Any number of people, several popes included, have passed comment on the tricky relationship between means and ends. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell refined the argument a bit by observing: "Power is not a means, it is an end." None of them wondered what happens when means and ends become indistinguishable.

New Labour happens, for one thing. The perpetual election- winning machine becomes an ethical feedback loop: it exists to succeed yet succeeds only to preserve its existence. No distractions - ideas, ideals, promises - can be allowed. Being on-message is the only message. Winning is the only point of winning.

If you happen to point out that this is sterile or stupid, depressing or actually self-defeating, you are liable to be treated as slow on the uptake. Five-year-olds are patronised less thoroughly. "Can't do anything without power," they tell you brightly, leaving the distinct impression that doing anything is not, in fact, high on their list. "Remember the Thatcher years," they add, with glib menace, as though the all- purpose answer to complaints is the threat of something worse.

I remember those Tory years perfectly well. They were a large part of my life. I also happen to remember the past decade, more or less. Only in the most recent weeks of the New Labour era has the possibility of a Conservative election victory begun to look plausible. But the plausibility derives not from a vacuous old Etonian - David Cameron is less a politician than a default position - than from the absence of any lingering fear of the alternative.

If the polls are right, a majority would be perfectly happy to see the Tories returned to power at Westminster. Not because Mr Cameron has emerged as a leader of vision, or even of competence. Not because the Conservatives have changed fundamentally - single-cell organisms evolve faster - but because 10 years of New Labour have come to this. "This" being whatever we can get into print before the next crisis astonishes all those, meaning all of us, with no right to go on being astonished.

Peter Watt, Labour's general secretary, has fallen on his Biro, having stumbled over the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. That, you may remember, was a piece of Labour legislation designed to "clean up" politics (like taking a half-empty can of Mr Sheen to the Augean stables). So fair is the cop this time that Mr Watt - no peer of the realm - has denied neither his legal responsibility nor his culpability. That's Harriet Harman's job.

With the acuity for which she has long been known, the party's deputy leader accepted £5000 "in good faith" from Janet Kidd, a secretary acting on behalf of a shy and retiring property developer named David Abrahams. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, turned down a similar offer in similar circumstances, but he appears to have been a rare exception to a general rule.

Even with memories of cash for peerages and police investigations still fresh, Labour was grabbing almost £600,000 in donations from Mr Abrahams, most of the transactions being disguised, in a flagrant breach of the rules, by the use of intermediaries. Mr Watt claims not to have known that this might be a problem. Everyone else, it seems, just didn't know.

Though the cash was accepted, the practice was, of course, "completely unacceptable". We have the Prime Minister's word for it. Yesterday, in another of his pre-emptive apologies, Gordon Brown admitted that the means to an end (ending Labour's funding problems) could not be justified. But since he only became aware of the affair on Saturday, and since all the money is going back (as though there were a choice), a reasonable voter should be happy enough. As happy, certainly, as Downing Street is with Ms Harman's version of events.

Labour could have done without all this, of course. The snap election fiasco, the capital gains calamity, the Northern Rock shambles, the grousing generals, the child benefit database debacle: none of these looks well on the CV. Nor do they reflect well on ministers who say they need all the power we can lend. Opponents and other critics claim, first, that they are incompetent; secondly, that Mr Brown is no big political beast but rather a rabbit caught in the headlights. The political obituaries are already being written.

As they should be, but so what? Only rarely are individual scandals definitive. Mr Brown leads a government that seems aimless, accident-prone and, this week, venal. But the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, did not personally push Northern Rock to the brink; the Prime Minister did not personally lose computer discs down the back of a sofa. And we don't yet know - for let's be scrupulous - if the latest tale of dodgy donations is just a function of a businessman's personality quirks, or something worse.

It doesn't matter, in any case. None of it, not really. All governments fail and all governments behave badly, sooner or later. New Labour's problems are deeper and, in the horrible word, institutional. They have less to do with moral and intellectual exhaustion after a decade in office than with ideology's answer to original sin. Nothing complicated: as it turned out, they didn't believe in anything much. It shows.

The "project" as devised by Blair, Brown, Mandelson and those who went along for the ride was, remains, an empty thing, dead and deadly. Though they claim otherwise with a kind of desperation, the motives behind New Labour were never animated by a guiding principle. The ideals they did hold dear were tawdry things. And they never could, even in opposition, distinguish between means and ends. That has consequences.

You want a true scandal, an authentic example of how New Labour's appetites have eradicated the remnants of a political movement? It didn't make the front pages. Nevertheless, the Commons public accounts committee has at last obliged the Treasury - Gordon Brown's Treasury, until recently - to admit the actual cost of PFI schemes, Gordon Brown's PFI schemes, to the taxpayer. Over the next 25 years we will pay out £170bn for deals generating huge profits while services decline and the pretence of competitive tendering evaporates. The Labour Party did that.

Blair gave us wars and "reform", the surrender of public services to private ends and means. Brown gave us targets and managerialism, the unchecked growth in inequality and the PFI scam. A government dedicated to the attitudes and aspirations of the right, in other words, and a government freely elected. But what does Labour do, what does Labour become, after the "new" party comes finally to grief? What's left?

Who could name the leader likely to follow Brown, or say what he or she might stand for? Who still counts on the Liberals as a social-democratic alternative? Scots inclined to exempt the SNP from the rightward drift of these islands should read a recent interview with Alex Salmond in the Spectator: tax-cutting and Tory nationalism are prominent in the discussion.

There is nothing ordained about a "left alternative". Even the phrase can be made to sound quaint, these days. But Blair and Brown did more than talk. They did their very best to make sure that alternatives would seem forever impossible. Now nothing remains, save shabby means disguised as hypocritical ends.