A new 'non-party' political party launched itself yesterday, promising to make "politics more accessible, politicians more accountable, and political institutions more transparent". The oddly named Jury Team will support independent candidates in upcoming European and general elections in a bid to chellenge the current party political system that it says is self-serving and corrupt.

On the face of it, Citizen K should be enthused; he has long argued that Parliament needs more independent MPs and bemoaned the difficulties such candidates face in competing for the electorate's attention. But the Pop Idol approach to selecting candidates does not inspire confidence, nor does the fact that the man behind the organisation is Sir Paul Judge, who, as Private Eye recently pointed out, is not beyond reproach when it comes to accountability and transparency:

Only last December a court case brought by his ex-wife, Anne Judge, revealed his own murky footsteps. When they divorced, in 2001, she accepted that £14m should be deducted from the £29.6m estate of which she was entitled to 38 per cent, so he could fulfil a "moral obligation" to cover the losses of a charity which had invested on a failed business on his recommendation. In fact, without telling her, he used £600,000 of it to pay the charity's debt to the Inland Revenue but kept the rest.

Although the appeal judges ruled that in law she wasn't now entitled to the extra cash, they admitted to being "troubled" by his conduct. "He was presented to the court as a successful and eminent businessman," said Lord Justice Collins. "But I remain disturbed about the way in which he used the charity to fund his own enterprises while simultaneously taking advantage of gift aid, especially when coupled by the relativity with which he seemed to approach the concept of moral obligation." The outcome of the case, Collins said, was an "undeserved windfall" for Sir Paul.

Man In The Eye, Private Eye No. 1232

The Eye goes on to highlight Judge's less than straightforward approach to matters of party funding when he was Director-General of the Conservative Party in 1993, in which role he refused to return a £440,000 donation made by Polly Peck fraudster Asil Nadir - despite the Polly Peck administrators' insistence that Nadir had had no authority to make the donation, and that the money rightly belonged to the ruined company's creditors. In 1995, Judge sued The Guardian for libel for accusing him of being obstructive in his dealings with the Polly Peck administrators; the jury found for the paper.

So, Citizen K will be reserving judgement on the Jury Team for now, conscious of the fact that, almost without fail, whenever someone in public or political life promises to take on a corrupt and broken system and restore it to its pure and noble roots, they are merely laying the groundwork for a future sleaze extravaganza.