A Cabinet career ended... A police investigation launched... A reputation damaged. All this because a busy Cabinet minister took his eye off the ball and submitted some paperwork late? Well, no, it's not quite that simple.
The principle underlying the law which governs donations to politicians is "transparency" - the simple idea that if we know who's giving how much to whom we can judge whether they're getting any favours in return. The Electoral Commission - which polices the rules - regarded Mr Hain's excuse that he'd been too busy to follow the law - as treating it and them with contempt. The Commission faced a stark choice (as I wrote the other day). They could either tick Peter Hain off and face criticism themselves for being toothless or call in the police and risk triggering his resignation. They chose the latter.
It's an irony that on the day a police investigation into party funding claimed its first victim in the Brown Cabinet that Lord Levy announced he was publishing his memoirs.
There are important differences between the cases of Peter Hain and those of Gordon Brown's deputy, , and Labour's Scottish leader, , who are still awaiting the verdicts of the Electoral Commission.
The most obvious difference is scale. over 拢100,000 whereas Harriet Harman's deputy leadership campaign accepted a much smaller sum, 拢5000, from a proxy for David Abrahams and Wendy Alexander accepted just 拢950 from a Jersey-based businessman who was not a "permissible donor".
Hain was regarded within the Electoral Commission as holding the law in contempt when he said he'd not met his obligations because he was too busy being a minister at the time and had left his declarations to his campaign staff.
Harman, in contrast, said she took the money in "good faith" and couldn't have known the original source. If the Commission accept this she will be cleared although she could face criticism for making insufficient checks on donations.
Alexander originally admitted to breaking the law and would, therefore, appear to be in a very similar position to Hain. Indeed the SNP are now saying that, like Hain, she should resign. However, after she studied her campaign paperwork, Labour's Scottish leader changed her story and said she did not knowingly break the law as she had accepted assurances from her campaign that the donation was, in fact, permissible. If the Electoral Commission accepts her version of events then she will not face a police investigation though others might. The Commission's verdict is expected next week.
He jumped. He wasn't pushed. That is the word coming from Downing Street about Peter Hain. The decision was, we're told, his own in response to the decision of the Electoral Commission to call in the police to investigate the former minister's failure to comply with the electoral law.
Mr Hain always insisted that once he'd discovered the accounts for his Deputy leadership campaign were in disarray he'd admitted it and ensured that everything was revealed - albeit late - to the Electoral Commission. This account has two problems.
Firstly, it reveals that he did not take his legal duty to produce accurate accounts seriously. Secondly, the accounts he did produce revealed the existence of a mystery think tank which had been used to channel donations to Mr Hain's campaign. He never agreed to answer any questions about this or to give an account as to why this arrangement had been set up.
Mr Hain's resignation is a reminder that there is an ongoing police investigation into the Labour Party's use of proxy donations and Electoral Commission enquiries into the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Wendy Alexander (for taking a foreign donation) and Labour's Deputy leader Harriet Harman (for taking a proxy donation).
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