As far as I'm concerned, politics is an honourable profession to be respected

For five months, ever since their extraordinary advance from obscurity to government, the senior members of the Lisjt Pim Fortuyn party in the Netherlands have been behaving like the delegates to a Trotskyist unity conference. In May they got a new leader, Matt Herben, a former journalist. At the end of July the LPF was sworn in as part of the new right-wing coalition government, and within hours one of its nominated ministers had been forced to resign for not having declared links to the former military rulers of her native Surinam.

A month later, Herben walked out following party infighting, to be replaced as leader by the former editor of a motoring magazine. Within weeks the new man had also departed, along with two of his main critics. Two days ago, just after Herben had returned for his second leadership stint, two LPF cabinet ministers, Eduard Bomhoff and Herman Heinsbroek, left the government because they couldn't get on with each other. Now the entire government has resigned and new elections are to be held in which, according to the polls, the LPF will lose 85 per cent of its seats.

As political tragedies go, this is one of the most easily borne. For a few months the Dutch were governed by a populist party whose British equivalent we can only construct by imagining Jeremy Clarkson as leader, Julian Clary as Treasurer, Melanie Phillips as head of policy and Air Vice Marshal Sir Leonard Sproggett as honorary president. Well, we wouldn't like that at all. And above all, of course, the LPF's militant anti-immigration stance makes it very tempting to associate the party's failure with a return, after a short blip, to the marvellous tolerance that for so long (we thought) characterised Dutch society.

But let's leave race out of this for a moment. The LPF's original success was thought to be due to a number of other factors. There was Fortuyn's own unorthodox charisma, which – with his assassination – was sympathetically projected upon his followers by a sentimental public. Then there was the nature of the movement he founded, which defied categorisation. Unlike most far-right groups, one writer in the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight bemoaned, "[the LPF's] ideology is difficult to tackle precisely because their programmes are largely composed of bits and pieces of whatever grievance is fashionable or topical. In this sense, they are a constantly moving target."

And then there was the idea that this movement was anti-political. It was seen by many Dutch people, as Neal Ascherson wrote, as part of "a resistance movement against an empire of private greed and public hypocrisy" being represented by conventional politicians. It told "the truth" about crime, immigrants, taxation and corruption, while the mainstream parties were guilty of dissembling and being interested only in maintaining themselves in power. If the battle could successfully be defined as one between the people and their masters (and not, say, as one between classes or between ideas), the new populists would be bound to do well.

Populism is not to be found just in national politics. A microcosm as small as, say, a school governing body can give rise to exactly the same tensions. It is remarkably easy for a group of people to become convinced (and to convince others) that there is a de facto self-perpetuating oligarchy in position, which runs things for its own benefit. Any defensiveness, no matter what its rationale, can be interpreted as a sign that the authorities have something to hide. Populism feeds on the notion of conspiracies. Sometimes, of course, there really are oligarchies, and occasionally even conspiracies. But usually the populists are really confronting nothing more evil than the forces of cosiness. Politics is always a minor art and sometimes a major one. Political skills, in a school or in a cabinet, consist of how to get people to agree, how to trade off or reconcile interests, how to make deals. Only rarely is politics a crusade by the righteous against the evil-doer.

It is interesting now, in my late forties, to watch people who just can't or won't understand this. They want to believe that these irksome rules somehow don't apply to them; that they can say what they feel about others (no matter how critical) and that this bluntness will achieve things that gentleness and obliqueness won't. And it is almost never true. Instead they cause offence, alienate people they need to conciliate and – as the LPF experience shows – cannot take what they themselves dish out. Anti-politics often turns out to be merely self-indulgent.

In the Netherlands it hasn't taken long for the voters to discover this. In some European countries the advances made by right-wing populists have not survived the translation into national or local government, and those parties have fallen back, squabbling within themselves.

I would like to believe that there was an iron rule governing this process, a scientific law of politics that determines that populism must implode before it succeeds. Because the most uncomfortable argument that liberals like me have to endure is when we are told that illiberal sentiments must be "addressed" if the worst is to be avoided. If, for instance, there is a widespread "perception" that immigrants are taking over the known universe, then the way to counter this is with a new "perception" that we aren't letting any more of them in. If there were a law of implosion, then obviously none of this would apply. Mainstream parties could simply, politely tell the voters they're wrong and wait for the storm to blow over.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that populism feeds on something other than issues. Who, in Scotland, for instance, would want to support the Scottish Labour Party or any other conventional party after this week's shenanigans involving the constituency party of the First Minister, Jack McConnell? The details are so obscure as to be just about incomprehensible, but seem to involve the non-declaration by party officials of tiny amounts of money, including an amount raised at a dinner, held at the Dalziel Golf and Country Club near Motherwell last March. This crime has been leaked to the press by Labour Party opponents of Mr McConnell, and seized upon by the Conservatives and the SNP. It is said, somehow, to cast doubt upon the First Minister's integrity.

This kind of politics really is damaging. Not so much the issue of donations and declarations, but the charge and counter-charge, it all strengthens the simple and widespread view that politicians are mostly self-serving bastards, and – far from assisting the opposition parties or Mr McConnell's internal foes – makes abstention more likely. After all, if there were a McLisjt Pim Fortuyn available to Scots right now, led by Billy Connolly's eccentric second cousin, wouldn't many of them be tempted by it?

Not me, though. I believe that politics is – in the round – an honourable profession, and that the alternatives are always disappointing or much, much worse.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com