This is how democracy works.

You’re the governing party. Your political opponent is flooding the marginal constituencies with cash in an attempt to win both them and power at the next general election. You lack the funds to match them. You lack the ability to win the war of ideas (such as they are) on the ground. You lack the democratic instinct to rectify the travesty of marginal constituencies holding the balance of power in our electoral system.

What do you do? You threaten to cut off your opponent’s flow of funds by proposing banning large donations to political parties between general election. ‘[T]o prevent the millionaire Lord Ashcroft bankrolling Tory campaigns in marginal seats’. That ‘between general elections’ is important. It means your opponents can’t shore up support in the long term but you can take a huge bung from your supporters once an election is called.

They say for all his talk of it, that Brown lacks ‘vision’. But I think we can see ‘Brownism’ finally starting to crystallise. It is doing what is easy rather than what is right. It is using power for the direct benefit of one’s political party. It is a childishness that takes rather than earns. It is mere tinkering; a sticking plaster here, a stitch there - the patient is dying but nobody is interested in why, just in keeping him going a bit longer.

And if Gordon had an Ashcroft of his own in his back pocket, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.