Forget ID cards, they are so yesterday. Der Spiegel Online reports: A new weapon has been found in the global war on terror. Amid all the modern equipment and techniques such as computer networks, digital data profiling and the planned online access to PCs, the age-old method of scent analysis is enjoying a revival.
The Stasi secret police used scent gathering in Communist East Germany, collecting smells in empty jam jars and storing them. The method has reminded Germans of that failed regime of snoopers, and was highlighted in the recent Oscar-winning film "The Lives of Others" about a Stasi surveillance officer.
Let's see, they need an officer who can smell something bad even when no one else can detect it.
Got John Yates's phone number anyone?
(Hat Tip: Bruce Schneier)
 The cash for honours fiasco? A triumph.
The purpose of raising money is to advance a party's political cause. But if you handle donors and donations carelessly you risk damaging the party's cause more than the money secured advances it. In a competitive political system, you won't do this too often. That's why democracy works.
The CPS was not able to find enough evidence of lawbreaking to feel confident of securing a conviction. But the decision to offer posts as Labour working peers to a number of recent donors with very little in the way of Labour links was still a poor one. And something that should be discouraged.
As a result of the investigation, Labour won't do it again. Nor will anyone else. The money will be judged not worth the potential political costs.
No one goes to jail. We can move on from the whole boring issue. And it won't happen again. See what I mean? A triumph.
I know that Stephen Pollard got there first. I know that I said I didn't think that the main reason for Michael Levy being in the spotlight was because he was Jewish. But this is very funny and contains a good deal of truth.
 Now. Lord Levy.
Yesterday The Times ran this: Lord Levy’s rabbi, Yitzchak Schochet, said Jews were scared that the inquiry would lead to “one Jew being hung out to dry”.
Firstly, is this true? Yes, I think it is. Michael Levy is respected in the Jewish community for his work for charity and his success in business and politics. And Jews (including me) are saddened that he is in trouble. There is also a feeling of community embarrassment that a prominent and successful Jew should end up as the one in the firing line.
Second, has there been anti-Semitism in coverage of Lord Levy's plight? Well, from time to time, there have been careless headlines (e.g. You've got to pick a pocket or two) and descriptions (bouffant hairdo and so on) that Jews are sensitive about and might have been better avoided.
But, third, is Lord Levy in the spotlight because he is a Jew? Has he been "hung out to dry" because he is the only Jew involved? Is anti-Semitism the cause of the position he finds himself in?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Rabbi Schochet is making a terrible error. If you start hinting at anti-Semitism whenever a Jew is in trouble you undermine the very idea. You make people wary of real claims, ones justified by the evidence.
There's enough genuine anti-Semitism about. And it is difficult enough to make people take it seriously.
 The injunction obtained by the Metropolitan Police against Nick Robinson has given birth to a great deal of speculation. But it has made one thing horribly clear.
Supporters of the Prime Minister have been arguing that the pattern of police arrests suggested that they didn't really have anything.
Forget Guido, they said. The dawn swoops were an attempt to intimidate witnesses into coughing up something, anything, that could be used. Yates of the Yard was aiming for a spot on Celebrity Big Brother, his motivation similar to that copper who nicked Mick Jagger and George Harrison on dope charges.
More than one attempt was made to encourage me to write this.
But I always responded by asking - how do you know? The link between cash and peerages seems fairly obvious to me, but let's wait and see whether there's any hard evidence that would hold up in court, shall we?
The Nick Robinson saga shows that the police definitely do have something, something hard. Otherwise they wouldn't need to protect it with an injunction, now would they?
So last night Newsnight duly ran the story about Colin Challen and Ed Balls that Iain Dale and I have been arguing about. What did we learn?
Well, not a lot really. Colin Challen denied having been offered anything in exchange for standing down in his seat, the Treasury said he hadn't been and Tory spokesman Chris Grayling said he didn't believe either of them.
I don't think this alters the story. It may be, for instance, that Mr Brown was applying the rule of reciprocation that I've written about before. Challen might have been given a role on climate change and resigned out of "goodwill". Either way, I accept the idea that Ed Balls and Gordon Brown have induced him to stand aside.
So why don't I accept that it is a scandal?
Not because I am complacent about scandals, as Iain suggests. I think the highest standards are vital. I would never wish to ignore a scandal or argue that true scandal shouldn't be investigated.
And not because I love the Brown-Balls partnership. I think the reliance of the Chancellor on Mr Balls has not been a good thing and that their relationship is stifling and unhealthy.
My problem is more basic. My problem is that I don't think that moving someone to another role for which they are qualified in order to encourage them to vacate an office is scandalous.
I am not arguing that politicians should be subject to different rules from the rest of us. I think what has happened to Colin Challen is exactly what happens everywhere, all the time in every workplace. And why shouldn't it?
Please, don't just assert it's a scandal. Please don't just say that the Murdoch media loves Gordon Brown this week. Please don't just say that commentariat are cut off. That's not good enough. I need a proper argument.
So please just someone, somewhere explain what's wrong with it and why its scandalous.
That, or just give it up.
 I have been reflecting on Gordon Brown's comment regarding the cash for peerages affair:
I believe when people see the full facts then they will be satisfied.
This is a rather odd comment, if you think about it.
Gordon Brown has always maintained he does not know the full facts, and that the whole thing has got nothing to do with him. So how can he be sure that people will be satisfied when they see the full facts?
Tony Blair on Ruth Turner 2007: Ruth is a person of the highest integrity for whom I have great regard and I continue to have complete confidence in her
William Hague on Jeffrey Archer 1999: This candidate is a candidate of probity and intergity - I am going to back him to the hilt
There's an entertaining difference of opinion between The Independent's Steve Richards (here) and the BBC's Nick Robinson (here) about the coverage of the police interview with Blair. Richards's key charge is this: The BBC is not anti-Labour or pro-Tory, but unable to take a stand on policy issues, and, wanting to make waves, it has inadvertently become anti-politics.
Robinson responds thus: This simply won’t do. A senior police officer in charge of an investigation which is unprecedented in British political history has stated publicly that his inquiry team has "significant and valuable material" and hints that charges may follow..... The BBC is not being “anti politics” when it reports those facts.
I'm with Nick. The idea that the police interview was unremarkable is ridiculous.
I think that cynicism about politics and politicians is dangerous and both the media (the BBC is less guilty than most) and politicans can encourage it. A fightback is in order. But if I were in charge of the fightback strategy, the loans affair is not the event I would pick.
 Tony Blair's explanation of his peerage nominations was intriguing. According to his spokesman:
The Prime Minister explained why he nominated each of the individuals and he did so as party leader in respect of the peerages reserved for party supporters as other party leaders do.
The honours were not, therefore, for public service but expressly party peerages given for party service.
The Prime Minister is right to explain that a peerage is a political office rather than a conventional honour. But he fails to comprehend that it is precisely this that made his choices so curious.
The various people he nominated for peerages in the most recent batch were deserving of honours - they were people with distinguished records in business and many charitable works to their name. Knighthoods were quite in order. One or two might even have been worthy for consideration for a cross bench peerage on a different list.
But as working Labour peers? That's quite a different matter. At least one of them was openly a Tory. None had strong party identification or records.
Usually the Prime Minister is good at selecting his argument. I think in this case he has made the situation worse.
This morning's Times carried the news that Labour backbenchers are resisting a cap on union donations. I am not sure why they are so bothered.
If individual donations are capped, those with sufficient motivation will simply find ways round the law. Either they will find other people to donate with them or they will set up supportive partisan organisations that are not subject to the rules. Unions are in a far stronger position to do these things than Blairite business donors.
So the cap being canvassed by Sir Hayden Phillips is likely to strengthen the union link.
The only way to make political parties finance themselves honestly is for the electorate to punish transgressions when they get to the polling booths.
In the 1980s, voters turned against Labour because their union finance had corrupted their policy so Labour began to change. In the 1990s, the Tories were punished for sleaze and began, very slowly, to change. In this decade, all the parties are being punished for the dodgy relationship between the honours system and money, and this too will change under poltical pressure.
Regulation won't work.
I can't improve on Guido Fawkes's taunting, mischievous coverage of the cash for peerages saga, but what I can do is look at the social psychology.
So here goes.
For a moment, let's accept that peerages were not sold. In other words, there was no explicit agreement to give a peerage in return for money. But no one can deny that peerages were given to donors. The arrangement then was reciprocal. A feeling of obligation to the donor was established without a word being said explicitly.
There is a copious literature on reciprocity. But I think Robert Cialdini's experiment with towels provides the most powerful example.
Cialdini persuaded the Holiday Inn to allow him to experiment with the words on the little sign they put in rooms encouraging you to reuse your towels. Which words would encourage most people to reuse?
The whole study is fascinating, but here's just one of the results. One card promised a donation to a charity for every reused towel, another said that a donation had already been given and asked the guest to help recoup the money.
Now, if I asked you which worked better I am sure you thought it was the first approach. But you thought wrong. The second message was considerably more effective. Why? Because of the power of reciprocity.
There is a whole chapter on this in Cialdini's magnificent book Influence, but in a couple of sentences it is this - we have learnt to reciprocate favours and feel strongly compelled to do so. We reciprocate even when we didn't want the favour.
Now, cash for peerages.
Reciprocity suggests that a sense of obligation can often be as strong, or even stronger, than an explicit deal. In other words, getting donations and giving peerages later without a word being said, is not only more likely to avoid criminal investigations, it is also a powerful way to get money.
But, actually, there is a better way.
Reciprocity is so strong that you could have given the peerages first and collected the money later.
 When the political deterioration of governments is discussed, it is frequently asserted that one reason for their decline is the arrogance of power - the tendency to become too familiar with being in office and to start to override the checks placed on office-holders.
My experience is that the opposite holds just as strongly. And I think Lord Goldsmith’s failure to rule himself out of the cash-for-peerages decision is a classic example.
What do I mean by that? I mean that as parties reach their tenth year in power they see themselves increasingly as a government rather than as a political grouping. Ministerial fiefdoms, bureaucratic conventions, civil service advice, precedents - all become more important than political considerations.
Before the 1997 election, the Tories were under huge pressure to publish the Commons Privileges Committee report on Neil Hamilton and other MPs. The Government machinery said that this was quite impossible, it was a Commons matter, the power didn't exist, and so on. I attended the meetings. The will to publish was there, but the ministers couldn't see a way around convention.
In those days, Blair would have had the document out there in 5 minutes. He was politically ruthless. He would have found a way.
Now, they too have caught government-itis. It is clearly politically insane for Lord Goldsmith not to rule himself out but they are too office-bound to be able to find a way around convention.
It's not, then, just contempt for governing conventions that does political damage, but also respect for them.
Daniel Finkelstein
is Comment Editor of The Times and writes a weekly column. Comment Central is his rolling guide to the best opinion on the web. Click
here for more information on the blog. Robbie Millen, the Deputy Comment Editor, will also be posting.
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