The all-party funding crisis reveals that these organisations are already the living dead. Their active membership and core constituencies have withered, leaving leaders less able to raise money and support. Yet they need ever more cash to fund the media PR stunts on which they now rely — another consequence of the demise of campaigning parties.

Their short-term solution was to get rich individuals to give secret injections of cash, quick shots of financial Botox and Viagra to keep up the appearance of youth and virility. Now the deathbed cry goes up for the State to act as a life-support machine, using public funding of political parties to maintain artificial signs of vitality.

But who needs nationalised political parties? Our politicians already sound and act like glorified bureaucrats instead of inspirational leaders. (Exhibit A: Gordon Brown’s Budget speech.) To make them more dependent on state patronage than public support would be to rubber-stamp their role as account-keeping civil servants rather than accountable servants of the people.

In any case, what on earth is wrong with political donations — even from those dreaded rich people? The message today from David Cameron downwards seems to be that parties should be more like charities, operating somehow above political interests. But democracy only means something real when political parties are, believe it or not, partisan, representing clear interests and constituencies with conflicting world-views.

The problem is not donations. It is that the asking for donations has become divorced from politics. Let the parties go out and convince people that they stand for something worth backing. If they cannot, they are bankrupt in more ways than one, and surely do not deserve to survive.

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