There’s a lot of things that make the British parliament unique — Black Rod, the hideous mock-Tudor cladding around the Big Ben bit, the opportunity to go and hear a sub-committee on cloud nanotechnology in a thousand-year-old stone room in the old bit — and high among them is the place it finds for people such as Gerald Kaufman, a Labour stalwart first elected in the dark days of 1983.

Journalist, comedy writer (for That Was The Week That Was), habitually clad in a white suit, with a tie like a tart’s window box, Kaufman has been on his hind legs in the Commons several times in the past two weeks hammering a Manchester firm in his constituency because they sacked two people who were organising industrially.

A Labour loyalist, he’s nevertheless the grandchild of Holocaust victims, who’s compared Israel to the Nazis and Hamas to the Jewish resistance. He’s written The Left: A Symposium and a critical study of the film Meet Me In St Louis. He’s … well you get the picture. We’re not talking about Peter Dutton here.

So it is sad to see that the great Kaufman has been brought down by the purchase of that most ancient of temptations, to have the public pay for two grapefruit bowls. The Legg report on expenses rorting by members of all parties, reveals that Sir Gerald paid £240 for the items, and then charged the public for the pleasure, money that he must now pay back.

The items are merely example of the Legg report raising more questions than it answers. I mean which one of many possible things is a grapefruit bowl — something for grapefruit? Isn’t that just a big bowl? Made to look like a grapefuit? Out of grapefruit? Is it some fiendish British particularity, like hunting pink, which is meant to just know is exactly what it says it isn’t.

Charging for the grapefruit bowls — in Australia, the term would be slang for a scrote, which captures the cultural difference nicely —  isn’t the most egregious of sins revealed afresh by Legg, but it has become the obsessive object of focus for the media, who sense a combination of boredom and disgust at the whole spectacle on behalf of the public.

After all, when the scandal broke last year — courtesy of a US freelancer who simply did an FOI request on expenses claims that would have been public record elsewhere — the Brits were driven to a white-knuckle fury over a series of expenses that seemed to express neatly the underbelly of each party, its shadow self.

Thus the Cameroonian Tories, attempting to make themselves over as hip suburban types, were pinged by various members of the old guard, who charged for their moat cleaning, and an island for their ducks to hide from the foxes.

Meanwhile, labour types like Hazel Blears, the midget ginger Gillard-Pomeranian love child, presenting herself as “wine ov thuh nyormal peeeble eh oop” had been caught in some complex mortgage scam designed to have the public pay off her house, rather than pay for digs in London.

By the time Jacqui Smith, the mildly Dworkinite bluestocking Home Secretary had been got because her husband had ordered p-rn (Raw Meat VI) and Ocean’s Twelve (twice!) on government-provided pay-per-view, it was clear that something stranger was going to be needed to re-engage public ennui.

Grapefruit bowls appears to be it, not because the loose whack of the plastic is all too easy to understand, but because it’s close to incomprehensible. There is something zen about a grapefruit bowl — it is an object beyond use, beyond desire, beyond purpose. Its essential absurdity appears to mirror the widespread sense of futility that the expenses scandal represents in British politics.

Though it began as a huge blow to Labour, the revelation of Tory wrongdoing quickly cancelled out any gains they might have made.

Now, with the police about to announce that fraud proceedings may be undertaken against as many as half a dozen MPs and Lords — chiefly for charging for mortgages that had already been paid off in full, a pure benefits rort — what continues to surprise is the general glee with which pollies of all parties took to dipping their beak, in an atmosphere that Sir Thomas noted that public servants had been “overly deferential to Mps claims” yah can say that again.

But though the lesson that’s been drawn is one of anti-politics, in reality it says two different things about two different parties.

The Tories were sunk in the mire of opposition and a lot of them have a sense of entitlement, that makes petty corruption as common as syph during eights week (I dont know what eights week is). But Labour was ostensibly part of a living movement devoted to real change — the sort of purpose that tends to minimise such a free-for-aall.

The fact that the party caved from the inside, that the exception became the rule, is a measure not of human venality, but of political collapse. Labour rotted at the middle a long time ago — it’s only know that people notice the furniture sliding through the hole in the floor. Grapefruit bowls and all.