At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party

‘Get me a Bishop. Get me a f—ing Bishop!’ Peter Mandelson, then Labour’s political strategist, yelled these words across the floor of Labour campaign headquarters at a rare moment of crisis before the 1997 general election. Inquiries were made, soundings taken in ecclesiastical and other circles. With surprising speed, lo and behold! there emerged out of pontifical obscurity the austere figure of Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford. The ecclesiastical potentate obligingly anathemised John Major and his works.

Ever since then the Rt Revd Harries has been reliably on hand with spiritual solace for Labour party politicians in times of trouble. When Michael Howard accused Tony Blair of bad faith over Iraq, Richard Harries confirmed his burgeoning reputation as the Lord Hutton of the Bishops’ Bench by placing the spiritual weight of the established Church behind the Prime Minister’s personal integrity.

Last week Lord Harries descended, deus ex machina, into the Labour party’s latest funding scandal. The Bishop will preside over the internal Labour inquiry, announced by Gordon Brown this week, into the circumstances which allowed Peter Abrahams, a businessman from Newcastle, to keep party donations worth £600,000 secret.

Doubtless Lord Harries, who stepped down from his Oxford see last year, has knocked about a bit. Nevertheless it is very doubtful whether anything in Lord Harries’s previous experience can have prepared him for what lies ahead. He is not just dealing with a funding problem. At the heart of the matter is the financial, organisational and above all moral collapse of a once great political party. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seized control of Labour 13 years ago in what the former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler last week accurately described as a coup d’état, they made a deliberate decision.