I believe cash for honours and the scuppering of the SFO Saudi investigation brings great shame on us all. This piece in last Friday’s Evening Standard summarises my thoughts:
In the nine months since the Scottish Nationalist MP Angus MacNeil first reported his suspicions to the police that honours were being sold in return for large donations to the Labour Party, the political class has been in denial. First we were told by the world-weary Westminster press pack that the police would never take up the case, then that their inquiries would never lead to any arrests and that Scotland Yard would not dare question cabinet ministers. At every stage, these lazy assumptions have proved to be wrong.
The collective denial continued yesterday. The fact that the Prime Minister was not questioned under caution when visited by Scotland Yard detectives was eagerly seized on as evidence that he had escaped serious sanction. Yet on the evidence of the story so far, it would be wrong to assume that the police will stop here. Just because the Prime Minister has been questioned as a witness on this occasion, it doesn’t mean he can not be treated as a suspect if detectives choose to visit him again. When the scandal broke in March, Tony Blair made it clear that he had known about secret loans set up to avoid his own government’s legislation on large donations. He offered to take full responsibility himself. If there has been any wrongdoing in setting up the loans, then the Prime Minister must surely take the rap. Lord Levy, Blair’s personal fundraiser, could be forgiven for feeling a deep sense of injustice if he has suffered the indignity of arrest, while the man for whom he was raising the cash was allowed to wriggle free. Des Smith, the hapless former head teacher, arrested on suspicion of offering honours in return for funding the government’s city academies, has even more reason to feel aggrieved.
The story is now moving so quickly that it would be more foolish than ever to predict where it might lead. Just last night, the BBC reported that one of the lenders, bio-tech millionaire Sir Christopher Evans, had kept notes of conversations with Lord Levy in which he claims honours were discussed. The news came as a consensus was beginning to develop in the Westminster village that the police were likely to concentrate on the irregularity of the loan arrangements rather than the actual selling of honours. Wrong again.
I am told that Levy has been ringing journalists he imagines to be sympathetic to tell them he never really wanted to set up the secret loans and that he argued the party should to stick to straight donations. This makes sense in the light of a conversation I had with Levy at Labour Party conference in September when he told me that some of the loans had always been intended as donations, naming the £2 million loan from Lord Sainsbury as an example (a claim that has been strenuously denied by Sainsbury himself). But if Levy has said the same to the police then Blair must be interviewed under caution because failure to declare a donation is a breach of the rules.
Levy has always greeted the police investigation with a light-hearted refusal to believe any of his actions should have caused concern. This attitude of near-hysterical levity has infected most in Blair’s inner circle. The Prime Minister’s Official spokesman is said to have greeted lobby journalists yesterday with the corny copper’s traditional catchphrase “hello, hello, hello”, but the macho schoolboy humour rings hollow. It’s just further evidence that those gathering in the bunker around Tony Blair refuse to admit to themselves the seriousness of the situation. Those representing the Prime Minister still can’t resist a last attempt to joke and spin themselves out of trouble. But it is too late for that now. Even at the death yesterday the games continued. This newspaper’s political editor had the scoop that the Prime Minister was about to be interviewed, but was told categorically by the Downing Street press machine that this was not the case. Were the spinners really not told until the police were literally knocking at the doors of Number 10? If so, then it really is the last days of Rome in there.
The present cast of special advisers and spin doctors in Downing Street fully expect to be out of a job when the Gordon Brown premiership begins. But it is not immediately obvious that the new man will find it easy to draw a line under the affair. There is, for example, the small matter of the £2.3 million loan from Sir David Garrard, a former supporter of the Conservative Party. When I made a documentary for Channel 4 on the subject of cash for honours earlier this year, Garrard’s spokesman, the Conservative peer Lord Bell, told me that Sir David had given the loan because of his strong support for the war in Iraq. This leaves Gordon Brown very little room for manoeuvre: will he risk any significant shift in policy on Iraq and thus see this loan being called in? It seems unlikely when the Labour Party already faces effective bankruptcy.
December 14th 2006 was a day of great humiliation and shame for Tony Blair. As if it were not enough that he should become the first British Prime Minister to be questioned by the police while in office, it also emerged that he had personally intervened to scupper a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into a £68 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. In 24 hours we witnessed the definitive collapse of two of the great promises of new Labour: that Blair’s premiership would bring an end to sleaze and mark the beginning of an ethical foreign policy.
We watched in smug complacency during the last decade as party funding scandals ripped through the political classes in Italy, France and Germany. It turns out we were wrong to think we were immune. Now an investigation into serious allegations of bribery and corruption has been closed down on national security grounds for fear that Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian Islamic state, will no longer share intelligence to fight a war on terror against a version of totalitarian Islam bred in Saudi Arabia. This is the stuff of nightmares.
But the humiliation is not the Prime Minister’s alone. No politician acts in isolation from those that elect him. Tony Blair came to office bearing the hopes of the nation with him like no other post-war Prime Minister since Clement Attlee. He brought with him an idea of Britain as forward thinking, enlightened and idealistic. When he finally leaves Downing Street, we will not only have lost a Prime Minister but an idea of ourselves. We share in his shame.
Content from our partners
Related
