For the Conservatives and Labour, things have gone as well as could be expected.

Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw are swinging in the breeze, hung out to dry, their reputations worth about as much as cash-in-hand from a fictitious Chinese company. Swift action has been rewarded.

Sir Malcolm has even spared Downing Street the problem of the Intelligence and Security Committee. David Cameron can now deny any pressure was placed on the chairman of an independent statutory body to step aside. Unprompted (supposedly), Sir Malcolm has realised that someone who can't spot a media sting is probably not the man to have oversight of the security services.

It counts as the most remarkable aspect of the affair. An individual with all the security clearances you could need, someone granted frequent access to the most secret documents, effectively said, "Oh, you're Chinese. Do come in. No, never too busy. Here's my rate card."

Inevitably, Mr Straw's faux pas seems modest by comparison. An automatic entree to every embassy in London - his special selling point - might be indistinguishable from influence-peddling. His boast that elevation to the Lords would make "under the radar" work even easier might have given his protestations of innocence a hollow ring. But both men are old hands. Exposure is excruciating; the consequences might be less painful.

It is one measure of the gulf between the political class and the rest. In the world of Sir Malcolm and Mr Straw, "obeying the rules" elides instantly into "I've done nothing wrong". They make no distinction. The public fails to agree. But when those rules are applied, whether by the parties or the Parliamentary Standards Committee, the chances are the pair will receive little more than rebukes.

No contracts were signed; no money changed hands; no "advocacy" took place. Mr Straw was stupid to allow a meeting in the Commons, but the real offence was to be caught on camera talking business. Had a Hong Kong-based "communications agency" called PMR existed, and had deals been done and placed on the register of members' interests, no one would have batted an eye. Hence the initial indignation of the former foreign secretaries.

Those facts won't change. A pair of 68-year-olds who can't get by on £67,000 a year, or on pensions accruing at up to one 40th of salary for every year of service - Mr Straw has done 35 years, Sir Malcolm 33 - might be fretting over peerages, but that will pass. It will be a major surprise if either man is denied his ermine after the dust has settled. The tale will recede amid the usual gaffe-a-day general election campaign.

That's a pity. Until this week, Sir Malcolm had every intention of pressing on as the member for Kensington with a 12,418 majority, and as the chair of the Intelligence Committee. This was despite having time on his hands, or so he claimed, for walking, light reading, and the extraordinary delusion he is a self-employed person who cannot be expected to survive on public money. Where that reward is concerned, Mr Straw seems to agree.

Call the pair crass, greedy, arrogant and incapable of sound judgment if it makes you feel better. Remind yourself that a basic salary of £67,000 - with a 9 per cent increase recommended for 2015 - puts an individual comfortably within the top 10 per cent of earners. It solves no moral problems. Above all, it fails to get to the heart of the issue of outside interests and lobbying.

Some, generally those who point out that the former ministers have "done nothing wrong", see no big problem with the system. The argument runs that all those second jobs are good for Westminster. Outside employment exposes parliamentarians to the real world, the world of business above all. Don't we want MPs to know how things are outside the bubble?

Quite what an invented Chinese firm had to do with reality isn't clear. Nor is the connection between ordinary life and Sir Malcolm's quoted fee of £5,000-£8,000 for half a day's labour obvious. Besides, if the issue is simply one of keeping MPs in touch with the world, what's wrong with fees donated to charity? A simple answer: there's no money in it.

If Sir Malcolm thinks £67,000 annually isn't enough to live on, that might be because he and Mr Straw are accustomed to better. A glance at the register says the Tory last year picked up over £270,000 in directorships, including just under £86,000 as a Unilever non-executive. In addition to his MP's wage, he was also entitled to an additional £14,876 as chair of the Intelligence Committee.

The Labour man didn't do nearly so well. He supplemented his salary with just £60,000 as an adviser to a commodities firm and around £41,000 in public speaking fees. Mr Straw also earned some bits and pieces from newspaper work, such as a £1,000 payment from the Daily Mail last November for an article denouncing Edward Snowden and - a small irony - those who worry about surveillance.

A second supposed solution to the lobbying problem - pay MPs better and restrict their activities - therefore looks like a forlorn hope. It might comfort parliamentarians with no outside interests who earn less than a GP, but it would not begin to console Sir Malcolm for the loss of £350,000 a year. Besides, this week has demonstrated, yet again, that voters are in no mood to sanction a big rise.

Ed Miliband would ban MPs from accepting directorships or consultancy work. Why not? It would be more effective than Mr Cameron's Lobbying Act, a measure that contrives to cover barely 1 per cent of ministerial meetings and mostly affects charities. The Prime Minister is meanwhile opposed to doing much about second jobs, presumably because he can guess the reaction from his backbenches. Too much "talent" might be lost, including those who know that the value of a seat is in the money that can be made.

In Washington DC there are 535 voting members of both Houses of Congress. Each is paid a basic $174,000 annually. As of 2013, there were 12,281 registered lobbyists in the city, officially spending $3.2 billion a year to persuade 535 people to be obliging. But an estimate of unregistered or "underground" lobbyists produced by The Nation magazine puts the true total at 100,000. The American Bar Association believes they actually spend $9 billion.

But here's the joke. The Congressional members who are far better paid than MPs are also restricted in their "outside earned income", as we noted yesterday, to 15 per cent of a $181,500 salary grade. They are forbidden to accept honoraria and banned from any outside work except medicine that involves a "fiduciary relationship". Still DC swarms with lobbyists and panhandling politicians.

Sir Malcolm and Mr Straw provide the lesson. The issue is less the money than the intended uses of money. Our problem is the unending attempt to buy favours, influence and laws. That's the system from which ordinary voters are excluded. Ban that, all of it, and try public petitions instead. Meanwhile, remember our 68-year-olds, if at all, as no great loss.