Biting my tongue, I asked, as one would want to ask Brown, why his party seems to think that the single issue which most allows the BNP to pick up votes — the apparently limitless mass immigration which makes many decent people feel like strangers in their own country — was not an issue his party could address responsibly, thereby lancing the boil of BNP support. I was told that the Cameron crowd believe their poll bounce in 2005 was attributable to Liberal Democrat voters coming over, and that if the Conservatives were to discuss immigration it would scare away those LibDems.

This is the way that decent politics ends: lusting after a few thousand voters while coolly ignoring millions. The British people have consistently and increasingly registered that they do not want to be ruled from Brussels. The main parties have ignored them. The British people have said for years that they do not want mass immigration. The main parties have ignored them. This is venality. But it is a venality which has fatally combined with something else.

When it transpired that Jack Straw was one of the cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers who made money by "erroneously" claiming for £1,400 of council tax he wasn't owed, he excused himself with the immortal admission, "Accountancy does not appear to be my strongest suit." The question that must now be asked of the Justice Secretary Jack Straw and all his Parliamentary colleagues is simple. "What then is your strong suit?" Is it your charm? Your duck-pond or your Corby trouser-press?

People in government and those aspiring to government should possess two things above all else: they should have a moral reason for doing what they do, and they should be competent at doing it. Our main parties are filled by people who repeatedly show that in place of a moral sense they have only a desire to be in office. And they now also admit that they are simply incompetent where they have not been criminal. That they desire to rule, incompetently, over people whose opinions they despise so much is an oddity that those of us who watch Westminster can merely wonder at.

Fighting over the same irrelevant piece of ground, the major parties are no longer worthy of the people. They must either change radically or be replaced. Westminster needs not reform, but revolution.