At least Cameron got one thing right when he said yesterday that lobbying was the next scandal to hit politics.   One of the worst aspects of the corruption associated with New Labour over the last decade has been the multifold increase in lobbyists’ infiltration into every niche of the parliamentary domain, bribing, suborning, secretly manipulating, spinning their scams, nearly always offering payment to oil the wheels for under-the-counter influence.   So much of the New Labour project was built on this money-driven marketisation of politics, so many New Labour apparatchiks were actively engaged in it themselves, that nothing was done to stop it  – indeed it was enthusiastically encouraged on the side.

The Public Administration select committee tried to check it a year ago by proposing a statutory code, but the Government insisted the code should stay voluntary, i.e. utterly ineffective.   Blair had always demanded that business regulation should be voluntary, though surprisingly the trade unions by contrast had to nailed to the floor with multiple statutory chains.

So what should be done?   Several things:

• the code should be immediately tightened and made mandatory,
• there should be a statutory registry of lobbyists (as both the main parties are now belatedly proposing),
• breaches of the mandatory code should be punished by hefty fines and in the case of the most serious or repeated offences lead to banishment from the whole parliamentary domain,
• it should be a criminal offence (not merely a parliamentary standards transgression) both for MPs to accept bribes for peddling influence and also for lobbyists to offer bribes for such purposes,
• all Ministerial meetings, including particularly those of the PM, with interest groups or individual lobbyists should be routinely recorded on a daily or weekly basis on a public register.

All parties are in favour of clean politics; the question is, do they will the means to implement it?

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