The smart money is on Hogg, whose expenses claim while he was an MP didn’t just include £2,115 for moat cleaning, the fact that has lodged in the nation’s collective memory, but also £18,000 for his gardener, £40 for his piano tuner, £200 for his Aga maintainer and £611 for his mole catcher.

This was the week that the House of Lords finally left the plane that we call reality. Because this list wasn’t just the normal roll call of cronies, donors, butt-lickers, flunkies and has-beens who make up the average honours list. There wasn’t just one expense-scandal MP on it, there were three. There wasn’t one special adviser, there were seven. And there wasn’t just the prime minister’s selection of cronies, donors, butt-lickers, flunkies and has-beens; Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg got to nominate theirs too.

What’s more, it wasn’t just lefties kicking off in complaint – it was everybody. The House of Lords has now moved into a realm beyond parody. For where is there left to go when Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Quentin Letts in the Mail find themselves in perfect agreement? What strange twilight zone have we entered when the Morning Star and the Financial Times share an editorial line?

Which is when, well, you have to suspect that something is up at the quantum level. That we have now entered the multiverse in which the Conservative party, the party of fox hunting and the Bullingdon Club and John Major’s old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist, is now out to destroy the House of Lords. And if that sounds like the ravings of an unhinged conspiracy theorist, it’s not my unhinged conspiracy theory. It belongs instead to one of the leading constitutional experts in the country. Meg Russell, a senior research fellow at UCL’S Constitution Unit, points out that in any rational sense, the list is “inexplicable”. “It was widely anticipated that Cameron wanted to use these new appointments to strengthen the Conservatives’ position in the Lords,” she says. “But this is not actually what he has done. His list of 45 new appointees includes 26 Conservatives, 11 Lib Dems and eight Labour nominees, giving him an increased advantage of just seven.”

So why not, she asks, just appoint seven? “The net outcome in terms of Lords votes would have been the same and the media outrage could have been avoided. Given how strange this seems, is it possible that the media outrage is actually part of the strategy?” And suddenly, the penny drops. Because the stink coming off this list is in a special category of stinks. It’s the Great Stink, an August phenomenon of two centuries ago, when the filth and excrement in the Thames finally became too much to bear and the putrid stench led to one of 19th century’s greatest reformations: indoor plumbing.

Is this list simply the last wave of sewage down the pipes? The final great tsunami of crap that will sink the upper chamber for good? Because to spend time googling the names on the list is to descend in a Putinesque bathysphere to new lows. Nick Clegg literally seems to have run out of Lib Dems to nominate. After Vince Cable and Danny Alexander – Danny Alexander! – turned down peerages, he was left with Lorely Burt – who? – and Shas Sheehan – who? (In fact, the Spectator helpfully clarified that she had failed not once, but twice, to be selected as a parliamentary candidate and was described by another party member as “one of the least qualified people I’ve ever encountered”.)

In what world does Simone Finn – who? – deserve a peerage? She’s been a special adviser to the Cabinet Office for the grand total of three years. And she’s friends with Frances Osborne. But then, who isn’t friends with Frances Osborne? Kate Rock, vice chair of the Tory party, is also on the list. And also the owner of the £1.7m Klosters chalet where George Osborne stayed shortly after delivering his “we’re all in this together” speech. “The two families socialised together,” his spokesman said at the time, “because Mrs Rock had been friends with Mrs Osborne since the age of 15.” Is it my imagination or are George Osborne’s fingerprints all over this list? Media outrage doesn’t just happen – not across every publication, across every political stripe, in the country. If you wanted to discredit an institution, how would you go about doing it? Flood it with nobodies? Dredge up a star of the expense scandals and give him a peerage? What happened? Did Sir Peter Viggers of duck house fame turn it down?

Because one’s first reaction to the news was to wonder what on earth Douglas Hogg has that could possibly be worth a peerage. What cards does he hold that could be worth risking the kind of outrage that erupted across Friday’s papers? The mind boggles. Photographs? Videos? Some sort of incident involving an orange, a pair of fishnet stockings and a young David Cameron? The truth is that there can’t be anything, can there? Douglas Hogg is simply an old-school Tory venal enough to want the public to pay for his mole catcher and vain enough to accept an honour that the whole of Tory central office knew would be splashed across the papers. He’s been played. We’ve all been played.

Meg Russell points out that the Conservatives have no intention of reforming the Lords. The most likely upshot is that it becomes “a moribund and discredited institution, as existed in the 1950s, with ever weaker ability to hold the government to account”. Because while it might be comforting for the left to think that the Conservatives are just a bunch of public-school boy thickos out to ruin the country, the truth is that they’re actually rather brilliant at it.