Three former UK cabinet ministers have been suspended from the Labour Party tonight, after a Channel Four programme showed secretly-taped footage of them talking openly about the possibility of using their contacts and influence for paying clients.

Former defence minister Geoff Hoon, transport minister Stephen Byers and health minister Patricia Hewitt, were all filmed talking to a journalist claiming to be a recruiter for a fictional political consultancy called Anderson Perry. The ‘recruiter’ purported to be looking for people who could assist US-based clients to gain access to UK ministers and Cabinet secretaries.

Though the three are no longer ministers, they are still MPs, retiring at the next election. Any job offers are meant to be submitted to a parliamentary office for vetting, before or two years after retirement from parliament.

The behaviour recorded on camera is bound to provoke a fresh wave of disgust among a UK public already wearied by expenses scandals. Hoon, now charged with reviewing NATO responsibilities, boasts that he has just spent a week in Washington ‘doing three NATO days and two Hoon days’.

Byers gleefully recounts his efforts to have the government bend the rules to allow the National Express bus line to retain a franchise that competition policy obliged it to surrender (the relevant Ministers denied that Byers had ever spoken to them about it — as the day after the interview, did Byers).

Hewitt, the daughter of Australian civil service mandarin Sir Lenox Hewitt, explains in detail how thinktank sponsorship can be used as a back-channel to guarantee meetings between clients and ministers, and that she managed to get private health insurance — one of whose peak bodies she takes payment from — included in a policy review process on teenage mental illness.

And on it went. What was most gobsmacking was the deep, conspiratorial cynicism of the three — and of other minor players, including a couple of conservatives — a sort of gourmet’s glee as they recount the ways in which they would be able to help anyone with the folding stuff. “I’m just a cab for hire” Hoon tells the interviewer at one point.

Though the incident will add to the deep well of general public cynicism about politics, it is bound to affect the Labour party in a more specific fashion because four of the five featured on the show were Labour. Two of the minor players — including John Butterfill a Tory who announced that he was ‘probably going to the Lords next year’ — have referred themselves to the standards committee after the news of the show leaked out today.

However there is as yet no clear idea of whether Byers, Hoon and Hewitt have broken merely common decency, parliamentary rules, or the law itself. The PM has rejected calls for an inquiry, but the Tories may well decide that this is something they can keep hammering — unless they fear the possibility of more, unused tape from the sting on the cutting room floor.

Besides, there is so much corruption and dodgy dealing around, that it would be hard to know how anyone could get their footing to take a swing, so covered with blood and offal is the floor. The Tories still have a party vice-chair who’s a tax cheat, the expenses scandal is still fresh in the mind, cash for peerages, etc etc, stretching all the way back.

This one seems to be a final express of deep rot, however — the entire political caste has been hollowed out, appears to have put cynicism at the centre of its activity. In Labour at least it is a direct result of the lethal elitism that Labour deployed against its own voters, its country, the world. The well-named Geoff Hoon is its symbol — a defence minister in the criminal, deceitful Iraq war now looking at ways to make money from US armaments industry. Those are the bitter fruits of New Labour, its waste and shame.