POLITICAL DONATION WOES

As others have said far more eloquently than I (there are any number of posts out there but Guido's coverage - available here - together with this and this from Iain Dale cover all the (current) bases), the scandal - and it is a scandal of mega-proportions - that has erupted over David Abrahams is beyond parody. File under the "You really couldn't make it up" department!!! And, as they are all saying, we've got to reckon we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg at the moment - as the media/blog pack sniffs and digs at the story, a whole bunch of nasties are going to be unearthed in due course.

But I can't help feeling that the real problem for us poor beleaguered citizens in all of this (Northern Rock, disk-gate, and now the donation scandal) is that increasingly the Great Bottler and his Government are in a state of (near) complete paralysis. One of the primary purposes of any administration is to get on and govern. But this shower are now so mired in sleaze, so much at the mercy of the blizzards of 'events' that are buffeting them, that that purpose seems to be flying out of the window minute by minute. It is perhaps too early to tell whether GB's administration is holed below the water-line - although Matthew Parris has his own take on that here. (Incidentally, one has to admire the prescience of Matthew's concluding paragraph: "Something is going to happen, something quite nasty. What, we must wait to see.") But it is legitimate to ask what on earth his bunch of malodorous incompetents are for if they are incapable of governing. Needless to say, this is the (unstated but inferred) narrative that underpinned David Cameron's savaging of the Great Bottler at PMQs.