Will Ian Davidson be the next Margaret Hodge?

The public accounts committee supremo hogs the limelight as the scourge of tax avoiders and other assorted baddies. A remarkable transfiguration from her days as a mediocre Blairite minister.

Yet this week she unwittingly passed her baton to Davidson as the business and ­Scottish affairs select committees turned the heat up over City Link.

As the Star reported on Wednesday, MPs took the whip to “big, big boss” Jon Moulton (Davidson’s words) for his part in his own downfall.

But with so many facts and figures in dispute, the real work has only just begun.

Balding Better Capital chief Moulton, who snapped up the struggling firm in 2013, insisted he’d done his best for the thousands of workers thrown on the dole on Christmas Day.

It ain’t necessarily so. Scots MPs revealed that one subcontractor had failed to receive its regular payment from City Link on December 19 — when Moulton insists bosses hadn’t yet decided on calling in receivers.

Deploying the Shaggy defence — it wasn’t me — he said City Link managers might have withheld such a payment for all manner of reasons — if a big-shot client hadn’t paid on time, for instance.

But Moulton conceded that the withheld payment, inadvertent though it may have been, effectively redistributed funds from non-secure to secure creditors.

That is, redistributed from small contractors to … er … his own Better Capital, which is still likely to claw back £20 million.

When the committees reconvene on Wednesday, no doubt they’ll hold the Ernst & Young administrators to Moulton’s shock pledge that employee overtime will be paid in full.

That’s not the whole story. Hundreds of payroll staff were told they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t become self-employed contractors, MPs kindly reminded Moulton.

For them? Zilch. “We don’t have a legal framework that protects employees’ creditors,” committee member Katy Clark told me after the hearing.

She said City Link was one of “a number of situations where companies have collapsed chaotically, with people’s lives left in ruins and no money left to pay redundancy.”

As Marlene Dietrich used to sing, when will they ever learn? But who withheld the December 19 payment, and what did they know?