Last Tuesday, one of my friends gave a talk on British politics in Bonn. She had been invited to address English-language students without much prior knowledge of the subject. Her brief was to be lively and accessible and to talk about figures her audience would recognise. She set off for Heathrow at the crack of dawn armed with amusing anecdotes about Thatcher, Blair and other icons whose reputation - she imagined - would have travelled across the channel. When she arrived there was only one person they wanted to hear about: Derek Draper.
Draper's dizzy and rapid elevation from working-class Charley lad to international superstar at the age of 31 is already well documented. Commentators have focused on his obvious talent for publicity, his self-confessed "big mouth" and his role as an unwitting fall guy for the whole lobbying fraternity - a profession whose descent into crisis Derek himself had predicted. Others have seen it as a convenient metaphor for the charges of "cronyism" that have been thrown at the government since it created a number of high-profile task forces (a phrase becoming as loaded as "quango" was in the 1980s). More rarely discussed - and much more relevant to understanding the truth behind the Draper story - is that Derek's elevation was made possible by his membership of a political party.
Derek isn't the first person to use a party membership card as the foundation for a progression from rags to riches. One of the primary attractions of political parties since time immemorial has been the chance to get a "leg-up" or a "leg over". Over the years, thousands of people have been given an education, a status and a sense of purpose by the political parties they have joined. As Neil Kinnock once famously declared to the Labour Party conference: "I owe every life chance I've had to this party."
But the hysteria about Tony's cronies has concealed a much bigger issue: that the patronage and influence of political parties has spread to the very heart of our society. Most voters don't really care about appointments to government task forces or the Arts Council - in fact, they are probably happy if they see these institutions being run by the high-profile, competent people who go to Downing Street receptions rather than by invisible worthy nobodies. But if they knew that political parties had spread their tentacles right into the heart of our everyday lives - to the schools we send our kids to, the hospitals we depend on when we are ill and even the courts of law we turn to in times of crisis - they would certainly be gobsmacked, and probably horrified.
The truth is that political parties are not only the most important link between the public and public policy - responsible for electing our government, our 650 MPs, our 81 MEPs and 20,000 councillors - they also elect a quarter of the 350,000 school governors in England and Wales from among their members. They choose many of the 30,000 lay magistrates (Justices of the Peace) who sit in our courts. And their members make up a large number of the 40,000 people who have been appointed to health authorities and other quangos (a third of those who sit on quangos are party members, according a report by the Commissioner for Public Appointments last week).
The point is not that these appointees do not carry out high-quality work or are undeserving of these posts. Nor am I suggesting that these posts should not be occupied or selected by local parties. My point is that we need to have a more serious debate about the role of political parties in our society. There is a bland conventional wisdom that parties in the UK are becoming increasingly irrelevant, losing members, credibility and purpose. This is reflected in all the work which is being done on reforming the democratic processes. Columnists, commentators and organisations such as Charter 88 seem to have given up on political parties as a healthy and positive component of democracy. When they want to strengthen democracy, they tend to focus on changing the constitution, introducing new types of consultation such as citizens' juries and using forms of direct democracy such as referendums. In short, they are willing to investigate almost anything that allows us to sidestep or work around political parties.
But one of the reasons that Drapergate caused such ructions is that it fundamentally challenged this view. It showed, in the starkest possible way, that those who think it's all over for political parties have spectacularly missed the point. Parties today are more important than they have ever been, and their influence is more prevalent than ever.
What is more, one result of changes to the political system - the election of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly, the establishment of a London mayor, the introduction of proportional representation for European elections, reform of the House of Lords and the possibility of a new electoral system for Westminster - is that the future will hold more political contests, more focuses for party power and probably even more political parties than the past. So we can no longer treat parties as a distasteful, if unavoidable, part of our democracy. We must consider putting resources into creating parties that we can be proud of.
Other countries have shown that parties can be about more than winning elections, canvassing and stuffing envelopes. Parties in Germany, Sweden and Finland have large budgets devoted to training and political education. Parties in Italy run festivals of music and theatre and play a rich part in their members' social lives. Parties in Belgium run the national health insurance, Swedish parties run their lottery, and Spanish parties even train former guerrillas from Latin America in the ways of democracy. But the debate about party reforms in this country has been dominated by winning elections: how to get parties to speak with one voice, select the right candidates, improve their presentation and lines of communication. This is important stuff, and it is natural that party leaders should focus on it.
But the really interesting debate is still waiting to happen. The challenge for liberal England is to stop thinking of ways to emasculate and sidestep parties, and start thinking of new ways to use the old party infrastructures to strengthen our democracy. Because if parties are going to supply the people who run the most important institutions in our lives, they should have a duty to provide them with the skills to do a decent job. Perhaps it is time we looked at giving parties the resources they would need to act as centres of excellence and training colleges for would-be MPs, councillors, school governors and JPs. But we should not just think of parties as providers and trainers of personnel for public office. The primary focus for day-to-day party activities should not be government at any level, but the local community. Rather than tabling endless resolutions and arguing about party bureaucracy, local parties should be willing to get their hands dirty.
This might mean taking time out at weekends to clear waste ground or an old railway track. It might mean organising consultations with local residents about local problems. It might even mean going a lot further and providing a network of support and advice to local residents who want to set up a community centre, organise a housing co-operative on an estate, campaign for childcare facilities or create local crime prevention or health awareness facilities. Parties could even organise local schools to conduct an audit of the social needs and unused resources of an area. Parties have hundreds of thousands of members with specialist skills and spare time. They are an incredibly valuable resource, but their energy is rarely directed to useful ends. If local parties stopped wasting time in endless meetings discussing what others should be doing for the community and started doing these things themselves, they could have a profound impact on society. Engaging with local communities would also change the whole culture of political activism: a pre-occupation with problems could be turned into a focus on solutions. Parties might once again become proud of their activists.
To do all this - and to do it properly - will cost serious money. And it is money that has embroiled parties in controversy more than anything else. Many have argued that Bernie Ecclestone and Lobbygate have shown that parties need state funding so that they can be free from the influence, or perceived influence, of special interests. But arguments for the state funding of parties have not even got to first base. After all, the public are hardly going to support spending millions of pounds of their money on ever-glitzier party political broadcasts. If, however, they were promised that money would be ring-fenced and used for training the people who run our government, local councils, schools, hospitals and courts of law, you might get a different answer.
While all of these debates are waiting to happen, there is one crucial point which needs emphasising now: the health of our political parties is the single most important symbol of our democracy. If we want a healthy society, we must be willing to pay for healthy parties and make sure they are properly regulated.
If we take this to heart, we could learn a lot from Lobbygate (aside from not trusting dodgy Americans who wear trilbies indoors). And perhaps the next time my friend goes to Germany to talk about politics, they'll ask her about the quality of our councillors rather than the big mouths of our lobbyists.