Back to the good old House of £ords

Nice to see Dave and Nick, the Ant and Dec of politics, are determined to keep alive the traditions which have served Governments and indeed the nation so well particularly in the time of Lloyd George and more recently in the safe sleight of hands of Tony Blair - namely door to door gong selling.

Dolar Popat, a Ugandan born Indian businessmen gives £200,000 to the Tories and bankrolls a few Tory MPs and apparently he is in line for a peerage.

The hotel and care-home tycoon may well be an honourable exception but I just have a sneaky feeling that businessmen who find the odd couple of hundred grand in their back pockets when they are emptying a suit to send to the cleaners don't have that amount of cash hanging around because they give money away willy-nilly for altruistic reasons - or am I being cynical.

In my book large donations to political parties are to grease wheels, gain influence or curry favour. They are a down payment for some consideration or other in the future - and that goes for trade union cash just as much as the crisp bundles form the the wealthy and wannabe even wealthiers.

In the USA in 2008 General Motors payed out more than $800,000 in political contributions - 2009 was not so good as GM effectively went bust and filed for bankruptcy protection.

Of that 2008 donation though 52 per cent went to the Democrats and 48 per cent to the Republicans. Whoever ended up in the White House or running Congress or the Senate GM was going to be there with a winning ticket.

Something to do with pipers and tunes methinks.