The mix of politics and cash is simply too toxic - not least for this government - for the to draw a line under this latest story about party funding.
Questions still remain about how the party could knowingly accept so much money from someone who wasn't prepared to be revealed as a donor in public. Also still to come is an investigation by the Electoral Commission into whether there's been a breach of the law.
Party insiders hope, however, that by falling on his sword so swiftly, Labour's General Secretary will have limited the damage. Already Sir Alastair Graham the former Head of the Committee on Standards in Public Life has said that Gordon Brown needs a new strategy to restore trust in his government.
Meantime the prime minister is left to wonder - after Northern Rock, those 25 million missing names and addresses and now this - whatever next ?
Labour's General Secretary Peter Watt has resigned after the . Mr Watt told a meeting of officers of Labour's National Executive Committee that he had known about this arrangement but had not known that it might be illegal.
Ironically, it was Peter Watt who had to deal with the fallout of the cash for honours allegations. Gordon Brown will, no doubt, hope that his resignation draws a line under this embarrassing revelation but will hardly be pleased that his early days as leader have been damaged by another row about a lack of transparency in funding the party.
I laughed this morning when that Gordon Brown was to launch a fightback by proposing to build more runways and more nuclear power stations.
No, the prime minister does not believe that that's the way to restore his credibility and popularity. Indeed he believes no "relaunch" could do that. Instead, just as when he was chancellor, he is repeating his commitment to take the right long term decisions as Britain faces a difficult time. This, he believes, will over time - one thing he has got going for him - prove a flattering contrast with David Cameron.
So it is that he has on welfare reform this morning - one of the Tory leader's Big Ideas which he's promised to flesh out in the New Year.
Speaking to the CBI, Mr Brown contrasted the challenges of what he called the "old world" with those of the new. The problem used to be unemployment, now it's employability, he said. Governments now had to help people gain skills rather than to create jobs.
He put a toe in the water of tougher welfare reform by talking of pilot scheme forcing those on JSA (the dole to you and me) to take training schemes. This, say those close to him, is all of a piece with his earlier welfare reforms dating back to cuts in lone parent benefit in 1997.
It is, though, also about heading off the Tories' ideas for Wisconsin-style welfare reform and proving that there is no way they could raise 拢3billion from reforms other than by driving the unemployed into poverty
