The Times - UK (2021-11-11)

Culture warriors are

driven by insecurity

James Marriott

Page 30

“And how do we stop it?”. The

second slippery argument is to

remind everyone that compared with

other countries we are very

uncorrupt and that banging on about

it just diminishes trust between

leaders and the people. And there is

some small truth in this. But overall

it reminds me of that old joke about

the man standing guard looking out

for elephants. “But there aren’t any

elephants here,” says a bystander.

“Exactly!” says the man. Now, you

can read this either way, but given

the ease with which money and

power suborns the less fastidious, I

see it as meaning that we are still

relatively uncorrupt precisely

because we make a big fuss about

things like the Paterson affair. But

that if we don’t raise a storm about it,

the kind of powerful people whose

mantra is “whatever I can get away

with must be OK” will, gradually,

smilingly, masklessly dance us down

the primrose road to hell.

Let’s make tougher rules. Once

made, let’s enforce them officiously.

Let’s make it as hard as possible for

our leaders to be unaware of them

and let’s punish or restrict those

public officials who put their

personal gain above their duty to the

country. On this, let puritanical

values govern.

Britain is only clean if it clings to the rules

We like to think we live in one of the least corrupt countries in the world but the price of that is puritanical vigilance
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA

Cameron had already earned

millions and from whom he stood to

earn millions more. He, too,

deployed the Paterson defence. This

was not about his earnings but about

the good of the country. Of course.

At such times two forms of

offsetting argument appear to play

the role of corruption’s unwitting

henchpeople. The first of them takes

the form of the query: “Yes, but is it

cutting through to the voters?”

I think this is, in itself, a corrupt

question if asked too early. I’ll

explain. A leader can be wonderfully

popular and highly corrupt; in fact

the first may help you with the

second. Consider the career of Huey

Long, the interwar populist governor

of Louisiana, for example.

No, the first and main question

about an accusation of corruption

must be: “Is it true?” Followed by:

Sir Geoffrey Cox earns ten times more

as a lawyer than he does as an MP

columnist, which seem not just to be

compatible with being an elected

official but possibly even beneficial.

But in the case of Cox, his second job

is actually that of being an MP. How

could it be otherwise, given that he

earns over ten times as much

employed as a lawyer?

As I understand his defence – a

kind of golden V-sign — it is not that

his work helped the governance of

Britain but that his constituents don’t

seem to mind. The electors of West

Devon have sent him back to

Westminster at election after

election with an enhanced majority

and that is all the validation he

needs. If they had wanted a full-time

MP, they could have voted for one.

This seems hard to answer. But it

reminds us why we have rules. If, for

example, there were a rule that MPs

must spend three quarters of their

working time on actually being MPs,

the decision of West Devonians to

prefer a Tory to a Liberal Democrat

wouldn’t necessarily result in a

member who spent much of his time

in the Caribbean.

Cox, of course, is a knight. Johnson

made him one. If he had been a

former editor of The Daily Telegraph,

the hospitable owner of a desirable

palace or a multimillionaire donor to

the Conservative Party, he could

have been a lord, swelling even

further the bloated benches of one of

the world’s largest legislatures. In

plain view, reader. Mates, cronies,

wedge-wielders have been put there

to rule over us, when better qualified

people are easily available.

All somehow within the rules. As

were the actions of the former prime

minister David Cameron in the

matter of Greensill Capital. Texts

sent to the chancellor and answered

(you try it); phone calls made to

ministers, civil servants badgered in

the service of a company from whom

S

omething that had previously
just been bent was broken
last week and the prime
minister broke it. I don’t
claim the Sibyl’s gift for
prophecy but I never would have
predicted such brazenness.
It would have been one thing for
Conservative backbenchers to vote for
Andrea Leadsom’s attempt to have
the standards committee’s verdict on
Owen Paterson overturned. For the
prime minister, on what appears to
have been a whim, personally to
decide last Wednesday to whip his
Commons majority in favour of
setting aside Paterson’s suspension
for breaking very clear
parliamentary rules was an act
belonging to a different dimension.
In its wake ministers and Tory
MPs were sent out to studios across
the country to explain why, far from
being an egregious breaker of the
rules, Paterson was a saintly figure
who had been terribly mistreated.
Consequently on Thursday morning
the business secretary Kwasi
Kwarteng was to be found
apparently suggesting that of all the
actors in this drama it was the
independent standards
commissioner, Kathryn Stone, who
should be thinking about resigning.
Hours later Jacob Rees-Mogg. the
leader of the House, stood up,
performed a graceless U-turn and
falsely admitted to the minor (and
therefore eminently forgivable) sin
of “conflation”. Never mind taking
one for the team: as ever, members

of the team took several for the

prime minister.

We’ve learnt recently, not least

from Donald Trump, that many rules

are only rules until someone

powerful and with popular support

says they aren’t. And we owe the

standards U-turn not to any virtue

on the part of the Johnson

government, because we know that if

they could have got away with it,

they would.

People I trust who have met or

worked with Paterson liked him as a

colleague and felt for him as a

human being. Also, his sense of being

wronged by the standards process

was palpable. Yet I don’t think what

he actually did was any more morally

acceptable than a cop ignoring a

traffic violation for a tenner.

People are wonderfully adept at

convincing themselves that what is

in their own material interests just

happens to coincide with the welfare

of the world. Rules exist to save them

and us from such delusions. By

seeking to set aside the application of

such rules, the government, in effect,

voted to tolerate corruption.

Naturally, as is the way at

moments such as these, once a

narrative begins, dozens of other

stories are discovered and shaped

to fit it. Given that the problem is

paid lobbying — influence peddling

— I am not sure the case of Sir

Geoffrey Cox entirely belongs here.

Though perhaps his response to the

criticism does.

I have no problem per se with

“second jobs”. There are plenty of

second jobs, from GP to, say,

The government, in

effect, voted to

tolerate corruption

We are relatively

uncorrupt because we

make a big fuss

Comment

David

Aaronovitch

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the times | Thursday November 11 2021 29