Back when new stories about MPs’ expenses were appearing in the papers every day, I’d get the odd rueful comment from politicians pointing out that journalists were notorious for abusing their own expense accounts.

Sadly, I was able to report that such activities have long-since been banished from newsrooms. The days when hacks were able to send restaurant bills or receipts for first class rail tickets to their employer, without any questions being asked, are long gone.

But disgruntled MPs were right to say that newspapers were once known as a place where the drinks flowed freely thanks to generous expense accounts, or so I’m told.

And by all accounts, everyone did it. It wasn’t seen as “fiddling” or cheating. Rather, it was seen as a perk of the job, just as some people get company cars or access to a company pension scheme.

This leads me on to Lord Taylor of Warwick, the former headboy of Moseley Grammar School, who has been jailed for 12 months after a court found him guilty of claiming £11,277.80 in expenses he wasn’t entitled to.

In his defence, he told the court that fellow peers had explained that the fiddle – which involved misleading House of Lords officials about his living arrangements – was a way to earn money “in lieu of salary”.

In other words, he thought he was supposed to do it.

The jury wasn’t very impressed, and I suspect few Birmingham Post readers will be either.

But one thing we learned about the House of Commons was that many MPs did indeed see expenses as a method of supplementing their salaries – for example, by buying a property with a taxpayer-subsidised mortgage and then selling it at a profit some years later, but keeping all the profit for themselves (an activity which was perfectly legal and within the rules).

It wasn’t just a few crooked individuals at fault. It was a culture that had grown up over the years.

We’re told that culture has been swept away.

We can only hope that the conviction of Lord Taylor is the death rattle of an approach to expenses within politics that will one day look as antiquated and bizarre as the glory days of newspaper expenses must appear to anyone entering the journalism profession today.