The first Blair parliament is over. It will meet again after Easter, but only to close itself down prior to the election of another one. There will be time enough to assess the government's record, but I'm already visited by deeper-throated thoughts that suit the confessional season. On the brink of our age-old ceremony of democratic transition, I find it hard to engage at a fitting level with the awesome political climax the election is supposed to produce. This has nothing to do with the fallacy that the result makes no difference. The result will matter greatly. My confession concerns parliament itself. Why do I, for the first time in my life, experience tremors of heretical disbelief when I pass that great building in Westminster? Gazing up at Big Ben these past few years, I've begun to see it more as the icon of a theme park than the tower of democracy. It's a huge, magnificent sight, none more elemental in the entire democratic world, especially at night. But what goes on inside? Is that where power in Britain actually resides? How much are the sacred processes - the winding-up and then the rebirth - now symbol, and how much reality?
We know the bottom line. The very presence of these 659 MPs is a massive, immovable guarantee against dictatorship. Because they're there, certain horrors will never happen. Their existence, like the election that will produce the next batch, distinguishes countries such as Britain from great tracts of Africa and Asia, on to which the Mother of Parliaments somehow failed in the last century to graft a permanent culture of functioning democracy. We need elections to be open and uncorrupt, and must hope they engage the maximum number of citizens in voting. This is a system worth defending.
But what was once the parliament of an empire is now not the parliament of even a single nation. Perhaps 80% of the government decisions that affect Scotland are no longer made under these ancient rafters. The setting-up of the Scottish parliament means that 72 MPs at Westminster are not responsible for much of public life as it touches their constituents. Welsh devolution, though less drastic, also drains power away. Thus, two tranches of MPs, 112 in all, will return as impostors - only partially connected to the mandate of legitimacy, they need to justify the influence they hope to command. The perception of enfeeblement begins.
It homes in from other directions. Against Motorola, or Tesco, or Goldman Sachs, the tribunes of the people can do no more than flap their hands. The power of corporations, and the speed at which trillions of dollars are moved round global markets, sharply confine any big-picture agenda MPs may expect to control.
So does the encroaching writ of the European Union. A decade ago, Jacques Delors famously declared that before long 80% of the social and economic laws affecting Europe would be decided in Brussels. It never came to that, and now the tendency is to try to move the other way. But Europe is a mighty force for the rearrangement of sovereignty. European verities add to the feeling that the sound and fury we're about to witness is, in part, a charade. Still doing one's best to be impressed by the neo-Gothic palace beside the Thames, all one remembers, unfortunately, is the idleness and lack of tenacity with which Westminster handles its existing right to invigilate what Brussels commands.
Parliament remains, of course, sovereign. It has the power to overturn devolution, cancel the Treaty of Rome, and pass statutes containing solemn words that purport to undo the laws of global economics. It could re-declare itself the potent centre of what it means to be British: a private member, eaten by Euro-scepticism, is doubtless at work on a text. The more telling point is that most of the disablement has been at the hands of parliament itself. MPs willingly passed the laws - on Scotland, on Europe - that decimated their own importance. They responded, for very good reason, to imperatives that sent some power down to regions and some up to Europe. They now have to live with the consequences, beside which Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster look more like a protective facade than a fortress of democracy.
Many MPs make the best of this. Invited by the Guardian to name what they were proudest of doing in the past four years, a lot of them had answers you could admire. An amendment here, a campaign there, a cause taken up, a constituent rescued from NHS injustice. The accumulation of selfless labour in the Commons rebuts the pervasive and quite false impression of a chamber with its collective hand in other people's pockets, sometimes corrupt, always on the make.
But the sources of pride were mostly small beer. Politician as welfare officer, road mender, modest public servant. The members of this place watch the wider world from sidelines more distant than their Victorian forbears could ever have imagined. The theatre to which we will shortly return them is unobserved, to a degree unthinkable 30 years ago.
If there is another Labour landslide, it's hard to imagine backbenchers will be listened to any more by the second Blair government than the first. For the bigger the victory, the less important the MPs. It's one of the paradoxes that corrode our parliament, with its voting system and its deadening discipline: the more emphatic the democratic verdict, the less relevant the individual democrat.
Some of this will change if the next result is narrower. Part of the reason parliament seems otiose is because it is utterly dominated by the government controller. A prime minister who had to worry every week about the 10pm votes might find unwelcome political life breathed back into the theme park.
But not much. The truth is that higher powers have thrust national parliamentarians to the margins. Minor politicians can tinker with small things but not many big ones. A year when the issue that most burned MPs was fox-hunting tells the story. The big stuff is decided by a tiny cabal across the road, in the light of agreements and forces and networks and markets over which this multinational state now has startlingly little control, and never will have again, even if parliament were to exercise its sovereign power to take Britain out of the European Union.
This is no reason not to vote. Pieces of the local agenda are still important. Which side has its hands on executive power will affect the way public money is spent, and determine the British tone of voice. The way in which we fight, or reconcile with, the forces greater than we are could be much affected. But the public, in their apparent distancing from Westminster, may be more realistic than their politicians. Inside the imperial structures of the body politic beats the weakest parliament since universal suffrage.