Our cool Prime Minister, yeah, is looking like, y’ know, a bit of a dead man walking.  A drip-drip of killer Nu-Labour financial factoids is escaping into the public domain.  It can’t be stopped.

The latest development is that the people’s Prime Minister’s own fund-raiser - a man named Levy who was somehow elevated to the House of Lords - is distancing himself from, y’know, Tony’s slow-motion accident.  Since nobody outside Downing Street y’knew anything at all about the Party’s loan-funding, Tony is all on his lonesome.  Though, obviously, God still is right there.  Standing beside him.  What a pity He’s not interested in ermine.

The latest loan-shark to come out with a belly-up admission of involvement in Blair’s scandal is a property squillionaire named Andrew Rosenfeld.

He follows in the wake of the four frustrated Lords appointees: Rosenfeld’s business partner, Sir David Garrard, curry magnate Sir Gulam Noon (who’s had a bit of bother with Nu-Labour before), Dr Chai Patel and someone who might - actually might - be English, stockbroker Barry Townsley.

Googling for Townsley brought up a rather old webpage published by the Department of Education and Skills.  It is about the increasingly ill-fated City Academies progamme, and lists some of its sponsors.  There we find Minerva, of Rosenfeld and Garrard fame, along with, yes, Mr Townsley.  So it’s a small world in Nu-Labour, isn’t it?

So far the focus of the press has been on the buying of favours.  But surely it would be more in character for these people to seek influence.

Lord Levy has a particularly interesting history in that respect.  According to a Palestinian website he was introduced to Blair in 1994 by an Israeli diplomat named Gideon Meir.  He became Blair’s tennis partner and ran his “private trust” in the run up to the 1997 election.  Once in Downing Street Blair appointed him Party fund-raiser.  The Party wags dubbed him Lord Cashpoint.  He has operated as Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East, and in that capacity has had a key influence on the shaping of British policy in the region.  In May 2003 Tam Dalyell took very hard against him, declaiming to all who would listen:-

“I believe his influence has been very important on the Prime Minister and has led to what I see as this awful war and the sack of Baghdad”

Levy has been a backroom boy in Israeli politics for many years - he still maintains a home in Tel Aviv.  Now that his (gentile) master’s time in Downing Street is quite likely to come to an early end perhaps he will return to concentrating his attentions there.

If nothing else, this affair has shown us a deeply unattractive and in no ways democratic face of British politics.  The Conservatives are no better than Labour, and they know it.  Our system is corruptible because Parties crave money and wealthy men crave power.  None in this little arrangement is more craven than the Prime Minister, yeah, and he can’t go soon enough for me.