SO FORMER foreign secretaries Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been judged not to have breached parliamentary standards.

The sting organised by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Telegraph involved a fictitious company sounding out the pair’s willingness to take cash in return for access to powerful figures who could bend or change regulations to the company’s benefit.

Since the company never existed and the favours requested were never carried out, Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Hudson is clearly correct in stating that no rules were broken — “since at no point was either member explicitly asked to lobby and at no point did they offer to do so.”

It was pretty obvious what they were getting at nevertheless.

Rifkind bragged of his ability to provide “access in a way that is useful” to any foreign ambassador in London.

He would be ready to do this for money, since he had to “earn [his] income” being “self-employed” (his MP’s salary of £67,000 a year, some two-and-a-half times median British earnings, evidently being too insignificant to mention).

Straw claimed he had used “charm and menace” to induce the then Ukrainian government to alter the law to help commodities firm ED&F Man and also said he had met officials in Brussels to have regulations changed for the benefit of the firm, which was then paying him £60,000 a year.

The very fact that the people who make our laws are allowed to take on any number of paid lobbying positions for private companies is a recipe for corruption on an industrial scale.

This is why former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s initial response to the Straw-Rifkind scandal when it broke — calling for a ban on second jobs for MPs — was the right one.

Whatever nonsense we hear from unreconstructed Tory and New Labour MPs about second jobs giving MPs a grounding in the “real world,” their effect is precisely the opposite.

Because MPs do not tend to take second jobs as nurses or cleaners or teachers or shop assistants.

They sit on company boards or jet around the world doing favours for the super-rich.

Such associations with the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet is partly why MPs — who are very well paid compared with the vast majority of people — persist in seeing their own salaries as too low.

They give them a gilded view of reality divorced from the poverty and inequality that are increasing across Britain.

Sir Malcolm and Mr Straw were on their high horses yesterday, pontificating about how their actions were distorted by the media. But they remain discredited — as does a parliamentary system that permits their money-grubbing antics.

Bye elections

TIM FARRON, leader of the routed rump of the Liberal Democrats, claims senior Labour figures are approaching him asking to defect.

This may merely be a sad bid to make his party look relevant again after its trouncing in May — but the disloyalty of Labour’s Blairite wing to the democratic will of their own party has been too obvious for us to dismiss it out of hand.

If any Labour MP deserts their party they cannot be allowed to take advantage of Britain’s broken political system to maintain their seat undemocratically.

As even Ukip’s Douglas Carswell had the guts to do when he ditched the Tories last year, they should hold a by-election and see what the public think of their actions.