Politics
The tiny group that controls us all
Published 08 May 2000
Nick Cohen pursues new Labour's elite and finds it struggling to understand the country's democratic conventions
Dickens couldn't have invented a character so puffed up with pomp as His Eminence, Cardinal Irvine. The Lord High Chancellor of All England (and, lest we forget, Wales, too) was decanted into office by his former pupil, T Blair. The self-regard that compelled him to compare himself to Cardinal Wolsey was cultivated in his chambers in the Inner Temple, whose original inhabitants, the Knights Templars, were persecuted and destroyed after Europe's feudal monarchs persuaded the Pope to conclude at the Council of Vienne of 1311-12 that they were guilty of amassing huge fortunes, neglecting their charitable duty, forcing initiates to endure strange rituals and practising sorcery.
It would be pushing it a bit to accuse the knights' successors of devil-worship. But anyone who has goggled through the high railings of the Temple's gated village by the Thames at the quads where the Prime Minister, Cardinal, Cherie Booth and Lord Falconer once strolled might still feel the force of the other charges.
Irvine is cutting legal aid for the poorest and, together with Jack Straw, another lawyer, he is downsizing trial by jury - a policy that insults potential jurors as unreliable yobs as much as it threatens justice for defendants. In opposition, he promised an independent Judicial Appointments Commission. In office, he carried on the Tory tradition of appointing, in secret, the judges who - now that we are getting the European Human Rights Convention - will acquire great political influence.
Irvine has been elected by no one. Yet he sits on the Woolsack in the House of Lords and has sat on a baker's dozen of cabinet committees. He is a Prime Ministerial placeman. Yet he insists that it is his prerogative to hear cases from the bench, despite the increasingly loud shouts of "conflict of interest" from his judicial colleagues. He's a medieval relic. He's two fingers at the separation of powers and democratic accountability. Don't knock him. He's a bewigged gift from God to anyone making a television documentary about the unelected new Labour elite, as I have been.
What has been weird about the experience is that the elite does not see itself as privileged. Quite the reverse: the elite thinks its critics are the reactionaries. Irvine used easily to clear £1m a year representing Mohammed Al Fayed and Hong Kong plutocrats. When legal-aid solicitors who earn one twentieth of what he once earned protested about his assault on the welfare state, he accused them of being self-interested fat cats. The only people who worried about contempt for juries, sneered Jack Straw, were "BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers". Like Irvine, the PM and the First Lady, Straw had rarely argued before a jury of the swinish multitude. His past didn't matter. Straw was the working-class hero. Those who opposed the passing of the power to judge their neighbours' alleged misdeeds from the people to appointed magistrates were elitists.
Tony Blair has topped them both. He trembled with passion when he told the Labour Party conference last year that "arrayed against us are the cynics, the elites, the forces of conservatism . . . On our side, the forces of modernity and justice - those who believe in a Britain for all the people." We asked Peter Kilfoyle, who knew Blair well until he walked out of this government in disgust, how members of the establishment could justify themselves with prolier-than-thou language while disenfranchising the proles. "They're very good lawyers," he shrugged. Kilfoyle might not have got it quite right. The launch of Irvine's new Community Legal Service - which is meant to provide advice to, and legal muscle for, the great unwashed - offered a less brutal explanation. "Our" government may be staggeringly hypocritical, but it is also deluded: it thinks it's a business.
The press conference was as slick as a motor show. Jennie Murray from the neutral BBC's Woman's Hour was the mistress of ceremonies. She supported Irvine's initiative, she explained, because she cared very deeply about the legal needs of poor women. A poor woman appeared on a giant video screen to give us a moving lament about her debts. It turned out that she was not a poor woman, but an actress hired to slum it.
The audience applauded her Mockney cameo vigorously. Wondering if the hacks in the legal press were auditioning for jobs on Pravda, I checked the name badges. The ecstatic onlookers were neutral civil servants who had been paid at public expense to form a claque for the news cameras. They grew more and more excited, until, with a flourish, the Community Legal Service's new logo was unveiled. It looked like the Nike swoosh with some dots around it, and should be treated with reverence. Solicitors are receiving a ten-page pamphlet describing what typefaces, point-sizes and colours to use when they brand the law with its new trademark.
Inevitably, there was an advertising slogan that doubled as the title of the service's website. "I think it's great, don't you, 'Just Ask'?" commented a jocular Cherie Booth/Blair, another former pupil of Irvine's. "It's not often, if you're a lawyer, when people come up to you that you can say, 'Just Ask'." The claque writhed in the seats and wiped tears of mirth from streaming eyes.
In the background stood Garry Hart, a godfather to one of the Blair children, who as a City solicitor instructed Irvine frequently. Irvine made Hart his special adviser. Jane Coker, a London solicitor, took His Eminence to an employment tribunal, which accepted her claim that it was sexual discrimination for Irvine to appoint Hart without advertising the position. Not one of the feminists present raised the case. No one had the poor taste to mention the cutting of civil legal aid to the most handicapped and brain-damaged victims of accident and injury.
Irvine, alas, did not have the poor judgement to talk to my camera. We had been promised an interview, but he scuttled off when we "Just Asked" if he would honour it.
Never mind, we thought. We can make a balanced programme by interviewing Lord Falconer, a friend of Blair's since childhood and another lavishly recompensed Temple man. Everyone says he's a jolly nice and open chap and that you shouldn't get too excited about one of Tone's chums sitting on 14 cabinet committees that decide the future of everything from the Dome to devolution. He's probably too shy to face the voters. He was certainly too shy to answer questions. Even my pledge to his press office to become the new Michael Cockerell by being "really, really, gentle with him and utterly sweet" failed to flush Falconer out.
I could have got on my high horse and decried cronies who weren't accountable to the press or to the electorate. But businesses don't let electors and journalists sit in on their board meetings. Commercial confidentiality forbids it. People like me would say that, when half of the largest 100 economies in the world are corporations rather than countries, the business class is the real elite. It's a strong argument I like to think, but the dominant market ideology drowns it out. How can executives - and, by extension, the Blunketts, Straws and Blairs who ape them - be elitist? The consumers are sovereign, aren't they? If businesses didn't give them what they wanted, they would be out of business. Businessmen who make it aren't sinister, but far better tribunes of the popular will than mere elected politicians. Opprobrium is reserved for the cynics who prefer freedom of information to PR; elitists who prefer juries to focus groups; forces of conservatism who prefer representative parliaments to shareholders' meetings; and reactionaries who prefer citizens to consumers.
Thus, Blair has not only brought unelected commercial lawyers into government but Lord Levy of the fundraising parties, Lord Simon of British Petroleum, Lord Macdonald of Scottish TV, the tautological Lord Sainsbury of Sainsbury's and other similar "forces of modernity and justice". Thirty-five per cent of the appointees that the first Labour government in a generation placed on advisory task forces are businessmen and women. Two per cent are trade unionists. David Blunkett wants business to run state schools. John Prescott wants business to run air traffic control. Gordon Brown's Private Finance Initiative gives extortionate amounts of taxpayers' money to private builders. Then the politicians who can't manage a thing themselves whine about cynicism and the decline of deference.
If you think I'm over-egging the pudding, consider the method the government is using to place allegedly independent peers in the "reformed" House of Lords. It was unthinkable that the public should be consulted about who should replace the aristocrats in parliament. Lord Falconer and Baroness Jay hit on an alternative. A panel of four would pick the legislators. Its members would be selected by civil servants from a shortlist of seven drawn up headhunters from the Price Waterhouse Coopers, the City management consultants and accountants. We called its spokeswoman, Julie Harwood. We wanted the names of the headhunters who were being given a say in the government of the country; their salaries and political and business interests.
The accountants refused to be held to account. Harwood's work for Falconer was commercially confidential. "We never discuss client's affairs," she repeated until she was all but hoarse. "Couldn't she see the difference between a widget factory and the governance of a free society?" we asked. No. Perhaps justifiably, she didn't believe we were much of a democracy. I fumed, but rage got me nowhere. The directors and researchers returned to Juniper, an independent production company, run, as luck would have it, by Samir Shah, a friend of Peter Mandelson who is tied in to the new Labour net.
They happened to mention Price Waterhouse. "Price Waterhouse? They've just called. They want me to decide who should sit in the Lords. I told them I was a journalist who might need to criticise the peers. They told me not to worry. I said there would be a conflict of interest. It took them a long time to understand."
We are a populous nation. But the elite networks in a very small world whose borders are closed against those who want a "Britain for all the people".
Tony's Newboy Network is on Channel 4, Sunday 7 May, 8pm
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