The answer is a lot of high-grade financial expertise that it could not have possibly afforded in opposition. It’s pretty obvious what the company, eager to get a lawsuit off its back, had to gain from helping Labour’s winning team devise its windfall tax What’s more interesting is what the Government had to gain. Consider for a moment the case of Andersen, whose relationship with the Government is now at the eye of the storm. Nor, of course, would a big increase in state funding necessarily rule out political scandal, as the travails of Helmut Kohl’s CDU have shown.But it would help a lot. And that might have happened with or without Ecclestone’s £1m. Even in the affair of Bernie Ecclestone the main impression was that the governing ?te had been very na? in believing his bloodcurdling yarns about the collapse of industry threatened by a tobacco advertising ban. Changing the funding system would not wholly protect Labour from the furore it has faced this week.

Potentially that gives one man an extraordinary amount of power.But it’s the Government that is in the frame just now. But it’s equally clear that he would not be giving it money if it were not determinedly Eurosceptic. The businessman Stuart Wheeler is obviously a man of integrity, with nothing commercially to gain from his generosity to the Tory party. Indeed when Sid Weighell, the leader of the same union, tried something similar in the 1970s, he was accused of a gross breach of parliamentary privilege).Similarly it would prevent millionaire capture of opposition parties.

(It’s puzzling that there has not been more fuss about the blackmailing monstrosity of the RMT threatening this week to reduce constituency funding to its sponsored MPs, including Robin Cook and John Prescott, for not doing more to further their interests This goes against all old Labour tradition, which held that the party governed for the people and not one interest, and MPs represented their constituents. For Labour, public funding would do much more than a few rich donors have done to end its reliance, at once unhealthy and precarious, on the unions for money. And the increasing gulf between the political and non-political classes would start, at least modestly, to narrow.Nor is this just a matter of unhealthy cosiness between the governing parties and businessmen with an agenda to peddle. Parties would be less dominated by political junkies and ?tes.