ONCE worked for somebody who loved issuing edicts and hated phrases borrowed from other languages, living or dead. His pet hate was the expression deja vu, which one of our colleagues had absent-mindedly introduced into a piece as if it were a holiday address.
(As Mary Harney might say, there we were revisiting Deja View when who should turn up but the bould Charlie...)
Well. Deja vu it is, no matter who issues the edicts. And Mr Haughey - the poor ye shall always have with you - is in the thick of it.
But it only seems like yesterday that he had the Dail in stitches and set the opposition's teeth on edge with his witty retort to some niggly complaint about his figures.
"A million," says he, "what's a million? Sure you'd lose it in a tot." It seems like yesterday, but of course it was in the 1960s.
The old lags loved it. O'Malley and Lenihan (Des's uncle and Brian's father) didn't stop laughing for a week. "A million says Charlie. Sure, you'd lose it in a tot..."
Those were the days when friends of the party happily demolished rows of Georgian houses to make way for office blocks, secure in the knowledge that whatever they built could be let on long and profitable leases to the State.
These days, they'd call that history. At least it's what the current crop of Fianna Failers and their allies in the Progressive Democrats have taken to calling much more recent happenings. That was in the past, they say, when asked about the £1.3 million that Ben Dunne claims to have given Mr Haughey on being told that, as Mr Dunne is said to have said, the Taoiseach was skint.
The idea that this might have anything to do with the party under new management sent several former ministers into hysterics at their ardfheis.
Bertie Ahern had faced the music on opening night and made his position commendably clear: there would be no place in the party for anyone, however eminent, who'd sought or received large sums of money.
He reminded his audience that everyone was entitled to the presumption of innocence, and his opponents that, in the election, they'd be fighting the Fianna Fail of Bertie Ahern, not some party of the past.
He sounded resolute. By lunchtime next day, when they faced John Bowman, his colleagues did not. The message from Ray Burke, Mary O'Rourke and Brian Cowen had more to do with Mr Haughey and Dick Spring than with FF and Bertie Ahern.
The coincidence of an inquiry into Mr Dunne's payments to politicians and the general election had been no coincidence, they repeated, to anyone who cared to listen, but mostly to themselves.
Mr Spring, the author of most of their recent misfortunes, had engineered it, with the help of Proinsias De Rossa and his colleagues in Democratic Left. Labour's conference a fortnight ago had marked the start of a new phase in the centre-left strategy.
This weekend's conference of Democratic Left would ensure that the tripartite partnership stayed on course.
As for Fine Gael, it had a record of dirty tricks harping on the arms crisis in the 1970s, phone-tapping in the 1980s, now the alleged payments by Mr Dunne.
Remarkably, Mr Haughey featured in all three affairs, though the party, whose history sometimes seemed to have begun with Brian Boru, was too busy with its airbrush to notice.
IN the new, abridged history of Fianna Fail, shadows grow shorter all the time. As someone said this week of the latest event: Oh, that that was two leaders ago. Like Gerard Collins on the night of another local difficulty - "Don't do it, Albert. Don't burst up the party" - Ms O'Rourke and friends took a deep breath, counted to three and panicked.
Mr Cowen caught their mood in a radio interview on Monday. "It's quite clear who's running the show," he said. "The Labour Party and Democratic Left are running the show. The suggestion by the Taoiseach that in some way he is a political innocent...that simply won't stick.
"I understand he could well be a witness in this tribunal. Is he going to decide that he will call an election and make sure he is not called himself?"
Of course it made tactical and ethical sense for the Government to avoid any suspicion of such sleight-of-hand. Fine Gael, in particular, would not have been forgiven by the electorate for an attempt to gloss over its own dealings with Mr Dunne.
But even Mr Ahern was blown off course by FF's predicament. It had insisted on the tribunal, demanded the election and gained little or nothing from Mr Dunne's handouts.
The party leader came up with anstonishing suggestion. On RTE Radio's This Week he said: "(Mr Bruton) should either tell the tribunal what the position is or tell the eminent judge who deserves to know what the position is or we should have the entire tribunal seen out in public."
Imagine what politicians, commentators and public would have said if it had been discovered that the Taoiseach had, indeed, had a quiet word in the judge's ear. The calls for resignation would have been deafening.
But FF seems more intent on winning an election than on the serious ethical issues raised by Mr Ahern at the ardfheis. And its fire is concentrated, not on FG, or even Michael Lowry, but on the left.
This approach - and the curious slogan People Before Politics - is bound to draw return fire from Mr De Rossa and to sharpen the divisions between centre-left and centre-right.
DL can hardly ignore FG's dependence on corporate donations - Jim Miley admits that Mr Dunne was its outstanding benefactor - but will find a more clearly defined target in the PDs' outright opposition to the Electoral Bill.
MICHAEL McDowell's opposition to state funding for parties, like his attempted defence of FF as a reformed entity, calls for a sidestep that Michael Flatley might envy.
FF's alternative fund-raising system - once famously operated by Des Hanafin - hasn't been mentioned this week.
And, if it turns out to be true, no amount of fancy foot-work will sidestep the fact that Mr Haughey as Taoiseach was paid the equivalent of 10 years salary or more by one rich and powerful outsider and may have had contributions from others.
Who the others might be - or if, indeed, such contributions were made - remains for the moment a matter for speculation. But it's clear that at least some in Fianna Fail and several commentators have yet to appreciate the seriousness of the affair.
Who said, when the costs of the beef tribunal were announced last week, that the £7.5 million might have been better spent on farmers' incomes, hospital wards, carers' allowances and medical cards?
And that "lawyers, spin doctors and advisers" would be forever grateful to Dick Spring, Pat Rabbitte and Proinsias De Rossa "for their cavalier generosity with the hard-pressed taxpayers money"?
The man who said this, as reported in the Nenagh Guardian, was Michael O'Kennedy. Who, in case you've forgotten, was Minister for Agriculture when the scandal occurred which gave rise to the tribunal in the first place.
The Department of Agriculture was responsible for the EU's intervention schemes, for breach of which by companies investigated by the tribunal - this State's taxpayers suffered penalties amounting to £80 million.
Mr O'Kennedy has some neck.