So I can quite understand why offering peerages as a reward to party donors is immoral, not to say criminal. What I can’t understand, though, is why donors to city academies should be treated as scoundrels too.

When people talk about “cash for peerages”, they mention soft loans to Labour and support for city academies in the same breath. Lord Levy, the party fundraiser, has been arrested for questioning, but so has Des Smith, a former government adviser to the city academy programme.

Yet helping to finance the setting up of an academy in a deprived inner-city area, where sink schools are as common as crack dealers, seems an admirably philanthropic way to spend millions of pounds. It may be the lever that extracts hundreds of children from poverty and low expectations and sets them on a path to higher education and success in life.

These academy sponsors don’t just write cheques. They take an active part in the running of the school, offering extremely helpful business and management expertise. In other words, they give time, energy and enthusiasm as well as money, and in the process, they learn about the education system.

The House of Lords would surely benefit from the wisdom of people who have built a career in business, turned their focus towards social action, and now have informed views about education and social deprivation too. Why shouldn’t they be given peerages?

Even if part of their motivation was the expectation of a lordship at the end of the process, they will still have had to work hard for it. It is much more commendable than simply writing a cheque to a political party and expecting ermine in return.

We should praise Britain’s philanthropists, not bury them. Otherwise we may find that nobody wants to support a good cause again.

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