Is Cameron pushing his colleagues too far?

No wonder it was a senior Tory who broke ranks to whinge about how miserable it is being an MP these days. Not only is the clampdown on expenses going to infringe on Alan Duncan and his parliamentary colleagues' lifestyle, it now looks as though his increasingly puritanical party leader David Cameron will want his ministers to take a significant pay drop if he leads them to victory in next year's general election.

According to a report in the Guardian, Cameron believes that if the Tories are to push through severe public services cuts, and negotiate strict pay deals with the public service unions, then his top team must be prepared to "take a financial hit". It could mean pay cuts of as much as £20,000 a year, which means a lot of duck pond islands going unbuilt and moats uncleaned.

Whether Alan Duncan will still be a senior Tory by the time this happens looks increasingly unlikely after his secretly filmed chat with a journalist in which he said MPs were treated "like shit" and that no one in their right minds would want to become an MP now. Colleagues expect Cameron to fire him when Parliament resumes in October.

Any senior Tories secretly relishing Duncan's discomfiture will be less than thrilled to learn of Cameron's plan, for it comes on top of his demand that they give up their lucrative outside jobs as well.

One senior Conservative told the Guardian: "The thinking for most was that we would give up our second jobs until after the election, only a few months, and in that period get a loan to cover the lost earnings. But David's plans for after the election have changed that and some of us are wondering whether we can still afford to be in politics. I have friends who are senior lawyers or work in the City and they are earning much more than me."

The truth is, Cameron is in danger of going into the pre-election phase as one of the most unpopular Tory leaders of modern times - among his own team.

He followed up his private bollocking of Duncan - outlined by the Mole yesterday - by saying very publicly that "Alan made a bad mistake", only to find two more Tory MPs having a whinge.

Tory grandee Sir Patrick Cormack said that "being a Member of Parliament is an extremely expensive business". He went on: "One is expected to give liberally to all manner of charities, one is expected to attend all manner of events, one is expected constantly to be putting one's hand into one's pocket."

And Nadine Dorries went horribly off-message by blaming the media rather than politicians for the expenses scandal. According to the Daily Mail, she also claimed that she recently assisted at a road accident but was too frightened to admit her identity, such is the public anger towards MPs.

As if all this wasn't enough, Cameron had to deal with yet another high-profile Tory stepping out of line - the maverick MEP Daniel Hannan, who went on American television to join in the right-wing sport of knocking the NHS. He called it "a 60-year mistake" - which is absolutely not what David Cameron and his shadow health spokesman Andrew Lansley believe, especially now that half the nation, including Gordon and Sarah Brown, are madly twittering about their love of the good old NHS.

Lansley leapt to his master's side this morning, telling the Today programme that what Hannan had said "was both a negative view of the NHS, but more to the point was a distorted view of the NHS."

Whether Lansley would have been so vehement in his support of the Cameron line on the health service had he had the chance to read the Guardian and learn of his upcoming pay cut is another matter, of course.