LOOK back only seven short years and you will hardly find a good word to be said about MPs after the scandal about their expenses.

They were the most reviled profession, hated and distrusted by more people than estate agents or even journalists.

But now, following the terrible murder of Jo Cox, they are being portrayed in the media as a selfless group of men and women dedicated to the public good.

Where does the truth reside? As usual, somewhere in the middle although more to the good than the bad,

MPs are like the rest of us, sometimes kind and altruistic and occasionally surly and lazy.

There are excellent members and there are awful ones.

But they have changed immensely over the last century. In the Edwardian era they were gentleman performing a public service and had only recently been given salaries for it.

They did not pay much attention to their constituencies and there are stories of MPs going there once a year to be welcomed rather than scolded.

It wasn’t until the late 1920s that women fully got the vote.

The first female MP was Lady Astor and the first woman Cabinet Minister was the former Brighton shop worker Margaret Bondfield.

Unit fairly recently MPs kept gentlemen’s hours at the House of Cummins, often treating it as the best club in London. Mornings were kept free for second jobs rather than constituency work.

In the 1970s, Brighton Pavilion MP Julian Amery referred scornfully to his constituency work as making him a large-scale local councillor.

He regarded himself as a statesman, which indeed he was. He never lived in the constituency, preferring to reside at a town house in Eaton Square, Belgravia, or a cottage in the grounds of Birch Grove House, the stately home owned by his father-in-law, Harold Macmillan, the former Prime Minister.

The public did not seem to mind, re-electing him each time for more than 20 years until his retirement n 1992. He might be surprised now to find that the seat was Labour for 13 years before being taken over by the Greens.

Today’s MPs are a vastly different crowd who are generally working more than full time on case work and Parliamentary business.

Very few of the old-style Tory MPs are left, a rare example being Sir Nicholas Soames, the Bunteresque member for Mid Sussex. Not many Labour MPs are sons of toil like the so-called Beast of Bolsover, Dennis Skinner, now well past his sell-by date.

Jo Cox was a very modern MP, being young, female, charismatic and bold. She appears to have been genuinely liked by most of her colleagues, irrespective of party.

But I think she would have squirmed with embarrassment at some of the eulogies spoken since her death, pointing out that she was no more saintly than any other MP.

I never subscribed to the view that MPs were a lying bunch of hypocrites, solely interested in trousering inflated salaries and unjustified expenses.

At that time, I could have selected an MP like David Lepper, then Labour MP for Brighton Pavilion as an example of an excellent local member, serving his constituents well.

But reforms are needed. It is ridiculous that Cabinet Ministers still have constituency roles when they plainly do not have time to perform them.

MPs are paid sums that seem large to many of their constituents, yet small compared with the salaries of people they meet daily ranging from industrialists to senior civil servants.

We should not make impossible demands of MPs, expecting them to be as good as Jo Cox. But we should appreciate that most of them are doing their best and welcome that rather than deriding them.

The Argus: Lord Bassam

The role of local councillors has also changed greatly over the years and nowhere more so than in Brighton.

Half a century ago you would have found a council chamber dominated by Tory businessmen performing what they regarded as public service and a Labour opposition consisting largely of working men.

It was not until 1986 that Labour gained control of the council by the narrowest of majorities and ten years later it had a landslide victory.

Those successes were celebrated on Sunday by a few dozen Labour members of the council during that period at the home of Lord Bassam in Kemp Town.

Although there were many able councillors on both sides of the council chamber before then, the 1986 Labour administration was unusual in its all-round ability.

They were markedly young and well educated. They had also prepared a long time for that day so that they knew what to do when power came their way.

Bassam’s adroit leadership over the years made the group unusually able. But it was not to last.

Although Labour still runs the council, it is as a minority group with Greens and Tories able to outvote them. How easy it is to let power slip even for the canniest politicians.