David Blunkett resigned saying that he had done nothing wrong. This accords with new Labour tradition. Earlier this year Beverly Hughes owned up merely to having “unwittingly” misled us over the government’s scam to admit unqualified immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria.

Peter Mandelson protested that he had not done “anything wrong or improper” when he resigned for having taken an undeclared loan of £373,000 from a government colleague, Geoffrey Robinson. Using a similar script he asserted that he had not behaved “improperly in any way” when he resigned for a second time, after it emerged that he had spoken to a Home Office minister about British passports sought by the Hinduja brothers (who were putting money into the government’s Millennium Dome).

Of course Blunkett did wrong. A letter from a friend about an immigration matter should not have gone to his ministerial office. In a properly functioning government there would be mechanisms to prevent ministers from being involved where they have a personal interest. When I was in government, even decisions that affected a minister’s parliamentary constituency were whisked away by officials and given to another who had no conflict of interest.

Nor should Blunkett have been fighting a court case while in office. Jonathan Aitken resigned from the Conservative government so as to be free to bring a libel action. Ministers have to choose between fulfilling their public duties and pursuing their private interests.

A wiser prime minister would have sent Blunkett on leave of absence to sort out his private life. If he had done so, Blunkett might look forward to returning to office. But Tony Blair is short termist and selfish. His friend’s career is smashed to pieces because Blair needed him for the election campaign. But Blair will not have won many votes with his comment that Blunkett’s integrity was “intact”. The home secretary’s efforts to break up Kimberly Quinn ’s marriage have offended middle-class morality.

Like all Blair’s reshuffles, last week’s will prove a botch. In his anxiety to appoint a bruiser to the Home Office he moved Charles Clarke from education, and because he wants to build up a strong prime minister’s department to control his government, he extracted David Miliband from education too, leaving the department badly weakened. Blair demonstrated that his three priorities are centralisation, centralisation, centralisation.

His comment about integrity reflected his ministers’ view that rules do not apply to them. It was Blair who exempted Formula One from the government’s ban on tobacco advertising after Bernie Ecclestone gave the Labour party £1m.

It was the prime minister who wrote to his opposite number in Romania to lobby for a contract for Lakshmi Mittal, after his donation of £125,000 to the party. Blair made his former flatmate Charles Falconer first a peer, then lord chancellor. Labour uses power to help its friends. Blunkett’s behaviour over the nanny’s visa is typical of the government in which he served. More sinisterly, Labour also has no respect for fuddy-duddy rules such as habeas corpus and trial by jury.

As Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, said in a recent interview: “The executive is much too free to bring in a huge number of extremely bad bills.” Blunkett was the main culprit.

Lord Hoffmann said in Thursday’s House of Lords judgment on the government’s anti-terror legislation: “The real threat to the life of the nation . . . comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.” Let that be Blunkett’s political epitaph.

Blair bent the rules most when he wanted to wage war on Iraq. Butler now says that the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was “pretty thin” and that the country (and the United Nations) should have been told so. That is the mandarin way of saying that the government’s dossier was sexed up. It is a pity that Butler was not so clear in his official report.

The way that Blair manipulated the advice on the legality of the war will one day haunt him. John Kampfner, in an article in The Sunday Times, reported that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general (a commercial lawyer and a friend of the Blairs), long held the view that war could not be justified without specific UN endorsement. It seems he was lent on to change his advice, but even his revised opinion was not circulated to the cabinet or permanent secretaries. The then chief of the defence staff, who did see it, found it equivocal.

Clare Short, the former international development secretary, reveals in her book that the attorney-general relied on Blair’s statement that “there was no other way of securing compliance” from Saddam Hussein. Of course war can be justified if there is no alternative and Goldsmith chose the prime minister to be the arbiter on that central point. This has received little attention but will surely re-emerge in the future.