For every trip by car, ministers plant a tree. For every trip by plane, they plant a small area of woodland. For every speech by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, they invest in an area of Brazilian rainforest

We don't have politics any more; we have marketing. In the absence of any significant political differences (you could happily swap a speech by Blair, or even Brown, for one by Cameron and nobody would notice), the parties are driven to use all the tools of the marketing trade to sell their wares. Hence the vast sums spent on election campaigns in the hope that the public will distinguish one brand of managerial machine politician from another.

Yet even here we find that each party is doing the same. No sooner do we learn that Labour - or at least the Prime Minister and his sidekick Lord Levy - had been circumventing the party's own rules in seeking undeclared loans from rich donors with the added bonus of a peerage for the most favoured, than the light is shone on the Tories' financial entanglements. Even the Lib Dems are in on the game: their biggest donor, Michael Brown, is to be extradited back to this country to face fraud charges. The party, though relieved that the Electoral Commission ruled Brown's £2m donation as "permissible" - the Lib Dems couldn't have paid for their entire campaign with the cash raised from returning Charles Kennedy's empties - is said to be distancing itself from its erstwhile benefactor. Labour's apologists were right to insist that the government's much-vaunted changes to the party funding system made it "transparent", in the sense that people saw right through it.

Now the transparency has gone even further with news of Cherie's £7,700 hairdressing bill. I wonder if Rod Aldridge feels that having to resign from the board of Capita is a price worth paying for Cherie's hairstyle? And if the reward for a donation is a seat in the Lords, why not give the hairdresser a peerage and cut out the middleman? He (or she) could start a roaring trade doing shampoo-and-sets for the senior citizens in the mornings, before contributing to the afternoon debates.

Sure as night follows day, we hear that the Tories and the Lib Dems have their own set of amusing expense claims, not least Michael Howard's £3,600 bill for make-up. I can officially reveal that in the run-up to the election, Michael Howard, by a rough calculation, spent more on looking like Michael Howard than I did. Including the baldcaps, contact lenses, joke teeth and cape. Actually, the cape would technically come under our costume budget, which pales into insignificance beside Charlie Kennedy's £4,800 bill for suits. Our make-up bill for a six-week series still comes in at about £200 less than Cherie's figure for hairstyling.

The irony is that politics is so dull that we all fall on such diversions as the amount ministers spend on their hair and their clothes. So intense is the focus on what Tony Benn would call the "pershonalitiesh, not the ishoos", that we demand - and are given - such fascinating items of trivia as the car Ming Campbell keeps in his garage, how much Margaret Beckett spends on Polyfilla, or the contents of Geoff Hoon's lunch box. Where does it stop? Grecian 2000 for Alistair Darling: £12.50. Brasso for Patricia Hewitt: £2.6m.

David Cameron's quandary over whether to plump for a Toyota Prius, which emits 104g of CO² per kilometre, or a Lexus (186g) also made headlines. But his efforts to highlight green issues by going to Spitzbergen brought ridicule from correspondents who pointed out that the photo opportunity was achieved only at the cost of carbon emissions from the car and private jet that took him there. The pictures of his pink features braving the Arctic cold as he traversed the snowy wastes on a dog sled may yet come to be seen as the equivalent of William Hague's baseball-cap moment.

Already, ministers are obliged to offset any behaviour believed to be environmentally damaging by making a similarly beneficial gesture. For every trip by car, they plant a tree. For every trip by plane, they plant a small area of woodland. For every speech by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, they invest in an area of Brazilian rainforest. Where, by happy coincidence, they'll find the Tories' saviour Johan Eliasch, whose £2.6m loan allowed them to pay back those creditors who didn't want their names revealed and clean up the party's list of named donors.

Eliasch's trees can not only offset carbon emissions, but clean up Conservative accounts at the same time. Local problems, global solutions: what could be greener than that?

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