A BLACK EYE was involved, but I forget into which scene of farcical disorder, and in which Restoration comedy, an exasperated actor strides to centre-stage, rolls his eyes, and declares with perfect comic timing, “This . . . will never do!” The phrase says it all. No reference to a Committee for Standards in Public Life is required. Nobody suggests contacting the Cabinet Secretary. Nobody scurries away in search of a code which may have been broken. There is no proposal that any independent third party might be approached and asked to investigate and make a ruling, or determine why it will never do, or what in particular will never do.
This will never do. The whole damn thing will never do.
And that is all I want to say about the Tessa Jowell and David Mills business. Hedge funds, shady Italians, offshore accounts, mysterious benefactors, tax dodges, scandalised accountants, imprisoned shipping magnates, huge mortgages with mayfly lives . . . Tessa, you have always been nice to me, we once had a lovely lunch, I have been flattered by the air-kissing in the Central Lobby, it may not be your fault at all . . . but this will never do.
Either the Prime Minister sees that or he doesn’t. It has nothing to do with Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, or a “standards” board, or special investigator, or a whole cartload of lawyers. Five royal commissions, four law-lords a-leaping, three teams of accountants, two High Court judges and a partridge in a pear tree could add little to the central, elemental question that it is the job of Ms Jowell’s boss and nobody else to determine, and which he is already in the position to determine, and which he may determine with no reasons given: is it appropriate that she carry on?
If Tony Blair cannot see that it is not, then — fine — let her stay. We will make our own assessments, not least of him. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer thinks it none of his business to offer an admonitory word then — fine — we will assess for ourselves that man’s political courage.
There is no tearing hurry for Mr Blair to reach a judgment, but sooner or later this is something he is going to have to decide, he is going to have to decide: and all on his own.
No code of practice will give the answer. No committee will comb it from the tangles of fact and suspicion that such questions always arouse. No unelected civil servant can take this on. No bewigged luminary of the legal profession can relieve him of his responsibilities as judge and executioner.
Political leadership in a democracy means, if it means anything, exercising judgment beyond what can be determined by rules and procedures. It’s the extra bit, the bit the machine can’t do. Logic is not enough. Its conclusions will not follow as necessary consequences of the application of a set of regulations to a set of facts. “Guilty” v “not guilty” is not the question.
Sir Gus recognised that and most certainly did not “clear” Ms Jowell. He said that mistakes had been made, assurances had been given, and that “it is for the Prime Minister” to reach a judgment.
The ministerial code is a cloudy thing. At its core it amounts to little more than a set of notes towards the definition of “appropriate”. It leaves to the Prime Minister’s own discretion, as it must, any final response to allegations of misbehaviour. That is a matter for leadership, not box-ticking.
No procedure, however elaborate, can guarantee the wisdom of the judgments that leadership owes us. If it could, we should as well be led by procedures rather than men. No boffinry, however expert, can lend the authority that a prime minister alone should shoulder. Beyond the switches and circuitries of stop and go, of traffic tallies and robotic red and green lights, a leader makes his judgments in a world of perpetual ambers. He must not shirk this task.
I am suspicious of modern Britain’s developing habit of calling for “independent” inquiries and justiciable codes every time something goes wrong in politics. This national craving for sets of rules, for quasi-legal indictments, for veritable “proofs” that a named foot has strayed over a given line and for public trials and public verdicts, is Teutonic, Jesuitical, Judaic, very American — and infantile. Sometimes it seems that US politics has elbowed the democratic hustings to the sidelines and is now being conducted entirely by armies of expensive lawyers, one side looking for palpable transgressions of the law, the other seeking allowable loopholes. Is this the way that Britain too must go?
Interviewed on the BBC yesterday, a sensible-sounding Richard Bacon, the Conservative MP who raised the Jowell affair at PM’s Questions last week, sounded a warning we should heed. It was put to him that, given the Cabinet Secretary’s obvious inappropriateness to referee in cases like this latest, what we needed was yet another “independent” committee to which all such complaints could be referred. Should Cabinet secretaries pass the parcel in that direction?
No, he replied; maybe they should pass it back the other way: to the minister’s boss. I agree. If a politician has broken the law, we should go to the police. If without any law-breaking a politician has behaved inappropriately, we should go to his (or her) boss. We can hold the boss and their party to account in the polls.
The proliferation of “standards” boards to investigate and adjudicate allegations against politicians (the “punishment” of Ken Livingstone is a monstrous recent example) subliminally whispers two messages: that we cannot expect voters to take an informed interest in the behaviour of those they elect, and act on it; and that we cannot expect from politicians a civilised understanding of what is appropriate, or a willingness to insist on it. Both whispers subtly insult representative democracy.
The whispers breed the very evil they insinuate. The electorate these days can be forgiven for concluding that, now that committees of experts are appointed to promote good and drive out bad in politics, the voter’s own amateur judgment is secondary. And politicians can be forgiven for concluding that if it’s all going to be set out in codes and adjudicated by panels, then they they had best study the codes and keep to the right side of the letter of the law — rather than consult their own consciences.
Note the rise to prominence in political chat in recent years of the imagery of the “silver bullet” and the “smoking gun”. As if politics were a kind of detective novel, a sleuthing of miscreants, an “Aha! Caught you red-handed” affair. We appoint the Franks committee (after the Falklands); the Cabinet Secretary (after the Spycatcher affair, the Aitken affair and now the Jowell affair); the Scott committee (after the Iraqi supergun affair); the Hutton inquiry (after Dr David Kelly’s suicide); and the Butler committee (to look into evidence and intelligence for the war on Iraq). We place our trust in a series of Wise Men to administer a kind of celestial justice. Instead of arguing intelligently with political opponents or representatives, we hope that some great hand will descend from the sky and point an accusing finger at a politician, while we all stand around in wonder at the arrival of divine retribution.
It never arrives. There is no celestial justice.
Next week the Committee for Standards in Public Life begins an inquiry into “truth” and “truthfulness” in public life. I ask you! And what is truth? Apparently they are planning to ask people. Let their first witness be a poor chap who was probably doing his best and associated himself with no demonstrable untruth, and would surely have been “cleared” by the Cabinet Secretary, or any committee of the Great and the Good: Pontius Pilate.
Better by far to stand alone and unadvised, in silent contemplation of the Crucifixion, and murmur: “This will never do.”
