Ask voters to name the most shocking event of the year and nearly all of them will scream with unqualified fury: "MPs' expenses!" The saga will almost certainly stay in top position for much of next year as well. The story has a bizarrely episodic quality, although the plot is exactly the same each time the front pages reveal more. It began long ago and erupted regularly throughout the year, like a noisy neighbour who wouldn't shut up.
I, too, would place the scandal at the top of the shockers. Yet the cause for outrage has nothing to do with the claims for bath plugs, biscuits and moats. The financial gains were not especially disturbing in most cases, and are easily explained. MPs awarded themselves a pay rise by stealth rather than seek one openly in the face of hostile media and an equally hostile public. We value democracy so lightly as a society that we are not willing to pay elected representatives as much as a head teacher, or the amount a Premiership footballer earns in half a week. They made up for it with expenses - or allowances, to be more precise. This was no big deal. But what followed had much wider significance, exposing the changing dynamics of power in Britain.
MPs waited fearfully by their computers each day to discover whether the mighty Daily Telegraph had emailed them about their expenses, and the arrival of the email was the equivalent of discovering an ominous rash. It suggested political death was a possibility. Each evening, No 10 officials and David Cameron's entourage waited nervously to see which MPs had been singled out on the Telegraph's front page. On one such occasion, I am told, an alarmed aide reported to Cameron: "Bad news. It's us tonight."
“What have they got?" Cameron asked.
“Peter Viggers claimed for a duck house."
Cameron paused and then exclaimed: "What is a fucking duck house?"
Working in the dark
There was comedy in the darkness, but there were not many laughs in the symbolism of elected representatives cowering in the face of a single, mighty newspaper. The non-elected Telegraph clicked its fingers and elected MPs, including those who had also been elected as leaders of their parties, stood to attention. As they saluted pathetically, they agreed to clean up their act and accept any punishment meted out to them.
At which point, the mighty non-elected former civil servants punished elected representatives with an arrogant swagger and were treated with uncritical respect as they did so. In an act of timid weakness, Gordon Brown called on a retired civil servant, Christopher Kelly, to decide on new rules for MPs' expenses. Kelly, whose annual pension is worth more than an MP's salary, virtually declared that elected representatives must walk to their constituencies from Westminster if they live south of Edinburgh.
He spoke with the official's disdain for politicians. I have no idea whether Kelly was a good civil servant, but that is part of the difference between elected politicians and those that function in the dark. Politicians are accountable. They have to answer for their actions in the media and in parliament. We can get rid of them in elections. Certain civil servants rise through the ranks of the civil service without anyone quite knowing why, retire on huge pensions and are deified when they utter a word in public.
Britain's democracy is in crisis, not because MPs fiddled their expenses, but because those that are not elected, or not engaged actively in politics, are revered, while elected politicians are loathed. The Telegraph was not alone this year in forcing politicians to dance to its tune. With an imperious wave of its menacing hand, the Sun newspaper announced during September's Labour party conference that it was switching its support to the Tories, generating panic among cabinet ministers as they sought to adapt to the defection.
A Times leader that was critical of Cameron's leadership this month, more powerful because of its novelty, made almost as many waves in the Conservative Party. Few people follow politics in the raw. The media mediate and, even in the era of the internet, politicians pay homage to the main players in the orthodox news organisations, most of whom earn much more than they do.
Some senior civil servants or former civil servants are almost as powerful. While ministers come and go from departments with absurd regularity, the senior mandarins remain comfortably in place on their six-figure salaries. If anything goes wrong, it is the puny minister who is interrogated on the Today programme, held to account in the Commons and torn apart in the newspapers. In their formalised anonymity, the civil servants can hide from scrutiny and enjoy the glowing approval of the public. After Kelly announced his new rules for MPs, he disappeared from view. Others will face the calamitous consequences of his anti-democratic rulings, as new MPs are recruited only from among the very young, the rich and the mediocre.
Blair's Catch-22
The Chilcot inquiry into the war in Iraq is another example of the changing dynamics that endanger democracy. Former civil servants, generals and diplomats speak out after the event. They had their doubts during the build-up to war, they declare pompously, as they dump on Tony Blair. Their doubts are reported with uncritical deference. But they had it easy, then and now. They did not have to account for their actions in public in the run-up to war. They did not face the nightmare of building a coalition of support in Britain and then face the tyranny of the US military timetable, over which Blair had little control.
Blair's reputation will never recover from his decision to support George W Bush. At the same time, however, his reputation might never have recovered if he had chosen to oppose the war impotently. He was trapped in a nightmare. The non-elected figures functioning behind the scenes enjoyed their power without responsibility. Yet, in the eyes of many, the non-elected figures are noble and Blair is a war criminal.
The scandal of non-elected media and mandarin power fuels and also reflects the decline of the bigger political parties and that of the related activities associated with more robust democracies. The proliferation of smaller parties and independent candidates is a sign of frailty, not strength. There are plenty of parties and independent candidates in Russia, but only one party that wins elections.
The Tory MP Ann Widdecombe noted recently that when she contested the 1987 election, she held 30 crowded public meetings during the campaign. At the last election, she took part in one, and wished she had not bothered, as so few turned up. I was intrigued to hear her despair at the decline of the political meeting because I chaired a session with her a couple of years ago at the Dartington Hall Festival. It was standing room only. Widdecombe the Conservative Party candidate could not fill a small room. Widdecombe the author had them queuing round the block.
Gordon Brown has observed that when he speaks at similar literary festivals, or under the auspices of Make Poverty History, the venue is crammed to capacity. If he attends an equivalent gathering organised by the Labour Party, he speaks in a small room. Shortly before his death, the film-maker Anthony Minghella spent the day with Brown. In the afternoon, the director accompanied him as he spoke at the Brighton Festival. In the evening, Brown took part in a Labour Party meeting in London organised by the Fabians. Minghella told friends that it was like witnessing two unrecognisably different people performing. At the arts festival Brown was warm, engaged and tonally versatile. At the Labour meeting he was wooden and artless in his determined monotony. Party political meetings are starting to alienate politicians as well as the voters.
Such is the dangerous cynicism towards elected politicians that it is only when they escape from politics that they are viewed as human beings, admired almost as much as non-elected nonentities such as Christopher Kelly. William Hague was derided and ridiculed as leader of the Conservative Party. Within weeks of his resignation, he was a popular celebrity. Few people watched his speeches when he delivered them for nothing as party leader. Once he had stepped aside, he was paid a fortune for after-dinner speeches in which he cracked the same jokes he had previously made as Tory leader with similar aplomb. Tony Benn was more vilified as a politician than just about any elected figure in recent decades. Now that he is no longer an orthodox politician, he can sell out theatres around the land, including those located in some of the more determined Conservative constituencies.
In Britain today, only non-elected figures can act politically and be treated with respect. Elected politicians win approval if they become the equivalent of a cabaret act. Many excellent journalists are obsessed with the threat to civil liberties in Britain. The threat is an imagined one. People in this country have never been freer. But while they fret pointlessly, Britain sleepwalks away from democracy.
Steve Richards is chief political commentator for the Independent and a contributing editor of the New Statesman
James Macintyre is away
