DONORGATE

With all the brouhaha about the above - and with so many others far more eloquent and effective than me on the case - I've little enough to add. (In fact, I'm so cheesed off and appalled by the whole sordid mess that I think I'm going to try and do something a little more useful than letting my blood boil about it for the rest of the week-end!!!)

But, like others (not least this from Burning Our Money), it is worth emphasising the point as vehemently as possible that there is categorically no justification for the Great Bottler using his party's mendacity/incompetence (see Matthew Parris' article here for 'guidance') as an 'excuse' to wish upon us (the innocent and long-suffering public) state funding of political parties. It is unlike him but Guido puts it rather more gently: "There is no real need for new laws or reviews, there is a need for politicians to simply not break the existing laws." And this, of course, is the real point - if this miserable shower can't comply with the laws that they themselves have introduced, then they should face the full consequences of having broken that law.

HUBRIS ABOUNDS

James Cleverly asks the question : "Is Labour rotten to the core?" Well, given recent events, the simple answer would have to be a resounding "Yes!"

But there is an intense irony in the current situation. In a quite palpable sense, the Great Bottler is inheriting what Bliar had sown during his period in office; in other words, Bliar's immediate 'legacy' to the clunking fist is to mire him ever deeper in the sleaze that so dogged his last days. According to the BBC, that (Man-of-) Straw, Jack, accepts the underlying principle in this and believes that "there [are] questions to be asked of Tony Blair, because many of the donations were made when he was Prime Minister". So much for all that tosh about leaving front-line UK politics with the public begging for more!

Isn't it strange too - almost 'ass-covering' one might say - that Bliar has been seeking to distance himself from his pre- (and post-) 1997 savaging of Major and the Tories over sleaze? His football analogy is especially apposite - it suggests that he knows full well that he 'took a dive' in order to gain political advantage. Regret on his part? Well, he says yes. Contrition? No way. But, more intriguingly, this sort of intervention from the sidelines must be making the Great Bottler apoplectic. Having effectively dumped him in it, the only Christmas present his old boss can offer him is that it was all a load of stuff-and-nonsense anyway. As for Blair, I have the teeniest suspicion that he might be just be revelling in the Great Bottler's discomfort - a sort of arrogant "Well, Gordo, it's not as easy as you thought" and "Now you know why I kept you out of No. 10 for so long" attitude.

Mind you, the Great Bottler may have already sown some seeds of revenge. Taken together with Straw's comment above, his insistence that the mess of the Abrahams donations is "illegal" is tacit acknowledgment that our erstwhile PM may well have a criminal charge to answer to. Could it be that he will have his collar felt again by the men in blue as they act on the Electoral Commission's referral of the file to them?

As to the hubris in all of this - and the thing that is so odious to anyone observing from the outside - it is the mind-numbing way in which all the players can just sit there and maintain that they personally have done nothing wrong - Hain is an absolutely classic example ("administrative error" doesn't cut it!). It beggars belief that they really imagine that we will be prepared to take such mendacious posturing seriously.

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.