Today the government has suddenly discovered the appetite to amend electoral law to outlaw secret loans - despite the fact it was the prime minister himself who appears to have personally sanctioned such loans a year or so ago.

Also today, the Tory leader will proclaim his opposition to secret loans - despite the fact that his party's been using them for many years. David Cameron will also argue for a new legal framework which will dramatically change the way politics has been financed in this country. The key to it is a limit on donations - the debate inside the party has been on whether to set that at £30,000 or £50,000 - with match funding and tax relief being deployed to encourage smaller gifts.

This is the mix which the Electoral Commission examined in an enquiry into party funding in 2004 but which they didn't push because the necessary political consensus didn't exist (translation - no sleaze headlines at that time to focus party leader minds). Smaller parties - not just the Liberal Democrats but the nationalist parties too - have argued for reform on these lines - their problem, of course, has more often than not been that they've not had enough money to be accused of sleaze.

Lo! Thus, a consensus emerges to save us from sleaze. Well, hold on a second. There are real problems with reform on these lines which - to abandon the cynicism for a moment - is why both major parties opposed it in the past.

Problem 1: Limits on donations can be got round

Rich people simply give £50k to friends and relatives to give to their favoured party on their behalf. New organisations will be set up - "The Friends of David Cameron", for example or "Committee of Labour backers" which could receive millions and then spend them on political advertising to "complement" that of the parties. Clearly, the law can be drawn up to try to prevent and police this but any study of the growth of so-called "soft money" in the United States shows the way that laws can be circumvented.

Problem 2: Limits on donations may destroy the traditional structure of the Labour Party

Large union donations would be banned on this model - and if they weren't other parties could complain that there was no level playing field. Peter Hain is already publicly expressing the concern felt by many union leaders. Some Tories are already rubbing their hands with glee.

Problem 3: You'll pay for it

The Electoral Commission estimated a £46 million shortfall if fundraising limits were introduced although that did not allow for the fact that much more could be raised through small donations if that was the only way for parties to get the money they needed.

The moral of the story? Laws may help bring transparency and, therefore, act as an antidote to sleaze but, in the end, it is the actions of political leaders which matter most.

PS. Like the rules on party funding, this blog is going to be undergoing some maintenance today. This means you won't be able to add any comments for the time being. But normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

It would be corrupt. It would be illegal and Tony Blair denies it emphatically. But that's not stopped the question being asked by many in the party. They want to know why their party accepted multi-million pound loans from men who were - weeks later - nominated for peerages.

Under election laws introduced by this government, donations have to be made public but loans can be kept secret - not just from the public and standards watchdogs but from the party's own elected treasurer too - who shouted about it from the rooftops yesterday.

The row he caused has led to him getting an apology from the prime minister, a promise that all future loans will be declared and a pledge - long resisted - to try to build a consensus on the state funding of political parties and reform of the Lords.

That may produce real political change - the Tories are more open to these ideas than ever before - or it may prove to be a convenient distraction from the as yet unanswered questions about loans given and peerages offered.

Tony Blair can boast of making many changes to clean up British politics, but he as good as admitted today that it's taken sleaze alegations to convince him to try to finish the job.

The e-mail read : "I am being told by others that Sir David's position will be resolved quickly - the clear hint is that Sir David will withdraw his name. My instinct is that party spindoctors may just be tempted to announce this tomorrow when all political attention will be on the big vote on education in the Commons."

Sure enough, that is precisely what has just happened.

Some will even claim that this victory will spell the beginning of the end of the Blair era. How so? Because it will almost certainly be the votes of David Cameron's Tories that will deliver it. This will not be the Labour bill delivered with Labour votes which Tony Blair strove for.

Isn't this, you might ask, an artificial hurdle? Certainly. Isn't it a tad baffling to those outside the Westminster village? Surely. But it is a hurdle that the prime minister set himself and one which - if he fails to clear it - will produce despair in his party. Party politics is, you see, as much a matter for the heart - of tribal loyalty and of knowing who and what you are against - as it is a matter for the head. The act of voting in the Commons by walking into a lobby reinforces that. Unsure how to vote? Then follow your friends. But tonight loyal Labour MPs will be forced to walk with their enemies into the government lobby - enemies who will taunt them for it.

Now, on its own, Tony Blair might simply be able to brush this aside. There have, after all, been other rebellions - some almost certainly larger than this one. But this is far from his only problem.

The complex finances of the Jowell household and of those deemed suitable for a peerage have connected two previously unconnected words - Labour and sleaze. The contents of the Downing Street intray are hardly likely to cheer up those who are disgruntled - new nuclear power stations, a replacement for Trident, NHS reforms that may in the short run lead to bed, ward or even hospital closures. Oh, and then there's May's local elections in which most in the party expect to get a bloody nose. It's a list long enough and gloomy enough to have some - even in the Cabinet - wondering whether Tony Blair should go sooner rather than later.

Team Blair though are ready with their response. This is not our 1990, they say. Blair is NOT Thatcher. His reforms are NOT the poll tax. He, unlike she, is NOT an electoral liability. Gordon Brown is NOT Michael Heseltine. He will NOT force his leader from power - restless though he is and angry at the legacy he might inherit as he seems to be. So, Tony Blair does not see today's vote as a test for him but as yet another test he's set for his party. Are they serious, he asks himself, about carrying on as New Labour? Will they back what he calls "Clause 4 in practice"? Will they turn today's victory for HIS ideas into a political defeat? They, of course, might yet turn on him and insist that it's he and not them who is really the cause of their problems.

P.S.

Tony Blair may actually be defeated in a second vote tonight on the timetable for the parliamentary scrutiny of this legislation. The Tories are promising to form an alliance with Labour rebels to deliver what would be a largely symbolic defeat - though it would create a headache for party managers. I've no doubt that the prime minister will try to turn that defeat into a political victory by taunting David Cameron at Question Time for hypocrisy - claiming that he wants a bill while voting against its swift progress.

Funny business, politics. Lewis Carroll could have had great fun with it.

Or at least I thought he had - at his last Downing Street news conference. Thus, I asked a colleague to dig out the transcript from the Number 10 website. To my surprise, the line I was looking for wasn't there.

One reporter asked the prime minister about Guantanamo Bay and also this question: "Do you think it is sustainable for you to remain in office when a piece of flagship legislation is passed with the help of an opposition party?"

The official transcript of Mr Blair's reply reads: "I think I have said what I have said on Guantanamo. And on the first part, you know if you look at the school system at the moment..." before he goes on to talk about the school reforms.

What Tony Blair actually said - we've checked the tape - was:

"Look as you say I am hopeful we will get the vast majority of Labour MPs behind us, in fact I am absolutely sure we will get the vast majority. The question is whether we manage to get enough to get it through with Labour votes alone. But in a sense the issue is doing the right thing for the country, it's what the country expects and of course I want to do it with Labour MPs in full support. Look I think this is a very, very critical issue for the Labour Party for its instincts, for what it's about, for what it is trying to do."

I'm sure it was just a typing error and that Number 10 will be happy to put it straight.

Update (19:33 GMT)
The transcript typers at Number 10 have replied. Apparently they always exclude references to party politics on what is, after all, a government website. Shame they don't make that clear on the transcript or website.

Overused, unspecific, designed to damage rather than illuminate, "sleaze" is still a word that is mightily hard to shake off once it attaches itself to you. Over the past few days I've heard the high-minded editor of the sobre Financial Times use it; I've seen the former editor of the Guardian write it and seen the Daily Mail shout it from the rooftops.

What, you may protest, surely Labour has done "nothing wrong" (to use the party press office's favourite phrase)?

Well, no - provided, that is, you...

• believe Tessa Jowell's protestations of ignorance of her husband's financial transactions;
  
• accept that taking million pound loans from very rich people was not a ruse to get around party funding rules;
  
• think there's nothing questionable about every person who gave the party a million getting a peerage or a knighthood;

then they have, indeed, done nothing wrong.

What's more they can boast that they created the laws on party funding and the Electoral Commission that are now being used to embarrass them.

No matter.

"Sleaze" doesn't depend on facts or track record. It's a smell, a feeling, a cloud that can form around a political party. Once it's there your enemies will use anything they can to increase the size of the cloud - John Reid's mortgage, Cherie Blair's speaking fees and anything to do with Tessa Jowell.

If the warning lights are not flashing red in Downing Street they should be.

She should have remembered the plight of Peter Brooke - the Tory Northern Ireland secretary - who forever regretted singing Oh My Darling on Irish TV or John Redwood - the Tory Welsh Secretary - who pretended to sing the Welsh national anthem but didn't actually know the words, or even that idiot who destroyed his credibility singing Bhohemian Rhapsody on Children in Need.

Today Jowell is facing more questions about her husband's financial dealings and her failure to declare them so the pictures of her singing are a gift to news desks. One Labour MP put it to me that "the precedents are not propitious".

He didn't mean Brooke, Redwood or Robinson. He was referring to David Blunkett - then home secretary - who chose to show it was business as normal by singing "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again".

Soon after he was gone.

PS.
Just remembered another political singing howler. Cherie Blair singing When I'm Sixty-Four with Chinese students in Beijing. Perhaps the most famous example was Prime Minister Jim Callaghan singing Waiting At The Church when he revealed that he would not be calling an election in 1978.

The one that got away was also a Callaghan moment - Tony Benn recorded Sunny Jim singing "I'm the fat man, the very fat man who waters the workers' beer" to a TUC dinner. Sadly no cameras were present. Oh, then there was Peter Lilley's little list... memories are just flooding back. (You can hear some of the best/worst here). Anyone got any more suggestions?

Oh, by the way, if you're interested in the story. Number Ten has just let slip that the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has written again to Tessa Jowell.

- If she will make a statement on the support her department is giving to rugby league.

- What discussions she has had with the Office of Fair Trading and the Department for Trade and Industry on the distribution arrangements for newspapers and magazines.

- If she will intervene to ensure that the portrait of John Donne in the National Portrait Gallery is not lost to the nation.

The official opposition line - led by David Cameron - is to look and sound sympathetic whilst insisting she still has questions to answer. The Tories are content to let the media and the odd Labour MP cause trouble. Thus, it's unlikely that Tessa Jowell will get anything other than a warm reaction today. She is experienced enough though to know that this will not prove her troubles are at an end.

The key to that is whether new questions being asked about her mortgage and her husband's share dealings suggest that she did after all breach the ministerial code or, indeed, Commons rules on declaring interests. The Italian prosecutors may yet add more to the pot.

Margaret Beckett has turned this into a trial of strength with the media, calling it "a kind of witch-hunt and it ought not to go on" and declaring that her colleague has a duty to tough this out "If she can stand it". The next couple of days will see if "she can stand it" and she will have her eyes on the unofficial deadline for ministerial resignations - Wednesday.

Why? Because Tony Blair wants things neat and tidy before standing up for Prime Minister's Question Time.

What changed all that was one mortage application, for a vast sum of money for most people - £350,000. Her name on it, his financial dealings, and the only way in which it was found that she had not broken the ministerial code was because she had to plead ignorance.

She had to say, "My husband never told me. I never asked. I didn't know what this financial transaction was about." Had she known, she would have broken the code - Tony Blair would have been forced to sack her.

Now it is quite possible that, in the words of one friend of hers, there has been a breakdown of trust. That in the process of these documents coming out she has discovered things that she simply never knew about her husband, and she has also discovered that he has not told her all that she felt he should have said. But I am afraid, in the end, this is guesswork. What we know is that an enormous strain has been put on the family by the drip-drip of revelations from the Italian prosecutors.

We are told that they are now separating, but the hints from what I am being told, the hints from the statement from David Mills' solicitor, that this is temporary and that they hope to get back together again, suggest partly a painful personal decision but partly a calculation - to separate off the vulnerable political person, the minister, from her husband so that both can deal with their own problems in their own ways without becoming intertwined.

All the talk about who's the bookies' favourite to win the Lib Dem leadership race merely proves it. Bookies, remember, are not soothsayers. Their odds merely reflect their exposure to financial risk. They respond to the bets of punters. The sure way to make your guy the favourite is to bet on him. The widespread suspicion at Westminster is that that's just what friends of Chris Huhne have been doing.

Pollsters can't help us much either with this select and special bunch of voters (there are around 73,000 Lib Dem members). Conventional polling struggles to get more than one or two Lib Dem members in a normal sample. Internet polling - which showed a surge for Chris Huhne - performed well in the Tory contest, but there are still doubts about the reliability of samples in contests of this sort.

Finally, we have the Lib Dems to thank for not being able to predict the winner. They passed a rule so that membership information was private. No candidate has a canvassing list so even they don't know.

My hunch is it'll be Ming. The official result will be at three o'clock, but the talk is that we should hear a whisper around lunchtime… keep an eye open.

No wonder at Question Time a Labour MP talked about the "politics of Lewis Carroll". (You can watch it here - go to the last question.) David Taylor was referring to the fact that so many Labour MPs oppose the reforms and so many Tories back them.

Despite Tony Blair telling his MPs that he wants "a Labour Bill passed with Labour votes" senior ministers increasingly believe that they will only win thanks to the votes of Tory MPs. Yes, concessions have been made. Yes, leading rebels have switched - albeit grudgingly - to become backers of the legislation. But, no, backbenchers are not following. That became clear at a series of meetings last night - hours after the Bill was published.

It's much too early to predict rebel numbers. Huge political pressure will be put on potential rebels over the next fortnight to come into line. Yet I can find few who seriously believe that there will be fewer than 35. That's the magic number which means that Tony Blair needs Tory support to win.

So, will that, as some have claimed, be curtains for the PM? Already his allies are insisting that "a win is a win is a win". He himself has said it would be absurd for him to resign if he'd just won a vote. But other senior Labour figures are speculating on what size of rebellion would so damage Tony Blair's authority and credibility as to hasten his departure from Number 10.

Prepare for a battle of spin. Blairites will point to vast Labour rebellions that he's shrugged off in the past - like the 73 who rebelled over top-up fees or the 65 who rebelled on cuts to lone parent benefit. Enemies of Blair will say that on a flagship bill this early in a new Parliament a revolt that big should spell the end.

Lewis Carroll would have had great fun explaining how victory could in fact mean defeat. And with the fact that the vote will take place on the Ides of March (the 15th). Beware, Mr Blair, beware.

I speak of a "Clause 4 moment" - a moment that convinces the country their party has changed.

Of course, today's document of Tory aims and values (which you can read in PDF format here) can be no match for Tony Blair's ditching of Clause 4. That had shock value, it was daring and there really was a fight.

Until I dug out the library footage of the time, I'd forgotten that the vote in favour wasn't of North Korean proportions. It was roughly two-thirds for and one-third against. It was, in many ways, the symbolic end of a decade long struggle to re-position Labour begun by Neil Kinnock.

David Cameron (who you can watch here on BBC Breakfast) may be denied the fight which some of his advisers desire in order to prove that they're really changing. Many Tories grumble and moan while sullenly accepting the changes he's making as "there is no alternative".

But don't then imagine that what he's doing is merely PR fluff with no significance. For the Tories to sign up to a "moral obligation" to end world poverty; to building a consensus to tackle global warming; to testing their policies against what they do for the most disadvantaged, or to celebrating the role of government can play as a force for good is, to say the least, historically intriguing.

(Operational note: Most computers should open the PDF automatically - if yours doesn't, you can download Adobe Reader here.)

Up until yesterday it was easy to say a simple "no" to that. Whatever scandal was alleged, Tessa Jowell could insist it had nothing to do with her. It was her husband - the corporate lawyer David Mills - who had once worked closely with but was now being dissed by Silvio Berlusconi.

It was he whom Italian prosecutors had been investigating for years and who could face indictment in less than a fortnight. Miserable for Ms Jowell - who backs her man to the hilt - but not a problem for her politically. Until yesterday.

It was then that the Sunday Times made a link between the minister, her husband and the alleged bribe. The link came in the form of a joint application with her husband for a loan which was - in some way far too complex for me to get my head round - linked to the money Mr Mills received which has made him so interesting to Italian prosecutors. Aha, say those sniffing ministerial blood. I say hold on a second.

Note how the Daily Mail - once again in the lead - and the Tories only say that there are questions that need answering. Not, in other words, allegations of misconduct. In Westminster asking questions is a way of keeping a story going when you're not sure where it's headed but you hope something bad might just turn up. Fair enough - that's what journalists and politicians sometimes need to do to get to the truth.

The Conservatives have called on the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell to investigate whether there's been a breach of the ministerial code. They know that the code is vague - stating only that there should not be a conflict of interest between a minister's private dealings and their public duties - but not stating how such conflicts should be investigated or judged.

They know the code says that it's up to the Prime Minister to decide whether ministers should be resigned (they never, perish the thought, are sacked). They also know though that it was the advice of Sir Gus that finally ended David Blunkett's career.

So, back to my questions. Is there a scandal? Well, there's not even - yet - an allegation, though they may follow soon. Will it cost Tessa Jowell her job? Not if the Prime Minister can help it as they are both close friends and allies.

There is, as ever, a "but" to be inserted here…but this story is not being controlled in London but in a Rome dominated by election fever and there can be no knowing where the 3 Bs may take us yet.

When put to him that he should use his access to the American president and Congress he grew visibly frustrated and took issue with the assumption that he was taking "no personal action" to bring about the prison camp's closure. It's another of those issues on which those behind the scenes claim Tony Blair speaks strongly in private but softly in public.

PS. If you were watching the live coverage (which you can see a recording of here), you might have wondered why there were cheers for the man who brought the prime minister a cup of tea. Despite his bow, he's no butler or manservant. He is is Alastair Campbell's one-time deputy, Godric Smith, who is finally taking his bow from the Downing Street press team. A civil servant of integrity - marred only by by being an Arsenal fan - he will be sorely missed.