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Take a tour around the Commons tea rooms at the moment and you’ll find a despondent group of Parliamentarians. A few are concerned about the damage that has been done to the reputation of Parliament. Some realise that they have, collectively, erred. Many are furious with the drawn-out torture to which the Daily Telegraph is subjecting them. But many more are seriously questioning how they will make ends meet in a post-expenses (or post-generous expenses) regime.

To the bulk of the public, disclosure of this dominant preoccupation will beggar belief. Yet there is a simple fact about MPs that has not yet surfaced amid the furore of the expenses revelations: they are as a class of professionals woefully underpaid for the work they do.

When Lord George Foulkes clashed with Carrie Gracie on the BBC News Channel on Tuesday, most backed the news anchor. Yet her disclosure that she was paid £92,000 – nearly 50% more than an MP’s basic salary for reading the news to often fewer viewers than the average population – of a single Parliamentary constituency did not strike people as excessive.

That is because it is not – or at least not grossly so. Throughout the public and private sector, salaries in excess of £64,000 are commonplace for upper-middle managers and professionals with only moderate levels of responsibility. It is true that backbench MPs have few formal management responsibilities. They do not oversee complex project or operations. They possess few specialist skills. Yet they are the only group of individuals with the authority to pass and scrutinise the laws under which we all live.

We are now in a situation where many of the officials, advisers and bureaucrats get paid more than the people they are supposed to be supporting. When those paid to lobby the politicians earn substantially more than the politicians themselves, something must be wrong. Either those remunerating the lobbyists have grossly overestimated the value of trying to influence legislation, or society has badly underestimated the importance of making and examining those prospective laws.* I know which mechanism I have greater faith in to estimate the value correctly.

At this point, the counter-counter blast is that supply and demand dictates what MPs get. For every sitting member there are a dozen or more aspirant ones who would happily do the job for the same or lower levels of pay. Perhaps so, but this is not about getting people at the lowest possible rate – if it were we could replace every BBC TV news anchor and replace them with 20-year-olds for a small fraction of the cost. No, it is about paying people for the work they do, a principle most voters warmly endorse in every other walk of public service.

Nor is this an argument about attracting the right people for the job. It is true that a large cut in the salaries of news anchors would result in less talented people wanting to do that job, and upping the pay of MPs would make it more attractive to that small army of upper-middle managers. But it is also true that this is a job of such special responsibility that some degree of remunerative sacrifice in the name of public service is not an unreasonable expectation. MPs should not that the job for the money.

But that, frankly, is a laughable notion at present. Regardless of our revulsion at the expenses revelations, it is delusional to suggest that MPs enter Parliament to get their snouts in the trough. The expenses scandal is a product of three things: a lax regime; a belief the claims would never come to life; and an insufficient basic pay.

There is no real way to size the value of the work, but international comparisons are illustrative. US Congressmen earn a basic £115,000 per annum. In Germany, it is about £80,000. In France and Italy, a lower basic rate is obscured by much more generous allowance and expenses schemes. No wonder that the Chair of the Senior Salaries Review Board believes that a bump of £15,000 is reasonable.

There is precisely zero chance of that happening now. Instead, the current expenses scheme will simply be choked off. That may satisfy a few voters (through we should not over-estimate how many will be placated) but it will only make the basic problem worse. MPs do a job far more complex, onerous and socially important than is reflected in their salaries, and no amount of hair shirt bluster changes that fact.

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* There is a third option: society does not attach great value to the role of MPs in shaping laws. That is perhaps the most disturbing conclusion of all.