It is always tempting at the end of a project to reflect back on its origins and progress. The origins of this book can be pinpointed to a chance conversation on a stairwell in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. One of us was an established member of staff there, undertaking comparative research into electoral corruption. The other had recently completed a PhD thesis on standards of conduct in the British House of Commons. Both of us were thinking about political ethics, albeit from different perspectives, and both of us expressed the view that academic researchers had so far paid insufficient attention to public attitudes on the topic. Some months later an opportunity presented itself to participate in the British Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (B/CCAP), a collaborative multi-wave survey led by Ray Duch, Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck, and to explore, in a small way, some of the issues we felt ought to be addressed. A chance conversation thus became a small self-contained project, which became a slightly larger project as we secured funding to participate in additional B/CCAP waves and to conduct several focus groups.

Little did we know when we began planning the project in the autumn of 2008 that Britain was about to be rocked by one of the largest and most unsettling political scandals of recent times. Scandal is, of course, no stranger to British politics. But rarely does a single scandal embrace virtually the whole political class, as it did in the late spring of 2009. Back in the 1990s, a number of ‘sleaze’ allegations, some serious, some not so serious, had besmirched and embroiled the Conservative Party and, in turn, prompted the creation of a new ethics infrastructure across the public sector. In 2009, allegations about MPs’ use and systematic abuse of their allowances and expenses besmirched and embroiled the whole of national political life. Like many others, we were taken aback by the force and power of the media frenzy that followed the publication of leaked details of MPs’ expenses by the Daily Telegraph.