Matthew Dancona

If a party can be judged by its parties, then the Conservatives are heading for office. Last night’s Black and White party, masterminded by the brilliant Anya Hindmarch, was a triumph. Michael Spencer, the Tory treasurer, looked understandably pleased with the money flowing into the party’s coffers (all legit: the auction programme included stern extracts from the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000). But the deeper significance of the event was its sheer stunning style, wit and aesthetic touch. Traditionally, the Black and White party is a chore for the party’s senior figures, a drab affair that resembles an explosion in a cummerbund factory with lots of talk of “Rhodesia” and Enoch.

Black Wednesday exercises such a grip over our imagination that we sometimes forget that governments collapse because of the slow erosion that precedes the big storms. It is the drip-drip, not the tsunami, that does for them. In John Major's case, it was the daily farce of Back to Basics and the never-ending saga of 'sleaze' - as much as Britain's ignomious exit from the ERM - that ensured electoral disaster for the Tories in 1997. For Gordon Brown, the involvement of Alan Johnson in yet another donations story must be the cause of something approaching despair: were any of the candidates for the Labour deputy leadership paying attention to the (completely clear and straightfoward) rules set out in the 2000 legislation?

The always-incisive Martin Kettle has a fascinating piece in today's Guardian, in which he assesses Peter Hain's exit not as a "sleaze" story or a test of Gordon's moral fibre, but as a generational punctuation mark. Hain, Martin writes, is the last of the Sixties era  politicians in the Cabinet - apart from the rather more pragmatic Jack Straw - and his departure will change the complexion of this Government irrevocably.  I wrote last October about Labour's "spoilt generation" of young "Fauntleroys", the youthful cohort of apparatchiks which has gained an even stronger grip upon the Government as a result of last week's reshuffle.

Excellent news for the Spectator’s mayoral candidate in today’s Standard. A YouGovStone poll of 533 influential Londoners shows Boris well ahead of Ken on voting intention (44 to Livingstone’s 38), and with a narrower lead as the candidate who “will do most to enhance London’s reputation”. Boris trails Ken on the issue of trustworthiness in the event of another terror attack and has some work to do with second preference votes (interestingly, Sian Berry, the Green candidate, leads on this question). But it is clear that Boris can win. Tonight is a big night in the mayoral contest: Martin Bright’s Dispatches programme on Ken airs at 8pm on Channel 4, and Boris faces a panel of Londoners, at an event organised by the Standard.

Is there anything more depressing in an age of prosperity, choice and freedom than the spectacle of an old fashioned public sector rationing system doing its bleak work? The criticisms levelled by Jim Knight, the schools minister, at the best schools over the implementation of the statutory admissions code are a horrible revival of the language of a bygone era when public goods were controlled by rigorously enforced queuing. And, in keeping with Fraser’s warnings, this is another example of the Brown government undoing the public service reforms of the Blair years (such as they were). The decision to make the admissions code statutory rather than advisory was a sop to the Left during the trust schools controversy.

Mulling over the organ donations row, and the fascinating posts by Coffee Housers, I went back to the last time the Commons debated the issue properly – which was on an amendment to the Human Tissue Bill in June 2004 calling for “presumed consent”. I recommend the debate to anyone interested in the forthcoming controversy over Gordon Brown’s proposals. The amendment four years ago was put forward by Dr Evan Harris, the Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, although Tam Dalyell recalled that he had championed similar measures decades before. This was Harris’s summary of the case for change: First, it creates a default position that life should be saved rather than a default position that life could be lost.

I find Gordon Brown's notion of 'presumed consent' for organ transplants, unveiled in the Sunday Telegraph, morally repugnant. It goes without saying that those who choose to give their organs after their death, and carry Donor Card to ensure this happens, are behaving commendably. They take a clear, proactive, individual decision about the fate of their physical remains, and one which is self-evidently to be applauded. What the Prime Minister now proposes is effectively the nationalisation of the body - with a new 'right' to opt out of the otherwise automatic procedure that your corpse will be stripped of organs for recycling.

I spent the morning at the LSE, listening to Nick Clegg’s first big speech at Lib Dem leader and then participating in a panel on the issues he had raised. After a scrappy campaign, this was Clegg back to his formidable best. All comparisons with Blair’s Clause Four moment are flawed in one way or another, but this was certainly the moment when the new leader made clear to his party that he intends to take them on and to shake up some of their laziest preconceptions. Try this for size: The last ten years has shown that money isn't everything. The big questions now are these: how do we make Britain a fairer place without raising the overall tax burden? How do we promote real social mobility without relying on the discredited politics of Big Government?