British prime minister Gordon Brown badly needed a clean start to politics this year after ending 2007 on a pretty disastrous note created by serial misjudgments, scandals over party funding and sheer bad luck. He wanted to return to the positive, pragmatic image confirmed by his initial three months in office after he succeeded Tony Blair last July.
Yesterday's resignation by Peter Hain as work and pensions minister and Welsh secretary puts paid to that hope of political retrieval.
Coming 11 days after the story broke that he had not declared some £103,000 contributions to his campaign for the deputy Labour Party leadership, Mr Hain announced his departure shortly after the electoral commission referred the matter to the police. He had no option but to go, given the blatant hollowness of the campaigning body that sponsored him, but Mr Brown certainly could have dismissed him earlier. Instead he allowed the issue drag on out of loyalty to Mr Hain, a considerable political figure in the Labour Party who served as Northern Ireland secretary from 2005-7. The prime minister has thereby once again had his media reputation for dithering confirmed, which cannot help his effort to start afresh. He did not want a cabinet shuffle so soon, but has been forced into it.
This affair reopens the issue of campaign contributions which dogged Labour last autumn, leading its general secretary to resign and putting a cloud over several party leaders and ministers - including Harriet Harman, Mr Brown's deputy leader who stands in for him. Both major parties have had trouble adhering to the legislation passed in 2000 which tightened up political funding regulations. This latest setback could boost the Conservatives if they can use it to further tarnish Labour's reputation for competence.
From Ireland the issue of party funding in Britain looks more clearcut and principled than here. Once the suspicion of irregular or illegal funding arose it has been more promptly investigated, referred to the police and made politically accountable in London than in Dublin. Parliamentary legislation and executive action are better ways to regulate political corruption than long drawn out tribunals of inquiry. Granted, the British system has not had the overhang of such allegations from the 1990s we have had here; and the now existing body of Oireachtas legislation on party funding bears comparison with the Westminster one, in that both rely much more on public funding and limited private subscription than before. But Ireland's political culture would benefit from a greater understanding that this is a resigning matter.