The two Eds and the naughty Reverend

"Whatever you want to say, you can say it with Mr Flowers," says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. The tale of the alleged "crystal Methodist" and the Co-operative bank is a "gift that gives to everyone".

For the Tories, it is an opportunity to "try to dirty up" the Labour party by association with the movement that holds its overdraft, gives it donations and sponsors 32 of its MPs to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year "though possibly not for much longer".

If you are leftwing, you use it to denounce banking, even the "ethical" kind. And if your taste is for "painful paradoxes", you can "dwell on the irony" that the Co-op has now fallen into the hands of US hedge-funds.

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The political interest lies in the extent of Flowers' relationship with the "two Eds specifically and Labour generally", says Matthew D'Ancona in The Sunday Telegraph.

Ed Miliband certainly met Flowers a few times, though it is a "stretch" to say he acted as his adviser'. But Ed Balls "undoubtedly boasted of his part in the merger between the Co-op Bank and the Britannia Building Society" and cannot deny that his office received £50,000 from the Co-op Group.

Decisions taken by the Coalition will also come under scrutiny, but the Tory offensive won't be affected by anything that comes to light. For this is "not about banking policy, or fiduciary duty of care, or any one deal". It is about creating the "ugliest possible mental furniture" for Labour, and Flowers has provided it: "a smoke-filled boudoir and drug den beneath the chapel, a symbol of a self-indulgent elite that hides behind the pieties of the lectern but, in private, lacks both mortality and competence".

Cameron prides himself on his courtesy, but it looks as though the battle between him and Miliband is "going to be one of the ugliest on record".

Ironically, Flowers may not deserve the blame for the Co-op's demise. Neither regulators nor colleagues "thought him anything other than a figurehead", says The Spectator's Martin Vander Weyer.

Instead, the behaviour of both the chief executive and the institution's risk committee should be scrutinised. The "naughty Reverend" may have "given us a good laugh, but it's the professionals who must carry the can".