The final failure of Two Party politics?

The Leader, linked here, in today's Daily Telegraph begins and ends as follows: "This is bigger than Tony Blair, bigger than his administration, bigger than Labour. The loans-for-peerages affair has redefined how we think about government. The administration of Britain has always depended on a degree of self-restraint from the ruling party. With no written constitution and no Supreme Court, there are few checks on the power of the executive." .......... "The danger now is that the official response to the crisis serves to make matters worse. Public funding for political parties, for example, would increase the power of party leaders over their MPs, and of the mainstream parties over everyone else. Politicians are quite arrogant enough without being able to compel money from the rest of us, instead of having to ask politely. And there is no point in removing powers over patronage from Downing Street only to give them to yet another quango. If this whole sordid business teaches us anything, it is that any concentration of power will tend, over time, to encourage nepotism and maladministration. One way to forestall future abuses is to make government officials more directly accountable to Parliament."