Sometimes it feels as though British politics is in a time warp. It might ostensibly be a liberal democracy, but UK’s political landscape is starting to resemble the court life of kingly eras.

In those dark days, leaders tended to be toppled through gossip, intrigue and backstabbing. In the absence of mass democracy, the preferred method of deposing one’s opponents was through rumour mongering in the backrooms and corridors of the court. Now, in the 21st century, such scandal mongering seems to be making a comeback. Barely a week passes without whispers that a British minister or official has done something dodgy and thus must be deposed.

Over the past month, Tessa Jowell, the secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, and a staunch ally of PM Tony Blair, has been accused of knowing that her husband accepted loans from Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi. She denied it and managed to keep her job. Now Blair himself is feeling the heat of the “peerages for loans” scandal, where it is claimed that various wealthy individuals who made large donations to his Labour Party were rewarded with titles such as “Sir,” “Lord” and “Lady” and, in some instances, with a seat in the House of Lords.

Some of Blair’s opponents seem to hope that this will be the scandal that — finally, after eight long years — breaks Blair’s hold on power. It’s certainly getting ugly: Now the police are investigating whether certain politicians have broken any laws in the “peerages for loans” debacle.

Over the past decade, the “politics of sleaze” has moved to the centre stage of British public life. All of the big parties, and their supporters in the media, devote much manpower to monitoring the behaviour of their opponents and leaping on anything that might be cited as evidence that this person cannot be trusted to hold public office.

Some argue that ousting duplicitous officials in this fashion is necessary to keep politics clean. To me, it smacks of opportunism and cowardice: Opposition parties are trying to get one over on their opponents through scandal where they have failed to do so through the ballot box. That’s bad for politics — and very bad for democracy. This politics of scandal and sleaze has been gathering steam for a generation — and not just in Britain. As Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg argue in their book, “Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatised Public Debate,” since Watergate in the early 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans in the US have also relied on such methods to shift the balance of power.

In short, scandal has become an actual mode of politics. Sleaze-hunting in Britain and “revelation, investigation, and prosecution” in the US are not so much about making politics more honest. Rather, they have become tools of the political class and sections of the media, a means of embarrassing one’s foes out of office.

Scandal busting is anti-political and undemocratic. Politicians are ousted, not for their public beliefs or actions, but for things they allegedly did behind the scenes. As politics becomes like the courts of old, the people once again become plebs who observe their masters bickering. Didn’t we have democratic revolutions over 200 years ago to get rid of precisely these sorts of antics, in favour of a better way of doing politics? — The Christian Science Monitor