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You know that nothing has changed and nobody has learned anything when even the metaphors remain the same.
In the “cash for questions” scandal of the mid-Nineties, Mohamed Fayed was famously told that you “rent an MP like you rent a London taxi”. A decade and a half later, Stephen Byers, the former trade and transport secretary, told an undercover reporter for The Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches that he was “a bit like a sort of cab for hire”.
A journey in Byers Radio Cabs, it turned out, would cost Anderson Perry, a fictitious US communications firm, between £3,000 and £5,000 a day. On the menu was the MP for North Tyneside's access to Lord Mandelson, meetings with Tony Blair, and his supposed ability to get advantageous deals done for clients behind the scenes — as he had allegedly done for National Express when it wanted to escape its costly rail franchise on the East Coast main line.
Patricia Hewitt, the former health secretary, and Geoff Hoon, the former defence secretary, also offered access to ministers or Government advisory bodies — in return, of course, for a hefty fee. Mr Hoon was shamelessly candid: he wanted to translate his knowledge and contacts into “something that frankly makes money”.
Gordon Brown must have felt a momentary thrill when he heard who the culprits were. In 2007, as Mr Blair prepared to leave Number 10, Mr Byers was the man drawing up lists of Labour MPs to back a candidate — any candidate — who would stand against Gordon in the leadership contest that never was. In January this year, it was Ms Hewitt and Mr Hoon who led the last, desperate coup against the Prime Minister.
Mr Brown is a man who takes his feuds with Sicilian seriousness, and it is not hard to imagine his moral compass whirring with dour pleasure when he heard that the three plotters had met their comeuppance.
Yet his pleasure will have been short-lived. With the exception of the pathetic figure of Sir John Butterfill, the retiring Conservative MP for Bournemouth West — who said he would be very useful to the fictitious Anderson Perry if he were elevated to the Lords — the Tories approached in the investigation did not take the bait. Indeed, Julie Kirkbride, the outgoing MP for Bromsgrove, had the presence of mind to alert her party's whips to the approach and the potential sting. So, in the first instance, this is a party-political story, and one that will do Labour no electoral favours whatsoever.
It is also a parable of the broader collapse and fragmentation of a once-indomitable fighting force. The New Labour coalition of the mid-Nineties was marshalled as a huge resistance movement against John Major's government. The word “sleaze” was toxic to Major, not because his administration was riddled with corruption, but because, deployed in headlines, it so perfectly captured the much wider perception that the Conservatives were greedy, jaded, selfish and obsolete. In 1995, Tony Blair declared that “sleaze has become the hallmark of the dying days of this administration”. It was the ash from which grew the New Labour red rose.
The flipside of this was a determination — at least at first — that the Blair regime should not submit to the same ethical decay, that the public would see that something had truly changed in public life.
On Wednesday, 7 May 1997, the new PM called a meeting of the newly elected Parliamentary Labour Party at Church House in Westminster. There were 419 MPs in the chamber, the largest gathering by far of Labour members in history, and Blair told them: “You are not here to enjoy the trappings of power but to do a job and to uphold the highest standards in public life. You are all ambassadors for New Labour and ambassadors for the Government.” When he resigned for the first time in December 1998, Peter Mandelson invoked the same founding commitment: namely, that “we are not like the last lot”.
Unfortunately, they were like the last lot — and worse. The latest “cash-for-access” scandal has a distinctly retro feel to it, recalling as it does the so-called “lobbygate” scandal of 1998 in which Derek Draper, a former aide to Mandelson, said “there are 17 people who count in this government … [to] say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century”.
Policy was for sale, as the Bernie Ecclestone affair showed. So too, allegedly, were peerages for those willing to prop up Labour financially with loans for the 2005 election campaign. Last year, furthermore, it was revealed that four Labour peers had offered to assist with amendments to legislation, in return for substantial payment. The list goes on.
The expenses scandal, it is true, was a cross-party affair. But Mr Cameron's response left the Prime Minister looking sluggish and literalist in his dithering insistence that what mattered was the letter of the rules rather than the public's nausea. If the Tory leader wins on 6 May, the robust and unambiguous fashion in which he responded to that particular crisis should be recalled as the moment when he proved himself worthy to be Prime Minister.
How can it be that New Labour has fallen prey to precisely the sins that it so deplored in the last Tory government? It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing, and perhaps that it is true of all oligarchies. Ever more insulated from reality, its perspectives disfigured by power, its material expectations raised accordingly, each generation of oligarchs comes to believe in its intrinsic moral superiority and fails to see that it is doing precisely what it once condemned in its opponents.
The New Labour era is almost done. The cycle is all but complete. Mr Cameron is the likely beneficiary. The question for him is what, if anything, he can do to stop it all happening again.
Reader views (5)
The one thing each of the BigBad3 (that's parties not individual MPs) achieves is they don't realise just how much they're looking in the mirror when they sit in the House. I'd love it if they stopped playing party politics on important issues. It's high time to introduce an independent Politicians Complaints Commission, modeled on the Independent Police Complaints Commission, with its Board appointed by a panel of designated charitable or professional bodies. Politicians clearly can't be left to their own devices any longer.
- Tigas, London, 25/03/2010 00:08
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At least Labour withdrew the whip from this gang of 3 moments after the programme was broadcast.
So why has David "dithering" Cameron not done the same with the one who would be a Lord?
- Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex, 23/03/2010 11:42
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Hewitt is arrogance personified and all four are the scum of the earth.
- R.F.York, Yorks, UK, 22/03/2010 16:58
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The surest sign that a government has been in for too long. They can't help themselves.
- Alex C, London, 22/03/2010 13:34
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Once more the excuse that the rules can be interpreted as allowing for bad behaviour is trotted out.
- Ghengis Junior, Fishguard Wales, 22/03/2010 12:30
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