"Embedded reporters" may be a new term but the idea that journalists would be doing their trade and their profession alongside troops fighting for their trade and profession is not entirely new; it goes back to the Crimean War. If a candidate such as Bill Clinton, for example, had exploited the internet to raise money, he could have appealed to both the party base and the centre ground.Democracy would be stronger if the influence of big money were more constrained; it is up to parties and leaders to meet the challenge of working within those rules.. Ideally, political parties should be paid for by large numbers of small donations, topped up by matching state funding if necessary, and not by special interests or rich individuals. The return of Michael Ashcroft, twice refused a peerage by Mr Blair, is a reminder of the difficulties.

It is unhealthy that both Labour and Conservative parties are so reliant on donations of £1m or more from individuals whose interests are bound to touch on matters of government policy.Nor would a limit on donations inevitably mean that party activists would choose candidates that alienate the wider electorate. But pause to consider what an outcry there might have been if, say, the public sector workers' union, Unison, declared that it would withhold its Labour Party subscription until Tony Blair were replaced by Gordon Brown as leader.The only reason Mr Wheeler was not criticised for buying a new Tory leader was because his views coincided with those of most Tory MPs and, probably, most grassroots members of the party as well. Mr Duncan Smith may have been the members' choice in 2001, but most of them recognise the need to put up someone more technically accomplished at politics against Mr Blair.And that, ultimately, remains the reason why the future of party funding in this country should move towards the Howard Dean model. But Mr Dean's liberal reputation has been regarded - at least until now - as a weakness against Mr Bush.Precisely because the situation in Britain is a mirror image of this, the response to the role of big money in dictating the Tory party leadership has been muted. Mr Dean's astonishingly successful mass fundraising seemed, on the face of it, the ideal answer to the huge sums available to Mr Bush from rich individuals and business interests (the President aims to raise $170m for the primaries, even though he faces no challenger as yet). Although it provides public funding, the scheme also limits total spending, and Mr Dean is now free to spend more than the $45m limit.His internet-based revolution in party funding appears to be the answer to the stranglehold of big money on American politics, yet he is not necessarily the best candidate to serve the wider democratic interest of fielding a competitive candidate against George Bush next year.The dilemma for the Democratic Party is that the candidate who most enthuses its core supporters is an anti-war opponent of tax cuts whose appeal to swing voters is in doubt.

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So successful has his fundraising been, that at the weekend he opted out of the scheme by which the federal government matches the funds raised by individual donors. In America, on the other hand, the flood of support from small donors may push the Democrats to choose the "wrong" candidate to fight next year's presidential election. Curiously, it was the intervention of a rich donor that helped secure the "right" candidate to lead the Conservative Party here. In both cases, it should be up to the individual to decide whether or how much to ingest.. Most packaging does carry the important information, which is the total sodium content per 100g. As the recipes always say, this can be done "according to taste", which we now realise includes our taste for medical adventure as much as for the delights of flavour.It also makes sense to tighten the rules on food labelling, although threatening the food industry with a "high in salt" label is going too far.