Oh for an evil genius, a Blofeld. Oh for a real villain, for web of wickedness, a vortex, a mastermind. Oh for a mind. Oh for a dastardly cause, or a noble cause. Oh for any cause.

For this is what so profoundly depresses in Labour's funding scandal. It's all so low grade. The characters involved are so shrivelled. “Tragic,” say the commentators. But the real tragedy is that the story fails even to rise to the level of tragedy. It's farce: a pathetic, demeaning tale of small minds, small imaginations, small stakes; a silly, twisted, inconsequential tale of paltry people hiding paltry sums of money for paltry motives.

A tale of spivvy incompetence: a big stage, and a cast of insects. Second-rate ministers flanking a third-rate Prime Minister waited upon by fourth-rate courtiers sending out the begging bowl to fifth-rate sleeve-tuggers who aren't even very rich. At Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, that “Mr Bean” gibe said it all.

New Labour, it seems, can't even cook its own books. They can't even co-ordinate a cover-up. They failed to find out fast enough what it was they had to cover up, failed to take the elementary precaution of reconciling their excuses, and failed to square their alibis. Talk of a piss-up in a brewery — this lot couldn't organise a scam in an amusement arcade.

There's space this morning — if you will indulge a moment's pure cynicism — for a modest expression of professional regret that our Government has proved a flop even at cheating. Turn in your grave, Horatio Bottomley. Blush, Robert Maxwell. Standards have slipped. Top-notch fraudsters up and down the country must be wincing at the sheer incompetence. Labour has brought disgrace on self-respecting hustlers everywhere.

Were I a senior Labour politician this weekend, much of the shame I'd feel would be because people in my party had behaved like crooks; but a little, secret bit of it would be because they've proved such incompetent crooks. We're not talking the Old Bailey here; not even Crown Court. We're talking Woking Magistrates' Court on a wet winter Tuesday; a shuffling line of dysfunctional miscreants in soiled shell-suits, struggling to read the oath, let alone to understand the charges against them.

We have a party leader incapable even of colluding with his own deputy. We have a Prime Minister so pathetically anxious to elbow blame on to his colleagues that in the first five minutes of the story breaking he volunteers — volunteers — the opinion that what has happened is “unlawful”, thus permanently settling the argument about whether it should be a matter for the police.

We see a chief fundraiser prominent in the Labour Friends of Israel who has made an apparently personal donation to the most pro-Palestinian of all the candidates for the deputy leadership. Unveiled too is a Mr Big so not big that he struggles to find halfway credible launderers for his secret donations. Hissed from the stage, as much in pity as anger, is a Labour general secretary who claims to have forgotten — or never understood — the simplest rules in the new legislation it is his job to implement.

Where do they find these people? What possessed Gordon Brown to declare, before he had the least reason to know it to be true, that there was one individual alone, Labour's general secretary, who knew about the fake donors — just as the media began unearthing all the others, and, as I write, are still unearthing? Didn't that great strategist, that colossus of a political intellect, pause for a moment to wonder whether there might be more to come out?

In what stunted imagination but Mr Brown's could the plan then be hatched to make Harriet Harman the scapegoat — for receiving, on Mr Brown's own lieutenant's advice, a sum representing less than 1 per cent of the total monies paid by David Abrahams? To what bully's mind but Mr Brown's could it fail to occur that if he kicked her in the stomach she might defend herself?

The root, I suspect, of Mr Brown's peremptory and careless handling of this story lies in his fathomless resentment of Tony Blair. The rest of the country may find it hard to believe that the present Prime Minister has nothing to do with the decade commanded by his predecessor, but I think Mr Brown really has convinced himself that he is not implicated. In this he is, I think, weirdly, sincere.

Somewhere in this strange mind has arisen an idea so palpably absurd when articulated that he has never articulated it, maybe even to himself: but it drives the way he feels about the past. It is the idea that he was somehow not there, or not completely there, from 1997 to 2007: just a sort of hostage, mute witness to a decade he neither willed nor bears responsibility for. To such an imagination, the stink of rotten fish left by his predecessor beneath the sofa cushions at Downing Street can be greeted almost triumphantly, vindicating rather than indicting him.

In any court of law or public opinion, every kind of hole can be blown in this defence, not least because some of the funding stink is more recent than that; but on the psychatrist's couch I suspect Mr Brown's sense of alienation from his own inheritance has — for him — an emotional logic.

But, really, how much time have we left, or to spare, to deconstruct the mind of Gordon Brown? The world has seen half-crazy leaders before, and their oddness has sometimes been a source of genius and strength. It's the mean-spirited incompetence on display this week that so dismays.

Benjamin Disraeli was never far from scandal, and lucky. David Lloyd George was as slippery as they come (“You must help me, Maggie. If I get out of this I give you my oath you shall never have to help me again,” he said to his wife, asking her to lie on oath in court so he could escape the charge of adultery). The words “Cook County” will always signal discredit for John F. Kennedy. And Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon were not straight men. But these were world leaders of whom — approve or disapprove — we cannot accuse of lacking great plans for mankind. In the watches of the night each must have consoled himself that, if the means were disreputable, the end at least was noble.

But for what noble end does Mr Brown's Government exist? Where are those great missions in whose cause big men grow impatient of the proprieties? It isn't, in the end, the lying and cheating I cannot forgive. It is the lying and cheating to no purpose beyond daily, weekly survival. When seized with some urgent national purpose, we may all be tempted to take short cuts. But Brown's people are cutting corners with nowhere to go. That is the real tragedy.

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