What a palaver

When I saw last night that Alan Johnson had now got caught up in a funding row, I buried my head in my hands. For Labour supporters these are moments of despair and bemusement - we are consoled only by the rarely commented on fact that we are only slightly behind the Tories in the polls.

But then I thought to myself - what has he actually done? In fact what have any of them actually done? What if anything does this say about Gordon Brown's government or about the quality of our politics?

In Johnson's case he has apparently declared all his donations - but not to all of the correct regulatory bodies - or rather he claims he did file it with the Electoral Commission but it didn't appear on their website. There is a claim that someone used a third party (his brother) to make a donation - but Johnson claims they checked the name and he appeared on the party membership list and they had no reason to question his bona fides. So at the most this seems to be an administrative error on part of Alan Johnson's office - if that.

Does this really merit the term 'sleaze'?

Lets take Peter Hain. Here we have the fact that rather a lot of money was not declared to the Electoral Commission (never has so much money been spent by so few for so little - why on earth did anyone want to be Deputy leader of the Labour party anyway?). But again no one thinks Peter Hain is a corrupt person - no one seriously alleges he wanted to conceal these donations deliberately - why would he have? Politicians have too much to lose. Rather it appears his office was guilty of, in Gordon Brown's wonderful phrase, 'an incompetence'. They didn't file the returns in time. Cock up, not conspiracy.

Wendy Alexander? She breached the law by accepting money from someone who was not a UK resident - again it appears that the correct checks were not made. Minor negligence surely - not corruption.

And yet, despite looking triffling in detail, collectively all this creates the impression of sleaze, especially when presented as such by sensationalist media headlines (both 24 hour news and the press being driven by the need to grab our easily distracted attentions). The conclusion most people will understandibly reach is 'they're a rotten lot' (not just Labour, but the whole political class).

But this is not a sleazy administration nor is our politics especially corrupt by international standards. No serious or reasonable person is arguing that any of these people was trying to conceal donations so that they could return political favours. None of it is about personal financial gain - it is all about raising money for political campaigns, not their own pockets. It is series of silly mistakes, made by people who were behaving carelessly, hubristically, stupidly.

Nor is any of this Gordon Brown's fault - it all happened before he took over and without his knowledge.

Where now? Clearly blaming media sensationalism will get us nowhere. I think the media does play a key role in undermining public faith in democratic politics and should not be immune (as many journalists seem to believe it should be) from criticism. But the way politicians operate in interaction with the media (spin etc) is as much to blame for the fact that the public and the political class speak to one another through an utterly distorted prism of populist headlines designed to stir us up rather than engage us in a reasonable conversation.

Clearly we need to get a grip - we urgently need a major reform of party funding (caps on spending, clearer regulations on reporting that everyone understands, caps on individual donations, state funding) and we need the Labour party to make sure all of its leading figures understand the rules we ourselves introduced.