SIR DOUGLAS GRAHAM: He resigned as a director the day after the company was put in receivership "as there was nothing more I could do''.

Charles Anderson tracks our politicians who have gone from honourable to dishonourable.

As falls from grace go, this one was bitterly ironic.

In 1991 Sir Douglas Graham was justice minister in a National-led government, and laid the foundation stone for the new Wellington High Court.

On Friday he was back. This time in the dock.

Once upon a time Sir Douglas lectured legal ethics at the University of Auckland. On Friday he was found guilty of making false statements as a director of the failed company Lombard Finance, just one of a long list of men who profited off the backs of the trusting who invested in the country's finance companies.

The charges, laid under the Securities Act, related to the company's prospectus which the court ruled misled 4400 clients with untrue statements about the company's position.

They carry a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment or fines of up to $300,000.

Standing two along from Sir Douglas was yet another former government minister – Bill Jeffries, likewise a minister of justice, his service with the Labour government from 1989 to 1990.

The pair now await sentencing, but have immediately joined the ranks of an inglorious coterie of scandal-plagued former honourable members of parliament. It is a path well trodden by numerous New Zealand politicians over the years. For the sheer irony involved and the scale of their collapse from the guardians of the people's justice system to convicted crooks, Sir Douglas and Jeffries vie strongly for No1 position in the ranks of disgraced MPs.

Though it is hard to best the first MP to be jailed for bribery and corruption while in office – Taito Philip Field, who had Thai nationals do work on his properties in return for immigration assistance between November 2002 and October 2005. It's not been all bad for Field though – wife Maxine said in jail he was treated like a chief and also gained a national certificate in horticulture.

Let's not forget the hubris of Act MP Donna Awatere Huata, jailed for almost three years in 2005 for stealing from a Maori trust which was set up to help under-privileged children.

She and her husband Wi were found guilty of fraud and attempting to pervert the course of justice after the Serious Fraud Office said the pair stole more than $80,000 from the government-funded Pipi Foundation.

Among the also-rans on the rankings is John Kirk, son of former prime minister Norman Kirk, who skipped New Zealand while still an MP, owing more than $280,000. He was arrested in the United States, imprisoned for 102 days in Dallas, and extradited to New Zealand where he was charged under the Insolvency Act and sentenced to four months' periodic detention.

That was in 1984. By chance that same year a spotty 24-year-old David Garrett, later to become the Act Party's law and order spokesman, fraudulently obtained a passport in the name of a dead infant – a decision that would later cue his resignation from the party.

Last year, Gilbert Myles, a former NZ First member and Justice of the Peace, was found guilty of obstructing the course of justice for faking a receipt book while under investigation for fraud. In a classic example of a self-inflicted wound, he was found not guilty of the fraud charges he was trying to avoid by making the fake receipt book. For the obstruction of justice charge he was sentenced to community detention and community work. He has since resigned as a justice of the peace.

However a political mini-scandal need not be an end to one's career. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, some have returned brighter than before. Ruth Dyson, once associate minister of health and accident insurance, resigned from her role in 2000 after drink-driving charges. Government sources at the time suggested Dyson's breath alcohol limit was twice the legal limit. But she was back the following year, regaining most of her ministerial responsibilities.