Tonight:
4°c
Forget Coco Chanel or even Dame Shirley Porter. At £173,691 for her parliamentary expenses last year, Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North, is London's most expensive woman. Like all expensive women, she is irresistible. Indeed, since she is funded by taxes, it is illegal to resist her.
As well as the MPs' expenses, we learned last week that Sir Ian Blair, the Met Commissioner, considered claiming a £25,000 bonus - because, said friends, the Met has cut crime. The outcry focused on the fact that Sir Ian's force is currently on trial for killing someone. But to me, the real problem was different. Reducing crime is what Sir Ian is already paid for. He shouldn't expect bonuses just for doing his job.
Then there was Andrew Lezala, catastrophic chief executive of Metronet, who got a £500,000 pay-off on top of the billions his company has already cost us. And then John Yates, the policeman in charge of the cash-for-honours investigation, told MPs how Downing Street had frustrated his enquiries, and how his detailed findings must unfortunately remain confidential.
There's a common thread in all this: the arrogance of power. This isn't, as some claim, a country where the powerful enjoy "impunity." But we do seem to have ended up with the worst of both worlds.
We have enough accountability to uncover bad behaviour - the sale of honours - but not enough to punish or discourage it. We have enough accountability to cast general suspicion - but not enough to discover what specifically happened. The result is that all politicians and senior public servants, even the good ones, are tarred by the activities of the worst. It would actually be in their interest - not just in ours - for the system to single out the guilty and the greedy, so voters understand there's a difference between them and the rest.
The crisis in our democracy will not be solved by allowing demonstrators back into Parliament Square, welcome as that is, or by anything else Gordon Brown suggested last week. It's a crisis of accountability.
The reason why corruption or shamelessness goes so often unpunished, the reason why the undeserving are so often rewarded, is that power in Britain is too often unaccountable. Too often, the bodies scrutinising the Government are themselves appointed by the Government.
We need select committees without a governing-party bias. We need democratic approval of senior appointments and salaries. We need a way of finding independent investigators in whom all can have confidence. We need electoral reform to bring all voters, and not just a few million in marginals, into the political process. We need to make sure that the greedy and the grasping in public life fear the real prospect of retribution, not just criticism.
These are fundamental changes to our over-centralised politics. But as a first step, let us release Mr Yates from his confidentiality obligations, and bring the whole cash-forhonours scandal into the daylight zone.
