We deserve better than adversarial smearfests

Mr Rove is the man who put the dirty into US electoral tricks from his early days as a young Republican activist stealing headed notepaper from the Democrats and dispatching fake, damaging leaflets in their name.

He graduated to the bigger league with so called "push polling" suggesting to voters that the incumbent Texan Democratic governor and her team were all lesbians, and then, securing George Bush Jnr's re-election by sabotaging John Kerry's legitimate war-hero credentials. Mr Rove, in short, is not a nice man. But he is entitled to be thought of as the Godfather of that brand of modern politics which spawned the likes of the Labour Party's Damian McBride, and the current backstage guru of the Prime Ministerial team, Lynton Crosby.

A long-standing practitioner of the darker arts in his native Australia, Mr Crosby's tactics include urging repetitive, negative branding of opponents, viz "weak" Ed Miliband, or highlighting local issues where opponents are known to be themselves divided. Allegedly, one of the false rumours he employed in Oz was that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard. Mr Crosby, in short, is not a nice man.

Now he is at the very heart of a government performing a dizzying array of U-turns. Not just ditching any "Vote Blue get Green" message - "getting rid of that green crap" was the supposed quote from No 10 - but doing a somersault on health issues like abandoning support for non-branded tobacco packaging. One of Mr Crosby's other businesses represents the tobacco industry.

It is difficult not to suppose his presence is partly responsible for the fact the weekly Prime Minister's questions no longer resembles a bear pit. No self-respecting bear would indulge in such screeching, infantile behaviour as is now the norm both at the dispatch box and on the baying benches. Temper tantrums rarely underpin intellectual rigour.

And we might note, in passing, the virus is seeping into Holyrood, the chamber designed to be the antidote to sterile, kneejerk, adversarial politics. First Minister's questions now rarely concern genuine inquiries about serious issues or engender thoughtful debate. Would that the energy devoted to cheap points-scoring be diverted to curing the raft of social ills spawned by welfare "reform".

The consensus seems to be that the 2015 Westminster election will be a serial smearfest; run on a diet of character assassination and innuendo. What a profoundly dispiriting prospect. We got a flavour of it at PMQ's on Wednesday when Mr Cameron used the Flowers saga to throw around cheap jibes about substance abuse at implausible targets like the mild-mannered Michael Meacher.

This is not some dewy eyed plea for Pollyanna politics. But the bare-knuckle variety is unedifying and counter-productive with dozens of hours devoted to honing insults and digging dirt which would be better employed in thought and analysis. Westminster used to be the home of the stylish, witty put-down rather than rants and personal invective. Men such as Foot and Healey used the dispatch box to evidence their erudition and hinterland.

Others utilised elegant phraseology to exact vengeance. Norman Lamont's jibe that Mrs Thatcher's administration was "in office but not in power", was a memorable use of the stiletto rather than the hatchet, as was Geoffrey Howe's unforgettable line about his PM breaking her team's bats before they went out to the crease. And nobody is likely to forget the blessed Ann Widdicombe noting Michael Howard had "something of the night about him." (Interestingly, all examples where the target was in the same party.)

Already the indications are tomorrow's publication of the White Paper on Independence will unleash a flurry of pre-scripted sound and fury delivering a verdict decided upon before there has been time to digest so much as the foreword. Yesterday's media suggested the usual critics were salivating at the prospect of savaging the document's conclusions regardless.

Scotland's voters deserve better.