Now that we can’t even trust the church, who can we trust?

Who would trust MPs?  Until recently most of us thought they were just in it for the expenses. Now it turns out they’re in it to abuse kids too.

We know because we’ve read it in the papers. Not that they’re any better, tapping Milly Dowler’s phone. Still, at least you can trust the BBC. Apart from their old stars, that is, or the higher-ups who covered for them or fingered the wrong paedos. Really, the police should have stepped in years ago. Except they were probably busy being racist.

So who will speak up for the kids? Once it could have been a bishop or something. Though not after what we now know about the Catholics. And the Church of England’s not much better. Frock-wearing paedos. Thinking about it could drive you to illness. Except you can’t take any chances these days. Not with the NHS just waiting to kill you with a superbug and then giving Jimmy Savile the keys.

Rarely since the last days of Rome can there have been such a dearth of authority in a society.  One by one, in the lifespan of most people in Britain, the institutions which once defended and epitomised our country have fallen and now appear unable to get up again.

Consider the latest furore. A dossier on paedophiles in Parliament several decades ago was reported to have gone missing (whoever heard of a government file going missing?), the internet erupted and within hours the Home Secretary was standing before Parliament to announce a review that will no doubt turn into an inquiry.  Anything less than a full judge-led inquiry probably won’t do. Though as Lord Hutton might attest, we can ignore the findings if we don’t like them. Even judges must agree with the public mood.

Theresa May stressed the basics: the public must have confidence that we are not in fact governed by a secret cabal of paedophiles. But the chance to debate this matter was an opportunity the House could not miss. Even politicians can feel some returning moral confidence once paedophiles are on the menu. At least, they can for the time being.

The Labour opposition tried to say that the Home Office was ‘too complacent’ about paedophiles.  And then there was the backbench MP Tom Watson, a man who appears to be auditioning for the role of witchfinder general. There is no moral panic ahead of which he does not seek to puff. Fresh from getting ahead of the courts and the facts on the phone-hacking case, he is now vying with both front- and back-bench colleagues to be the parliamentarian most opposed to the sexual molestation of children.

And played a blinder, making sure to ask the Home Secretary that the paedophile inquiry can access files from MI5 and MI6. This is purest crack for the mob. It was only unfortunate that sitting beside Theresa May was her Lib Dem Home Office colleague, ‘nutty’ Norman Baker, who has alleged that those same intelligence services were involved in the death of weapons inspector David Kelly and the late Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

The more one considers modern Britain, the clearer it becomes that public virtue has become a ghost town. Almost anyone might now move in and declare themselves sheriff. We are over-ready for some figure of apparent purity, meaning and drive to wipe it all away.

London audiences are still laughing through the easy satire of The Book of Mormon. But if someone like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, came along today, they would have the best chance of prophethood in centuries. Consider Russell Brand’s progress from ugly, unamusing drug addict into a person whose political pronouncements (‘drop out, don’t vote’) are deemed so important he is invited to testify to parliamentary committees and Newsnight. Our next problem, after an era which has taken ‘trust no one’ as its motif, is what to do when we meet anyone plausible who declares ‘trust no one except me’.

There is another way.  Our institutions could win back public trust, and with it the right occasionally to tell the public that they are either mad or wrong. That right can be won back only in the same gradual process by which it was lost. A first step would be for politicians to stop being commentators and once again to become legislators. Though for that to happen they’d have to be in a place with the power to pass laws. A subject for another day.