Reflecting at the weekend on his pisspoor performance on Radio 4′s Today programme last Friday and the latest in a long line of corruption scandals, it occurred to me that Arrivederci Gordon now resembles nobody so much as John Major.

Both seem fundamentally relatively decent men who inherited a premiership tarnished by a long-standing and arguably deranged predecessor along with an economy plunging irretrievably into recession, both were former Chancellors tainted by their own complicity in the economic failings that caused those recessions and both are surrounded at every turn by Chancers, liars and crooks.

It seems I’m not alone.

Yesterday I caught up with Sunday’s Observer and happened across Nick Cohen’s unmissable and devastating excoriation of New Labour’s performance history while today’s Harry Potter Bugle surprisingly allows George Monbiot slowly to pour a bucket of steaming hot shit all over poor Gordon’s noggin:

So the circle is closed. The government that won a landslide in 1997 after Tory MPs were revealed to have taken cash for parliamentary questions now faces far graver allegations: cash for laws. Along the way, almost every policy that distinguished it from John Major’s corrupt and pointless regime has been abandoned.

The difference between these two moments is that now there is nowhere to turn. There are the minor parties, but they have been systematically excluded by another broken promise: the failure to reform the electoral system. New Labour has engineered the worst of all worlds; it has sustained a system that ensures only one of two parties has a chance of power, and it has rooted out the policies that made a choice between the two worthwhile. At least when the Tories were in government we could dream of something better.

It is fitting and unsurprising that the scene of the new scandal is the unelected second chamber, whose proper reform Blair and Brown have spent 12 years avoiding. The deregulation of the banks, the love affair with the neocons, the failure to tax the rich, Peter Mandelson… is there any slithering cop-out that has not now returned to haunt this government?

For 12 years the British government has acted as an agent of other powers: the US; big business; big money; anything except the electorate. It is hard now to believe that it was elected in a frenzy of hope very much like the excitement surrounding Barack Obama.

Tomorrow, with impeccable timing, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency launches its campaign in parliament for public scrutiny of the contacts between legislators and professional hustlers. There’s a major lobbying scandal about once a month, and no one who is aware of the government’s failure to regulate this industry should be surprised. It was elected to stamp out sleaze, but since 1997 has done almost nothing.

The sleaze scandals, as they did during the dying days of the last Conservative government, will now emerge thick and fast, as disillusioned officials risk their liberty by leaking documents that should have been freely available, and journalists, scenting blood, close in. Labour will be driven from office with the same howls of execration that saw off the Tories in 1997. But this time there will be no bonfires, no bunting, no dancing in the streets: just the tired shuffling sound of a million more voters turning away from politics.

A nostril-scorching stench of decay surrounded the last years of Major’s administration.  As in so many other ways, it appears that New Labour intends to emulate – and perhaps even exceed – the Tories.

To quote with approval – and profound dismay – Cohen’s conclusion:

I cannot think of a more revealing measure of [Labour's] failure than the transformation of the English aristocracy from pantomime villains and chinless wonders into viable leaders of the nation. At the end of the longest period of left-wing government in British history, the Etonians were back for the first time since the fall of the Empire. A battered public seemed willing to embrace its old ruling class with something approaching relief.