Politics loses if cash is king

The drive by David Blunkett, the Sheffield Brightside MP and former Home Secretary, to get Labour supporters to donate between 1,000 and 5,000 to raise the party's prospects of a "miracle" victory is not out of the ordinary.

What it reflects, however, is the need for all parties to boost their coffers in the final weeks before polling day.

In the case of Labour, it also reflects its acute difficulty in attracting large donations from entrepreneurs who have been scared off by "cash for honours" allegations.

Opponents may cast the intervention by Mr Blunkett, chairman of Labour's election fundraising board, as desperate but, as always, he is playing a canny game.

He knows that if Labour is seen as relying on gifts of relatively small sums of money, then it will be much easier to portray the Conservatives as tied to the largesse of its controversial multi-millionaire donor Lord Ashcroft.

Much more will be heard of the businessman once the campaign proper begins – although most of what is said will come from Labour rather than his own party. Lord Ashcroft will continue to embarrass the Tories until he publicly confirms that he pays tax in the UK, as he pledged to do when he was made a life peer in 2000.

Labour, however, is not immune to criticism itself. The Tories will seek to portray its trade union funding, in the absence of many wealthy individual backers, as a return to the beer and sandwiches culture of the 1970s. Similarly the Liberal Democrats, who have been allowed to keep 2.4m donated from the company of a convicted fraudster, are not in a position to make much of their rivals' difficulties.

The whole spectacle is unedifying. It is not about to change, however, because all parties know that when contesting marginal seats, money talks. If traditional campaigning and transparent financing were to make a comeback, then that really would be a miracle.