IIt is sadly telling that many people in Westminster have come to view party finance scandals as something like thunderstorms: dramatic and inconvenient, but also familiar and unavoidable. They blow loudly, then shut off, leaving the political village depressingly unchanged.
The cash-by-question issue dominated the newspapers in the fall of 1994, when I started my first job at Westminster, and disputes and scandals over party funding have been a constant ever since.
The scandal, about the bribery of conservative members of parliament to ask questions on behalf of the wealthy Harrods owner, Mohamed al-Fayed, was followed by significant reform only after the 1997 elections.
By then, another funding dispute had broken out. Labor had secretly taken £ 1
