HERE’S WHAT I want to say. That Tony Blair? Oh yes, he looked so clean and respectable and he fooled so many of the gullible for so long with his smarmy Mr Clean act. But now we can smell, almost as much as we can see, the stench of corruption arising from the rotting corpse of new Labour. Cue Shakespeare quote. But this latest scandal, to add to the ones that have gone before (Ecclestone, Iraq, Blunkett, David Kelly, Jowell etc), must surely be the terminal one, after which even the long-suffering . . .

I want to say that because I will get lots of letters telling me how perceptive my article was and, even better, how brave (there is nothing safer for a writer than being told by everybody just how brave one is). I want to say it because I too enjoy the sound of my own disgust, the expression of which separates me in a satisfying way from too close an association with messiness and dirt.

Something rebels, however, as something always does. Perhaps the misunderstood little boy in me cannot stand the thought of another little boy — this one possessing the keys to Downing Street and power of life and death over us — being misunderstood. Perhaps because I add cash for peerages to Whitewatergate, Travelgate, the War of Lewinsky’s Dress, the War of Jennifer’s Ear, Mellorgate and a hundred other media firestorms and recall that, out of all these, there were only perhaps a handful of genuine scandals.

I hardly need to mention that the default position for the commentariat and the intelligentsia right now is one of automatic cynicism towards democratic leaders. I went to the National on Saturday night to see the wonderful Measure for Measure, and had to negotiate Professor John Carey’s programme note on the warning that the threatened Isabella sounds — according to him — for modern politicians.

But man, proud man,/ Drest in a little brief authority —/ Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,/ His glassy essence — like an angry ape,/ Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/ As make the angels weep (Act II, scene ii). “World leaders,” writes Carey, “Take note!” What, Nelson Mandela as much as Pol Pot? In fact, the assumption made in the play by the hypocritical judge Angelo — that no one will believe Isabella in preference to him, so that she “shall stifle in her own report” — might now be precisely reversed. Today everyone will assume that Angelo is the villain: “friends” of Isabella will make the front page of The Mail on Sunday.

Then there is the quality of the accusations. Let me be brief here, because it sounds partisan and pathetic to recall the years of anonymous donations to the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher — years that her honoured loyal editors somehow managed to tolerate. And for the sake of symmetry let us also remark those who believe that it was somehow democratic and transparent for Labour to be funded almost entirely by involuntary subscription from trade union members, their votes held in the pockets of union bosses who were themselves invariably be-ermined.

Cash for peerages? Yes, except the cash wasn’t their own.

In the end, I think it is unlikely that much — if any — influence was bought, or much policy bent by donors to political parties. And, by and large, I would guess that the sort of people who act as benefactors to the Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative parties are the same kind of people who go around benefacting everywhere else as well. Rich people who spend their cash on things other than their own pleasures tend to find some reward in advance of Heaven.

Is this absolution for Mr Blair? Absolutely not. If not quite Angelo, he has certainly been hypocritical and myopic. The business of the loans was designed to circumvent the need for disclosure that Mr Blair himself introduced. Not only did the practice permit the party to be funded, temporarily, by anonymous sources, but it also seems to have permitted those sources to have been recommended for peerages without reference to Labour’s own ethics committee. And it was bound to get out! It isn’t much of an excuse (but it is partly one) that the Conservatives seem to have been doing the same thing. Their plea of mitigation is that at least their treasurer knew of the loans, which Labour’s treasurer (in reality, an honorific rather than a descriptive title) didn’t. But they were still circumventing the spirit of the restrictions, and we may soon learn just how much they received in soft loans.

Let’s just note here the improbability of the “Oooh, they didn’t know!” stories that seem to be such a feature of recent days. Gordon, John, Oliver, Jack, Cammo, none of them had noticed that somehow their parties had gone from semi-bankruptcy and scraping beneath the bottoms of their cash barrels to spending 20 million quid on the 2005 general election? Please.

And that’s the point. It has been reported that, a year ago, Labour had debts of more than £20 million. The party had no money to fight an election, and its usual sources had dried up — no one needed the aggravation of being fingered as a big party donor. And yet the Tories seemed to be flush. In this context I love the comment attributed to Lord Hattersley that the whole business shows that Labour has become “too obsessed with the world of money”. Let them campaign with cake.

Fighting elections, preparing manifestos, slapping messages all over billboards, employing phone canvassers, all costs. Democracy costs.

Getting the message out costs. And the long-term decline of party activism means it now costs more. So how expensive should it be, and who should pay? Let me say immediately that I won’t be paying much attention in this debate to Lord Falconer of Thoroton, whose declaration that “the system had not been cleaned up enough and we need to change it” has to be one of the most unconsciously comic statements of the decade. The child, caught with its hand in the sweetie jar, sententiously suggests that it now be moved to a higher shelf.

Cap this, cap that, people argue, but will it work? Cap donations, and donors will divide them among family and friends. Cap spending and there will be a proliferation of “non-party” sources of campaigning, each of which will invite voters to consider a particular course of action. In any case the new media and information world makes far greater demands on parties than the old one.

I have heard the case against state funding put well and put often this week. It would license parties, it might mean giving tax pounds to the BNP and so on. Well, the Germans have somehow survived. As a result you get governments formed by the SDP or the CDU, or maybe the SDP/Greens, or the CDU/FDP and — just to make you really nervous — maybe the SDP/FDP.

Let us, for heaven’s sake, have state funding or let’s stop moaning. Let’s have state funding, or else forget the restrictions, or — what seems by implication to be the most-favoured third option — let’s agree that we just can’t be bothered with the sheer messiness of democracy. We’re above it.

David Aaronovitch’s weblog is at: www.timesonline.co.uk/weblogs

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