Martin Bright

I am still reeling from Antony Barnett's Dispatches investigation into MPs and lobbying. Truly brilliant TV. Horribly watchable. Exquisitely awful. I watched half of it from behind my hands. This was Curb Your Enthusiasm meets the Office: political Dr Who for grown-ups. Why is it always the Blairites who get themselves into these messes? Is it simply because they bought the New Labour compact with the market more fully than the rest of the party? Or is that they waded so far into unfamiliar territory that they lost their moral compass? None of this completely explains what is going on here.  There was something rather sad about watching Stephen Byers wade so deep into a sewer of his own making. In the post-Blair world he seems utterly without direction.

Anyone who cares about political debate should read the essay by the historian Tony Judt in today's Guardian. It is an astonishing piece of work which argues for a renewal of social democracy in response to the failure of the New Labour experiment (which Judt considers as evidence of the redundancy of the philosophy of Thatcherism so willingly embraced by Blair and Brown). You may quibble with the detail -- Judt remains over-sentimental about the public sector -- but it is a challenge to received wisdom in all strands of dominant contemporary political discourse.  He captures what many of the liberal left feel here: "It's difficult to feel optimistic about the upcoming election.

It is difficult to imagine two more unappealing characters than Michael Ashcroft and Charlie Whelan. Just when you thought the Westminster culture couldn't get more decadent, these two great toads come forward to squat on the body politic.  The sight of senior politicians lining up to trade insults about which of the men is more corrosive of trust in politics is such a depressing spectacle. How is it possible to weigh up the relative awfulness of these two individuals? And what are we supposed to make of the parties that tolerate them?  William Hague's reputation has been seriously damaged by revelations about his role in lobbying for a peerage for MIchael Ashcroft, but no more than Gordon Brown's tolerance of his licensed mockney fixer.  So who is most to blame?

The Liberal Democrats have developed a reputation for being able to face in two directions at the same time. Their Janus-like qualities have stood them in good stead during their rise to parliamentary credibility over the past decade. This week, Nick Clegg has appealed to Conservative voters in the pages of The Spectator, while my old friend John Kampfner has explained why all our former comrades should abandon the Labour Party for the Lib Dems. Confusing isn't it?  James was spot on in his politics column this week to say that our major parties are all giant coalitons.

On the back of Andrew Rawnsley's revelations, I decided to write about Gordon Brown's "bad citizens" for the politics column of the Spectator. Under the magazine's new online rules, this is only available a week after publication. But now you can read the filth and the fury in all its sordid glory.  I have since been approached by one of the players named in the piece to say that I had misinterpreted his concern for my welfare as threatening behaviour.  This, I would suggest, is the whole problem.

The sight of two unelected members of the legislature and John Prescott lecturing Andrew Rawnsley about political propriety on Newsnight last night was one of the more surreal moments of the past week.  Lord Steel in particular has very little right to the moral high ground as a longstanding member of the board of General Mediterranean Holidings, the company owned by Nadhmi Auchi a British-based Iraqi billionaire convicted of fraud in the French Elf-Aquitaine scandal in 2003. This business of bullying in Downing Street just gets weirder all the time. Whoever allowed the combined might of Downing Street' spin vultures to swoop down and peck at the bones of the tiny Anti-Bullying Helpline was not doing the Prime Minister any favours.

The parliamentary pass system is supposed to be strictly adhered to in order to stop lobbyists and interest groups getting undue access to politicians (indeed I recently received a slap on the wrist for not updating the journalists' register of interests immediately after I left the New Statesman. And quite right too).  Guests of passholders are supposed to be accompanied at all times. So I was surprised to see drunken thug Charlie Whelan, the Prime Minister's mockney fixer, wandering around Portcullis House unaccompanied yesterday. Perhaps he had simply slipped his minder. But I would be interested to know how he qualifies for a pass as a trade union official. One Labour MP simply tweeted "public schoolboy" after I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday.

So Nick Clegg has acted against Jihad Jenny Tonge following her statement to the Jewish Chronicle that there should be an inquiry into stories that the Israeli army was harvesting organs in Haiti. But by removing her as health spokesperson in the Lords without removing the Lib Dem whip, he may just be prolonging the agony. If he had hoped to draw a line under the affair, it seems that Baroness Tonge has other ideas. She has already given an interview to the Iranian state TV channel Press TV, which appears to back the idea that she was pushed out by the "Zionist lobby". [N.B.

I am pleased to report that the New Deal of the Mind Think Tank Clash at the Soutbank Centre on Tuesday went down a storm. The event sold out the Purcell Room, which suggests that there is an audience for ideas out there.   We wanted to have a series of quickfire debates (two minutes per speaker) on the pressing issues of the between the directors of Britain's think tanks. Each think tank was then asked to produce a star witness to bank up its argument. So the bouts were as follows: Progress v ResPublica on Red Toryism; Fabians v Reform on Equality; Demos v RSA on Character and IPPR v Policy Exchange on The Role of the State.  Rory Bremner was the perfect master of ceremonies, shifting seamlessly from impressions, to serious political interrogation without pausing for breath.