O David! A spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down

The big story this weekend was multimillionaire Treasury Minister David Laws being caught claiming rent money from the taxpayer and giving it to his long-term secret partner: MPs are forbidden from renting from partners to avoid the sense that they're scamming us.

Coincidentally, I watched Mary Poppins yesterday. The whole thing. Despite Dick Van Dyke's awful, awful accent, it's a fascinating film, covering imperialism, masculinity, childhood, suffrage (OK for the upper classes, not OK for the serving classes), class and high finance - Mr Banks's bank collapses because young Michael's tuppence is grabbed by the greedy directors and he demands it back, leading to a run.

Ironically, Michael Banks and David Laws are rather similar:

 

Despite Mr. Banks's protestations that banks are reliable, ration, friendly and well-run, this song reveals the ugly, vampiric truth. There's a glorious irony in most of the words, especially this: 'prudently, fruitfully, frugally invested…' - presumably not in CDOs, CDSs, derivatives and all the rest of the modern banking world's attempts at alchemy: