A political crisis
This is a political spectacle none of us has ever seen before. The government is reshuffling itself.

Hazel Blears has just shuffled herself out of the Cabinet. She’d have been fired anyway over her second homery and non-payment of capital gains tax.

Two other ministers, one of them another woman, are expected to go today. There is talk that Alistair Darling may go. No-one can remember a time in British politics when ministers resigned on the eve of an election.

A constitution in crisis
And there is no constitutional mechanism for resolving the situation. The head of state cannot send for a prime minister whose power is disintegrating, and that’s a good thing. Our system sports a head of state who is anyway unaccountable – no-one can send for him or her either.

Thus we depend upon the holding of a general election, which can only be called by the person who is himself in such appalling trouble: the prime minister. We are, amid the personal failures of MPs within parliament, observing the vast crevasse in what is called our constitution.

The Sun newspaper suggests some kind of petition signed by Labour ministers and MPs that calls for resignation and rallies around an alternative leader – a kind of regicide.

A party in crisis
The dream and vision conjured by the founders of “new” Labour – Blair, Brown, and Mandelson – has come to this.

What is fascinating about this torrid and disturbing period is the absence of any call for the return of the once lionised Tony Blair. No-one mentions him. He came adorned in hope for profound change, then disappeared without much trace.

A country in crisis?
We have a country whose banking system is in turmoil; a parliament reduced to the dust of ages, where the swathes of women who arrived in 1997 appear to have had little impact; an army dispersed in foreign fields; a relationship with Europe unexplained and left to wither; and local communities, most of whose funding and resource is hostage to the spending whims of central government.

And now the electorate is being asked to vote in an election that does not immediately affect this crisis. Its outcome will stoke the pressure, but not necessarily resolve anything.

And yet
Yet amid all this, the country continues to defy the political crisis. For all the talk of knife crime, exam problems, controversy about immigration and the continuing deprivation of significant pockets of the country, Britain remains blessed with a decent, caring, and achieving people.

How convenient, the Whitsun break. Have you ever wondered how many weeks the political classes absent themselves in a year?

But the problem today is not absenteeism. In some cases it’s a lack of it.

Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton South, already under fire for funding the treatment of dry rot at her house 100 miles from her constituency, is now under fire for using parliamentary resources to help run a company out of her constituency office.

But has she been suspended? No.

Nor, of course, have Cabinet ministers Hazel Blears, James Purnell and Geoff Hoon, who stand accused of serious tax avoidance. Not illegal but hardly the function of individuals charged with disbursing taxpayers’ money.

In the end, today is a day of miscalculation. Miscalculation in Downing Street that the electorate will smile on such prime ministerial tolerance.

Miscalculation, too, neatly expressed by the Gurkha debacle in which a clever west end actress has run the government ragged over a policy rooted in a failure to get the figures right, aided and abetted by a failure to read the public mood.

It must seem to some as if judgement, leadership, decisiveness and integrity are simply draining away like sand in an hourglass. The only lasting question: how long is the hour?

I am very struck by the huge response to both Snowblog and Channel 4 News this week – high-quality contributions and a number of very personal comparisons with what is happening in regard to disclosure of MPs‘ arrangements. Stan, as you return to work today after nine months without a job, I wish you well.

Buried in the cascade of disclosures last night on Channel 4 News was the revelation that a “behind closed doors process” (to which we, the media, let alone “we, the people” had no access) had found two of the four accused peers guilty of accepting potential bribes to change laws (as forecast in Snowblog).

Lords Taylor and Truscott face suspension from the House of Lords for six months. In any other democracy they would have been expelled for life. Amazingly, however, it seems you cannot be expelled from the Lords and must remain with the power to go on affecting our lives, for life.

But is worth adding that in an office behind Victoria Street in London, civil servants are putting the finishing touches to the Queen’s birthday honours – to be announced in under three weeks’ time.

There is almost no democratic scrutiny of these – as we reported in Channel 4’s Dispatches Secrets of the Honours System. The Queen herself awards these things “on advice” from the honours committee which works out of Whitehall, with “guiding” input from Downing Street.

And as we grind towards the general election, many Cabinet ministers and retiring opposition senior MPs are beginning to jockey for a place in the Lords. How many more people are to be added to the 800 or so already in the upper legislature, for life?

Edmund Dell (a minister in the Callaghan government) seems to be one of the only Cabinet ministers not so rewarded (he lost out for changing parties at the critical moment). Michael Foot, John Major, and Tony Benn are amongst the tiny minority who have never accepted a peerage.

But the real prospect exists that Hazel Blears, Jacqui Smith and Michael Martin (speakers have been going there automatically for half a century or more) and the rest will be put into the House of Lords, long to reign over us.

Legal sources I have spoken to tell me there could be a case to answer under both the fraud act (over the specific claim) and under the theft act.

If it came to it, there’s a real danger that the Metropolitan Police may be put off investigating former Labour minister Elliot Morley by the chaotic scenes that surrounded the arrest of Damien Green MP (Tory frontbencher).

Morley’s misdemeanour has been followed by the discovery by David Cameron’s office that the MP husband and wife Andrew MacKay and Julie Kirkbride had each claimed for different second homes. Mr MacKay, needless to say, blamed not himself but the fees office for suggesting he did it.

The scandal begs to have the whole parliamentary system investigated. And I’m still concerned that nothing has yet been said of any substance about the scale of abuse in the House of Lords.

The idea that the speaker has never been removed other than by beheading, and in any case not since 1690, is one part of the increasing sense of laughing stock that this extraordinarily serious situation is presenting.

The other is spectre of committee after committee after committee, apparently investigating all these abuses. Cameron has been looking more fleet of foot and more decisive. When it comes to feet, Gordon Brown has been looking more leaden.

The Labour local and European election launch today appeared to be all but farce, people like Hazel Blears (communities secretary in the Cabinet) surfacing for the first time since she admitted not only flipping her properties to maximum effect, but also failing to pay capital gains tax. So far as I could tell, she was not seriously tackled.

And I would point you to the excellent comment below. A nifty piece of research.