THE BRITISH Establishment is appalled at what it guesses to be new Labour’s sale of peerages. From armchairs across Whitehall, Westminster, Pall Mall and the City, no less than from boardrooms in Birmingham, a low, collective moo of disapproval can be heard beneath the rustle of
The Times and the clink of saucers. Sir Humphrey — soon, he hopes, to become Lord Appleby of Taunton Russet — is not amused. The Rt Hon Barney Sullivan, a former leader of the Conservative Party, is vastly irritated.
Lord Widget of Walsall, whose company (now in sad decline) supplied ball bearings to British industry for three generations, can barely contain his rage. Who are these johnny-come-lately tycoons trying to leapfrog into the Lords? His Lordship did it traditionally, slowly, and in the right order: he got on; he got honest; he got honour. Upon his specially designed coat-of-arms, entwined around two lathes (rampant) and a golden railway bogey, the banner reads Profice: Probus esto: Proconsul eris.
It must be admitted that financial journalists with long memories recall that a corner or two was cut at a difficult juncture for Widget’s company many years ago when, as a much younger man, responsibility was thrust upon him early: but he had a workforce to keep in employment. The gamble paid off, the accountants and the press were squared and the fuss soon died away. It had been (as his Lordship later noted in his memoir) a moral responsibility to keep the business afloat.
Widget’s record of charitable giving in his later years was impeccable; discreet financial assistance of a fairly substantial nature to one of our two great political parties was judiciously combined with a lifelong silence on matters of political controversy on all public occasions. It is true that ministers sought Sir Alfred Widget’s advice and company from time to time, and there were some whose dinner table he graced and whom he was proud to call personal friends. But if sharing a biscuit with a pal in the Cabinet who may (or indeed may not) find an unforced opportunity to drop a word in the ear of a prime minister is to become a hanging offence, then how is virtue to be rewarded? Virtue was rewarded. The robes and ermine were duly hired. Lord Widget’s conscience is clear.
So is Sir Humphrey’s. Regrets? He’s had a few — but then again, too few to mention. There were (if the truth be known) a couple of occasions during his long and distinguished career at the Department of Arbitration, Restitution, Regeneration and Goat Husbandry when a minor ministerial unwisdom here, a very slight prime- ministerial impropriety there, should perhaps have been brought to national attention — but what purpose does it serve to embarrass ministers in public when a private word may serve to subdue?
True, the inquiries it was his privilege to chair into these so-called scandals were described in the newspapers as public inquiries — but there’s “public” and there’s “public” and the art of distinguishing is a great art of administration. Ministers had cause to be grateful for his command of this art — but let nobody accuse Sir Humphrey of political partiality: he would have done it for a government of any colour; indeed he did. Appleton has been giving thought to his own coat of arms, should Her Majesty be pleased to raise him to the rank of Baron: In Discrimine Salus.
Barney Sullivan has more time to spend in the Commons tea room than in those tormented days when he led the Opposition. Over the tea and toast he is very cross. He will tell you (if he trusts you — and he trusts few) that for all his political life it has been a gently luminous truth acknowledged by all that the award of a high honour has sometimes been not been entirely unrelated to the rendering — by word, deed, gift or silence — of assistance of a discreet kind to a political party. He will add that in recent years and difficult times his own party (“under successive leaders, and, no, I do not exempt myself from this observation but I was hardly the worst”) have let the luminosity of that truth flare a little, to a point just short of where it might have begun to attract unwelcome notice.
“But this shower,” he snaps, “have blown the gaff. Greed. Greed. That’s what it was,” he continues, smearing extra jam onto his toast, “and impatience. They’ve cut one corner too many. There were rules, you know, a sort of unspoken code. Maybe we did push it — but they broke it. They’ve sawn off the branch we were all sitting on. They’ve killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. The press have blown the whistle,” (Sullivan is no more averse to mixing his metaphors than his drinks) “and now Scotland Yard is crawling all over both Houses. It’s disgraceful.”
Widget, Appleton and Sullivan are in a bate. Let us tiptoe away.
Few of us leave the legacies we intend, and one of Tony Blair’s may be this: by impatience, overconfidence and carelessness of the proprieties, Downing Street has kicked apart an ancient, elaborate and flimsy rat’s nest of Establishment corruption in the award of honours. It has broken the code, failed to understand the very British way we do these things. It has spoilt it for everyone.
This was probably not the reform Mr Blair intended nor the honour he wanted, but honour of a kind there ought to be in history for those who push things so far that they snap. However unwittingly, they introduce a kind of candour into politics. That is what Mr Blair and his friends have done.
It is to David Lloyd George and his rascally agent, Maundy Gregory, that we owe the Sale of Honours Act 1925. On Lloyd George’s behalf Gregory sold honours in so brazen and systematic a manner that the world was no longer able to look the other way. Odious though Gregory was, there was frankness in his approach:
“There are only five knighthoods left for the June list — if you decide on a baronetcy you may have to wait for the Retiring List. It is not likely that the next Government will give so many honours, and this really is an exceptional opportunity . . .”
Unguardedness on a scale amounting almost to honesty seems, likewise, to underlie the slew of small and carelessly executed deceits that (if allegations are to be believed) characterise the picture today. Labour fixers have been strangely uncircumspect. Imagining that all you needed do was cloak an outright gift in the garb of a soft loan was slapdash to the point of arrogance: if this was camouflage, it was cursory.
And how naive to think that modern Britain and its news media would just shrug off that a nominee for the Upper Chamber could show (beyond a sudden slug of money) no record of solid support and political association with the party recommending him — and sometimes no more than a nod in the direction of public-spirited work either. Downing Street seems to have said in its heart: “Hey, let’s get real; newspaper editors and their readers are not kids; they know the score already; we need the dosh; why should we pussyfoot around?”
The British Establishment dislikes nothing more than those who blurt out loud what everybody knows but prefers to leave unsaid. It embarrasses people. Parvenus such as Mr Blair, who think to join the Establishment while elbowing aside the delicate web of hypocrisies, deferences and understandings that support it, infuriate the old guard.
“Hypocrisy”, said François, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, “is the homage vice pays to virtue.” On the sale of honours, the Establishment’s message to Downing Street is becoming clear: a little more hypocrisy, please, gentlemen.
