This is a salutary and dispiriting time for anyone who thought that the term “Honourable Member” meant anything. Where is the honour in having your moat cleared at taxpayers’ expense? Your chandelier hung? Swimming pool cleaned? Tennis court dug? Silk cushions? With MPs conferred with the “Honourable Member” title, surrounded by deferential police and commons staff and aides, it is all too easy for them to slide into the indolence of greed and complacency, and treat the Palace of Westminster as their fiefdom.
Make no mistake. This is greed, and in many cases it is corruption, and not on a nicking-Post-its-from-the-stationery-cupboard level. It is theft of taxpayers’ money, in the most underhand way. “Flipping” your primary residence to avoid tax and maximise allowances doesn’t just sound dodgy, it is dodgy. Nor is it mere “oversight”. Putting in a receipt for swimming pool maintenance takes time and deliberation. Claiming for a bath plug or porno films displays nothing but contempt for the electorate. Anyone else who stole from their employers like this would be fired. If local councillors did anything like this, they would be prosecuted.
It is perhaps the lack of contrition that appals most. In the Commons on Monday, Michael Martin took the opportunity to miss an open goal by berating the messengers and launching a leak inquiry. MPs who had the temerity to question his priorities – such as Kate Hoey – were given short shrift. Speaker Martin is a model of admirable social mobility. His journey is impressive, and it is true that some of the attacks on him are motivated by snobbery. But that does not excuse his abject failure to appreciate the seriousness of this crisis. Many Speakers, Mr Martin included, like to compare themselves with the great Speaker Lenthall, who defended parliament against Charles I, and who told the king: “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” That’s all very well in standing up to a bullying king, but turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to parliament’s own failings in spite of the disgust of the voters is quite disgraceful.
Prompted by a desire not to be outdone by David Cameron, Gordon Brown has earned some credit for his (inevitably late) half-apology. Yet look again at his actual words. Speaking to the Royal College of Nursing on Monday, the Prime Minister said: “I want to apologise on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened in the events of the past few days.” Hold on. Nobody need apologise for the events of the past few days. It’s the years of graft we want an apology for, not the well-deserved headlines of a few days. Waving a cheque in front of the cameras, as Hazel Blears did on Tuesday, while still protesting your innocence, suggests that MPs still don’t get it.
Nor do we accept politicians’ complaints that they are underpaid, and that allowances are a legitimate top-up. At £61,820 a year, a jobbing politician’s salary is quite large enough, and if any of them wants to go out and test his or her employability in the wider market, good luck to them. Such is the state of voters’ ire that the weekend poll which suggested that 89 per cent of the public believe that politicians have been tarnished by the revelations was surprising only in the 11 per cent who disagreed. Just how low was their opinion of our lawmakers beforehand? Did they all work for the Fees Office?
It is easy, faced with the morass of drip-drip detail from the past week, to assume first that they are all at it, so corruption must be more excusable; and second to blame the messengers – in this case the Daily Telegraph and the Freedom of Information Act. Wrong on both counts. Not every single MP was on the take: Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband are among the few who emerge well. And the press was doing a public service by publishing: distasteful though the stories of dog food and dry rot might be, it is right that we get to hear of the individual excesses, the better for voters to pass their own judgement. The feeble response from politicians – who well knew what was coming out, but were expecting it all on the same day – can only be understood if we realise that they were never expecting to have to excuse, let alone apologise for, their own claims in detail.
Neither should we listen to the whines that all this was “within the rules”. Not only because in so many cases the rules were so blatantly being stretched and manipulated, but also because these rules were drawn up by the Commons authorities themselves. Did no one think to challenge them and thus reform them? These guards were left unguarded, and it has revealed the blithe, self-serving claims that “we are the least corrupt country in the world” as the dangerous nonsense it always was.
Of all the arguments put against the introduction of proportional representation for Westminster elections, there is at least one that has some force: the notion of a fixed link between an individual elector and his or her single representative in the Commons, which is a feature of the first-past-the-post system. When any single MP returns to his constituency, the people he meets – every nurse, every teacher, every banker, every estate agent – whether or nor they voted for him, are his bosses. The MPs work neither for party nor for parliament. They work for their constituents, who have chosen this person to be their representative in Westminster. And it is a two-way relationship. The MP is empowered, but in turn he or she must be accountable to those same electors for his or her actions during the parliamentary term.
If the whole political system is now in disrepute, there is danger of a populist backlash. A “Clean Party” – 651 Martin Bells – would doubtless attract many voters if it were to promise a bill of rights, modest allowances for MPs, fixed-term parliaments, no party whips or donations, and so on. Even before such a party exists, we urge voters to beware: there are seldom, if ever, easy populist fixes, and populists all too swiftly become demagogues. But if it happens, politicians would be quite wrong to blame the electorate for naivety. The blame lies squarely with the politicians. The “Mother of Parliaments” prides itself on setting an example to the rest of the world. We have set an example – to chancers and fraudsters the world over.
On page 24, we reprint a short article by the former Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, written in 1960. Many of his words are prescient: “There is one thing about politics that I think cannot be disputed,” he writes. “If a man stays in them long enough, they nearly always reveal him for what he is, and he tends to get not only what he deserves, but to find in his fate the reflection of his own strength and weakness.”
There is one respect in which Attlee was wrong. He suggests that it is often callow innocence, a lack of time in the House that beguiles MPs down the wrong path. A tempting theory, but wrong for the week’s revelations. Look again at the list of MPs who have refrained from corruption: Ed Miliband, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn. None of them is a long-standing MP.
Then muse on some of the names of the rule-benders: Rt Hon Alistair Darling; Sir Alan Haselhurst; Michael Ancram, Marquess of Lothian. Far from being the product of youthful indiscretion, this corruption speaks of the cynicism of too much time in the Commons Smoking Room, too many standing committees. They all need some time out
of the palace.
