That the past week falls into the latter category there can be no doubt.
We’ve had Clare Short giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, telling us that Tony Blair’s real reason for going to war was that he wanted to be up there with the ‘big boys.’
It’s a pity she didn’t feel strongly enough about it at the time to join Robin Cook in resigning before the conflict. Who knows, by acting together they might just have prevented it.
Then we had Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused of having let down the armed forces while Chancellor by imposing strict limits on defence spending prior to the invasion in 2003.
And we saw the conclusion of the tortuous negotiations on Northern Ireland policing, paving the way to full devolution and, perhaps, a ‘hand of history’ moment for Gordon before he leaves office.
Meanwhile the MPs expenses row reared its head once more, with independent watchdog Sir Thomas Legg finding that more than half of MPs had made “inappropriate or excessive” claims.
Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer yesterday revealed that three of them – Elliott Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine – will now face criminal charges.
Also in the news this week was Labour’s plan for a referendum on proportional representation, a deathbed conversion that has something of the air of tragi-comic farce about it.
I remember getting terribly excited about all the Blair-Ashdown manoeuvrings in the late 1990s, and how they planned to create a progressive-left alliance that would keep the Tories out of power for 100 years.
Electoral reform was to prove the stumbling block. It was when Jack Straw rubbished Roy Jenkins' 1998 report recommending the Alternative Vote that Paddy Ashdown decided to quit as Lib Dem leader.
Yet here we are, more than a decade on, and Labour is now endorsing that very system - surely a case of too little too late if ever there was one.
But in terms of its likely influence on the coming election campaign, perhaps the most significant story of the week was the apparent Tory confusion over public spending.
For months now, the main dividing line between the two main parties has been over the timing of spending cuts, with the Conservatives arguing that the scale of deficit requires action sooner rather than later.
Yet here was David Cameron at the start of the week attempting to reassure us that there would be “no swingeing cuts” in the first year of a Tory administration.
Were the Tories ‘wobbling’ on public spending, as Lord Mandelson was swift to allege? Shadow Chancellor George Osborne says not - but with election day looming, they do appear to be trying to blur the edges somewhat.
We have already seen this Cameroonian tendency to try to face both ways in relation their policy on regional development agencies, which were widely assumed to be for the chop within weeks of the Tories taking over.
Yet when this newspaper and others went and reported that, on the basis of some rather too candid comments by frontbench spokesman Stewart Jackson, the Tory machine swiftly went into row-back mode.
Mr Cameron’s apparent determination not to frighten the horses invites further comparisons with Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 election.
It didn’t do Mr Blair any harm, of course – but the public is older and wiser now.