TOO MANY commentators have announced that Lord Levy is innocent until proved guilty and then, having circumvented the libel laws, gone on to discuss the alleged sale of peerages as if he has already been convicted of offences with which he has not even been charged.

So I make my position absolutely clear. I would be astonished, as well as mortified, if he had committed any of the crimes and misdemeanours about which there is so much dubious speculation. It is not his style. Nor is it the Prime Minister’s. I remain one of Tony Blair’s irreconcilable critics. The sooner he leaves Downing Street the better. But much as I disagree with many of his policies and most of his political philosophy, I have not the slightest doubt about his personal probity. He is instinctively too respectable to break the letter of the law, and too sensible. Why risk his place in history by suggesting that a prospective peer and party donor falsify his submission to the Lords’ scrutiny committee?

All that being said, there can be no doubt that yesterday’s deeply damaging headlines are the result of Mr Blair’s folly. It is not surprising that nemesis has arrived disguised as half a dozen businessmen with large bank balances and no visible political convictions. They are the sort of people on whom the Prime Minister relies for advice. And he will find nothing remotely wrong in accepting their money — as long as the deal is done within the law. That is the result of Mr Blair’s political myopia. For the Labour Party, accepting millionaires’ money was bound, in the long run, to be damaging.

Whether or not the donors want honours in return for their generosity — and I find it extraordinary that anyone should regard a peerage as worth a million pounds — one thing is clear: nobody gives money to a political party without expecting some sort of recompense. That is as true of the trade unions as it is of the tycoons. However, with the trade unions no conflict of principle arises. What they want is, or at least ought to be, what the Labour Party wants too. Buying a peerage, if it ever happened, is quite different from using the voting strength that accompanies party affiliation to demand (and perhaps even obtain) an increase in the minimum wage.

Labour now wallows in the “cash for peerages” morass because of Mr Blair’s determination to loosen the ties that once bound the party to the trade unions. A partnership with them seemed to him, and the philosophers of new Labour, an association with both the past and the sectional interests of the working class. He wanted to lead a party that builds a land fit for the rich to live in. He expressed delight at the proliferation of the millionaires and found no reason to regret the widening gap between rich and poor. To him, taking a rich man’s money was the most natural thing in the world. And, since he does not have much ideology himself, he did not waste time worrying what, if any, ideology inspired the donors.

And as always with Mr Blair, it was the absence of ideology that caused the problem. Nobody can have the slightest objection to rich men with genuine social democratic beliefs subsidising the party that they hope will turn their principles into practice. The much, and wrongly, criticised Lord Sainsbury of Turville comes into that category. So does Lord Haskins — who has the unique distinction of both being made a peer and expelled from the Labour Party. The problem arises when a party receives money from donors for no obvious reason — other than the desire to enjoy the Prime Minister’s goodwill and, in consequence, have at least a vicarious influence over his thinking.

There will be many people saying today — both in defence of the Labour Party and in general criticism of the political class — that politicians have raised dubious money for more than a hundred years. Always have done. Always will do. Historically that is true. When Winston Churchill was Under-Secretary for the Colonies he promised a knighthood to a South African mining millionaire in return for assistance with the Government’s campaign of ending indentured Chinese labour.

Churchill did not deliver and the angry would-be knight made an official complaint to the Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office. Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the most upright of prime ministers, had his last days in office tarnished by allegations — confirmed by his Chief Whip — that donors to his election campaign had been told that they would receive suitable rewards.

But that was then and this is now. And the Labour Party is supposed to be different. Not just “whiter than white”, Mr Blair’s promise at the 1997 election, but by its nature opposed to buying influence as well as buying honours. I would gamble that, whatever the Labour Party has done, the Conservative Party has done worse. But the Tories are expected to be in bed with dubious finance and doubtful business. Labour is not. The damage to us is, in consequence, far greater than the damage would be to them.

If, as I both hope and believe, Lord Levy is not charged, the damage will still remain. In pubs and clubs people will be saying knowingly, “there is no smoke without fire”. The moral of the disaster is clear. In this, as in many other particulars, the Labour Party must remain true to its old principles — not its old policies, for they must change with the times — but the values that brought it into being should be respected and preserved. One of those values is the need to steer very clear of businessmen with so much money that they are prepared, without any ideological commitment, to lend or give a million pounds to the political party they imagine is going to win the next election. They are buying goodwill, if not honours. The Labour Party’s goodwill should not be for sale.

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