Curiouser and curiouser.
The Commons authorities have now changed their minds - not once but several times it seems - so I must change my story.
Having been advised there were no legal grounds for appeal, the Committee chaired by the Speaker has now been told that, after all, they can appeal on two legal grounds - the security of MPs and the legitimate expectation of MPs that their information would be kept secret.
Thus, the battle is far from over and goes on and both the final outcome and the timetable for it cannot be predicted.
After years of fighting demands that they should account for the public money spent on MPs expenses, the House of Commons is about to reluctantly accept defeat.
Today is the deadline for an appeal to be lodged against a ruling ordering the publication of a detailed breakdown of claims to fund and furnish the second homes of 14 prominent MPs and former MPs. An all party committee chaired by the Speaker has been advised that there's no legal basis for this and so they must accept the verdict of a recent Freedom of Information tribunal.
Thus we may learn - if we care to - what Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Prescott spent on everything from their mortgage to soft furnishings and how that compares with the amounts spent and the items chosen by David Cameron, George Osborne, William Hague or Sir Menzies Campbell.
More significantly, this decision will signal that the Speaker and representatives of all parties now accept that, however deep their misgivings (and they are deep), they accept that further moves to block publication are either impossible or would cause further damage to Parliament's reputation.
Today's decision will open the floodgates to demands for more information although, in theory, those floodgates could open very very slowly. The Speaker's Committee has been advised that they could drag their feet on each new request for information. The law limits the amount of time which the Commons authorities is obliged to spend compiling an answer to a Freedom of Information request.
They've been advised that in the maximum time allowed (three and a half days) the expenses of just four MPs could be produced. The law also prevents what could be seen as concerted attempts to reveal data by, for example, dozens of requests for the expenses of groups of four MPs.
Furthermore, the law allows six weeks for the Commons to respond to orders to publish whilst they decide whether to appeal. Thus, in theory, it could take 20 years until all the expenses of all MPs made it into the public domain.
However, as I reported, a couple of weeks ago, the Speaker's Committee will soon set out plans to publish all the expenses of all MPs for the past three years. This is likely to happen in October.
The one issue which has yet to be resolved is the question of whether MPs addresses can be protected even when they are not considered terrorist targets. The tribunal rejected this in the case of the 14. However, the authorities are hopeful that they can still make a case that MPs' addresses should be withheld in case they or their families become targets for attack at some future date.
Along with reforms to their system of expenses, MPs hope that their belated conversion to openness will - eventually - limit the stream of stories on what they spend on themselves and return the focus to what they do for everyone else.
I hope so too.
Update 11.55
The Freedom of Information Tribunal has just said it is giving a two day extension - until Thursday at 4pm - to the 14 leading MPs to argue against details of their expenses being released.
One more thing. Before anyone cries "hypocrite", let me draw your attention to the BBC's refusal to publish my expenses. You can read their reasons in the letter sent to Guido Fawkes which is shown in full on his blog.
I hope that I have never got on my "high horse" about MPs' expenses. I am aware that there are many, many more pressing issues to cover. However, I have chronicled the attempts of MPs to deny the public information which they are now going to have to publish and to defend a system of expenses which they are now committed to reforming radically.
Incidentally, a BBC request for the full expenses breakdown (as against only "second home") of six MPs and former MPs - Messrs Blair, Brown, Prescott, Howard, Kennedy and Jonathan Sayeed - passes its deadline today. We wait to see how the Commons authorities will respond. Hypocrisy-watchers may like to note that the request was made three years ago when I worked at ITN!
