Look on the bright side. Steve Morgan, the man who took over the organisation of Peter Hain's campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, is now in America helping Hillary Clinton in her quest for the Democratic nomination. Aha! Our secret weapon. With any luck he will do as much for Mrs Clinton as he did for Mr Hain.

But to what purpose, now, should we ransack the thesaurus for new invective with which to pour scorn on that fallen Cabinet minister's head? He's gone, and anyway he was finished from the moment figures such as £103,000 began appearing in newspapers alongside words like “innocent”, “oversight” and “overlooked”, while terms such as “think-tank” were conjoined with expressions like “dormant”, “mysterious” and “dud”.

The key question has been said to be: “Did he know?” Well, it's true that compared with whodunnits, whoknewits stay interesting for longer, on account of the extreme unlikelihood of their ever being resolved. Having no window into Mr Hain's soul, we can find endless entertainment speculating on what might be there. But that's all gossip. The question of whether the rules were broken is different. Here, the precise mental state of Mr Hain, vis-à-vis the undisclosed £103,000 is something toward which we should be resolutely indifferent.

We are perhaps entitled to a mild and passing human curiosity as to how it was that such enormous sums had never apparently crossed the radar of the man for whose benefit they had been raised. And kindly old souls like that elderly South African diamond dealer who gave £5,000 and lent another £25,000, and the munificent if controversial businessman who chipped in with £10,000 more, may be forgiven a little private sorrow that the ultimate beneficiary of their sudden impulse to fund a phantom think-tank would apparently never even have known who had rescued him - never even thanked them - had it not been for the press.

But these are secondary considerations. As secondary as the question whether it is the car-owner's fault or somebody else's that he has not paid his road tax, after the expired disc is spotted: a question in which the police take a stubborn lack of interest, heartless beasts.

Quite right, though. The fact that it will rarely be possible to prove that a motorist intended, or an MP wanted, to break the law, makes it all the more important that the intentions of the accused are discounted. Otherwise everybody would always plead ignorance.

In this case the law will take its course. In my own breast I cannot arouse much personal antipathy towards Mr Hain, a gutsy individual whose intelligence was plain, whose vanity was harmless, whose ambition was hopeless, and whose insolence was rather sweet. If he was complicit in covering anything up then it's likely the motive was embarrassment rather than gain. Politicians who flatter journalists, as Mr Hain was always careful to do, get a kinder ride in times of trouble; and, besides, I suspect he always liked us journalists better than he liked his own tribe: a mark, at least, of good taste.

But if there is a charge to lay at Mr Hain's door, it is surely this. It was very selfish of him to resign. He should have challenged Gordon Brown to sack him, thus offering Mr Brown a chance to do what would have been the first decisive thing he's done since entering Downing Street.

Because - for all that the referral of the Hain case to the police is being called “critical” by the media - nothing really happened before lunch last Thursday: nothing to make an assessment of Mr Hain's suitability for office any different by dusk from what had been at dawn. Mr Brown did not know an iota more when he pronounced the resignation “the right and honourable thing to do” this week than when he had declared his complete confidence in his minister after the story first broke.

Mr Brown could at any time have called Mr Hain into his office and asked him privately to explain himself, his dud think-tank, and that £103,000 missing from the declaration. If satisfied with the explanation he could have stuck by him. If not he could have asked him to step down until the matter had been resolved. It didn't need an Electoral Commission, or a parliamentary commissioner, or a reference to the police. It needed the Prime Minister's own judgment. Instead, Mr Brown seems to be franchising his moral compass out to external contractors.

We do not even have the Electoral Commission's findings yet; and not only do we still lack the verdict of a court of law (should Mr Hain be prosecuted) we do not even know whether the police will push this through to a referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions. If we accept the Prime Minister's earlier protest that it would be wrong to prejudge Mr Hain while inquiries are proceeding, then Mr Brown should still be backing him.

Oh, hang the logic. Come on, Gordon, admit the truth: you did not have complete confidence in Mr Hain, you never cared for him much anyway, you hated all that “donor-gate” stuff, but when it came to giving this minister the chop you funked it, hoping events might fashion a peg on which to hang his removal: a peg other than your own decision. In particular you didn't want to appear as having yielded to external pressure.

This combination of stubbornness and vacillation is getting to look really creepy. Here is a chicken that flaps into the middle of the road, half thinks better of it, then, paralysed by a kind of furious vexation, stands his ground in the face of the oncoming truck. Winston Churchill once described Stanley Baldwin's Cabinet as “resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity and all powerful for impotence”. Speaking at the Mansion House in 2004, Mr Brown, then Chancellor, quoted the remark. Interesting that it had impressed itself on his mind. I remember thinking at the time that this insight went a mite close to home.

When (talking to The Times this week) David Cameron made a passing reference to “that strange man in Downing Street” my immediate thought was that the Opposition Leader had polished up the soundbite in advance - and I wondered if it was clever or foolish to coin a cruel but perhaps ungentlemanly slight. But on re-examining the context (and re-examining the figure cut by this Prime Minister) I rather think Mr Cameron said it spontaneously. “The trouble with Margaret,” they used to say of another Tory leader, “is that when she speaks without thinking she says what she thinks.” I suspect that “that strange man in Downing Street” was blurted out, and is what Mr Cameron actually thinks.

There is a grave danger that it is what Britain may be coming to think too. Perhaps I was wrong to chide Mr Hain for depriving Mr Brown of the chance to sack him. Eyeball to eyeball, with Mr Hain refusing to go, I have an awful suspicion that Mr Brown might just have blinked.

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