Nobody illustrates the point better than Tony Blair. His behaviour over loans and peerages has been reckless, even self-destructive. His lack of caution has been breathtaking.
The details of the police investigation, which will eventually show whether a criminal case can be brought against anyone, are almost irrelevant given what we already know. After nine years in office, during which Blair faced mounting protests about how money could buy influence with his government, he offered peerages to four men who had recently filled the coffers of his party.
Admittedly steps were taken to obscure the connection. The four had been asked not to gift money to the party, which it would need to declare, but to lend it, so that their largesse could remain secret. But the subterfuge involved terrible risks.
Any of the four might gossip, since people generally like others to know how generous they have been. The arrangement required keeping the Labour party in the dark and when Jack Dromey, the party treasurer, found out, he exploded. Even though a loan did not have to be included in a party’s annual return, there were other disclosure issues. The loan contracts stipulated that Labour’s benefactors did not have to disclose the loans to anyone, which includes the Lords Appointments Commission. Ian McCartney, then chairman of the Labour party, had to certify in writing that each candidate had no financial links with the party, which he believed. So the whole thing went beyond nods and winks that could subsequently be denied. It involved signatures that no amount of spin could erase.
Interrogators love such situations. Apply pressure to any person in the chain and he is likely to implicate those on either side. Sir Gulam Noon claims that Lord Levy asked him to expunge his declaration of his loan from the form required by the Appointments Commission. The squealing has only just begun. Should any fuzzy feelings survive among those involved, the fear of police questions will soon dissolve them.
In the old days, good taste or political subtlety would have dictated a different approach. Under the Conservative government many of the party’s donors became peers. But I suspect that they were made to wait patiently for their ermine, possibly for many years, never quite certain whether they would be elevated. For jaded observers of politics, the quick payoff for Labour’s benefactors appears disgustingly crude and that is more shocking than the point of principle. In the past there were fewer rules and less need for skulduggery.
Blair brought in the new laws, but apparently without realising they would constrain him and also change the political climate. His declared aim was to raise standards and it is by higher standards that he is now being judged. The Conservatives may have been more slapdash in arranging their so-called “commercial” loans even than Labour, which may explain why most of those interviewed by the police are Tories. But the charge of hypocrisy will stick to Blair more than to his opponents.
Although Blair has brilliantly harnessed the Establishment, he retains some of the iconoclastic instincts of a 1960s radical. He scorns rules that strike him as fuddy-duddy. Those in the new Labour clique regard themselves as the smartest guys in the room (to borrow that description of the Enron bosses) and get their way. Blair has given political appointees authority over civil servants. He has exploited the intelligence services to justify the case for war. However much his ministers muddle their personal interests and their public duties, Blair sees no fault in their conduct.
Most MPs despise the Lords. It functions as a rest home for political has-beens. Blair probably finds it comic that anyone should want to pay good money in order to dress in funny clothes and get smarter tables at fashionable restaurants. It is hard to take the social climbing wannabes seriously and perhaps that has blinded Blair to the gravity of exchanging honours for money.
The prime minister’s estimate of his own virtue has made him sloppy, too. He is a victim of his own propaganda, dating back to his days in opposition. Rather like Mikhail Gorbachev, who was so taken in by Soviet demonology that on his first visit to Britain he was astonished not to find unemployed people starving in the street, so Blair is still bemused by his own myth that Tories are sleazy but he is straight.
However, no matter how hard you try, it is impossible fully to rationalise the risks that Blair has taken over party funding, because they are nearly insane. Sleaze is almost the only issue that can end a prime minister’s career. Incompetence is rarely enough. MacDonald survived being driven off the gold standard, Chamberlain continued after Munich, Wilson carried on post devaluation, Thatcher held on despite losing the Falklands to Argentina and Major remained in office, if not in power, after Britain was forced out of the European exchange-rate mechanism.
Blair is the author of many catastrophes but only the honours for cash scandal really threatens his position. Last week Iraq descended further into chaos, underlining how he misjudged his most important foreign policy decision. Although mayhem is constantly before our eyes on television, Iraq scarcely features as an issue in British politics. Equally the dispatch of more soldiers to Afghanistan scarcely causes a ripple.
News that civil servants now think that Blair’s pet scheme of identity cards is technically unachievable has aroused little indignation. The government is said to be dreaming up a face-saving alternative. When billions are spent on an unworkable half-baked scheme to spare Blair’s blushes that will be a real scandal. But it will not shake Downing Street as the arrest of Levy has.
The survival of our political parties is now in doubt as much as Blair’s. Many years ago they ceased to be able to support themselves financially through mass membership. That is only partly their fault. They used to provide evening entertainment before television existed, the means to meet the opposite sex before clubbing was invented and social status in the days when that mattered. In the decades since, society has changed so much that the parties have been sustained by company donations (which shareholders have abolished), support from rich individuals (which this scandal will bring to an end) and bungs from trade unions (which are no less scandalous and will be banned if there is another Tory government).
Funding by taxpayers is a dreadful idea. I have no wish to pay for Labour, still less for the British National party. David Cameron, the Tory leader, favours state subsidies but it would take a brave prime minister to bring forward such legislation in the present climate.
So perhaps our parties will go bankrupt. In any case many feel that their historic orientations fit poorly with present-day concerns, which is why Blair invented new Labour and Cameron wishes to abandon old Conservatism.
But for all their faults parties seem to me to be necessary. They bring together disparate views and form them into a programme. You can have government without parties but no democracy manages without them. Sadly the British are not good philanthropists. They want a choice at elections but they balk at financing the parties that give that choice shape and meaning.
Seeing the old parties fade away might bring joy to an embittered electorate. They might welcome a government made up of independent MPs. It would work because the people in office have little need of parties. They can use the full apparatus of the state to promote their political objectives. Public servants brief them, devise their policies and organise their press conferences.
So if our parties went into liquidation, the effect would not be felt by those in office so much as by those who tried to oppose them. The parties’ demise would make it harder to challenge the government and to change it. After the abuses of the Blair era that would be a deeply perverse outcome.
