What Is Really Going On

The present party funding scandal may be precisely that, but it is no worse than several others in the recent past. The Tories and the Lib Dems are making such a song and dance, and Labour is letting them, because at last they all have the serious chance of getting their bills paid by the taxpayer for ever hereafter, and thus of being saved from the oblivion on the brink of which they all otherwise find themselves and each other.

The attitude of such figures as Harriet Harman and Wendy Alexander is wholly understandable, and that of Tories or Lib Dems in the same position would be, and has been, exactly the same: the laws in question were never designed for them, and they consequently do not feel subject to those laws.

So the Electoral Commission (for ours is now the sort of country that requires political parties’ names, constitutions, aims and objectives, Leaders, and sources of funding to be State-approved) will undoubtedly do what it was set up to do and find that nothing wrong was done (though not until State funding is already in place). It will then go back to persecuting UKIP out of existence, just as George Galloway has been subjected to parliamentary strictures such as would never be employed against any other MP. (I suppose that we are going to have to deal with this wretched Commission. Be in no doubt that we know what we are going to do if and when it refuses us registration...)

Meanwhile, in by far the most important political development of the last week, the BBC has swapped sides completely, running and running with this story after simply killing off so many previous ones, and lavishing attention on David Cameron’s mediocre parliamentary performances after simply ignoring the much better efforts of his predecessors.

This has nothing to do with thinking that he is going to win: that sort of thing has never bothered the Beeb in the past. Rather, as Peter Hitchens writes this morning, it can see very clearly who is the Blair-like (except, I have to say, real rather than wishfully affected) candidate of sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll. And it isn’t Gordon Brown.