There are arguments that are
worth having, and others that
are simply a waste of time.
Trying to prove that the
moon is made of green
cheese falls into the second
category. That is also the
place for a discussion about
whether we need an
unelected House of Lords.
We do not, and its
existence is a source of
national embarrassment.
When was the last time you
met a foreigner who
exclaimed, “I’m so glad to
have met you. I so admire the
House of Lords.”
Stop rummaging in your
memories right now. It has
never happened.
It is well over a century
since Walter Bagehot
observed that “the cure for
admiring the House of Lords
was to go and look at it”.
And yet here we are in the
middle of another row about
it. This time it is because it
has turned out that a
plutocrat named Peter
Cruddas was recommended
for a seat in the Lords by none
other than Boris Johnson.
Cruddas is one of those
shrinking violets whose quiet
and selfless endeavours make
it possible for the rest of us to
believe we live in an
incorruptible democracy. I
have never knowingly met
him. Which is not surprising,
since I do not go around
trailing £50 notes.
Cruddas is the son of a
Smithfield meat porter. Onceupon a time that might have
been enough for the English
class system to doom his
social ambitions. But no
more. An investigation by this
newspaper has disclosed that
a mere three days after being
sworn in, Cruddas gave the
Conservative party a gift of
£500,000. This took his total
donations to the party to over
£3 million.
The investigation, done
jointly with the Open
Democracy organisation,
discovered that in the past
seven years every main party
treasurer has given £3 million
or more and has been offered
a Conservative peerage.
It stinks.
Oddly enough, since they
pride themselves on being
the champions of enterprise,
recently most of the scandals
have attached themselves to
the Conservatives. Since the
Labour Party is bankrolled
by the trade unions, it has
other sorts of problems to
deal with.
It is genuinely baffling that
our prime minister has not
sought to remove the
potential for embarrassment
that arises with the odd
mechanisms by which our
politics is kept afloat.
At his climate change
jamboree last week he had to
spend much of a press
conference in verbal table
tennis about whether British
political life was corrupt
when he might have been
discussing a subject he ispolitics. Some of them will —
not very astutely — deploy
their peerages as an
argument for taking them
seriously.
The truth is that the House
of Lords is like a bad smell
that has been left by history
and, like the stinks left by
ancient plumbing, it will not
be cured by any number of
“reformers” like the late-
lamented Roy Jenkins. He
turned out to be a very
complicated, and not very
effective, air freshener. There
is, though, one sure cure.
The dictionary defines
“democracy” as “a system of
government by the whole
population or all the eligible
members of a state, typically
through elected
representatives”. With all
their talk of Britain being
home to the mother of
parliaments, do not those
who earned their place in the
ancient buildings of
Westminster by election feel
ashamed? Folderol is one
thing. Buying and selling
decisions is something else.
The legitimate part of
parliament should cut the
House of Lords out of the
political process. Let’s see
“Lord” Cruddas and his
cronies waiting in their
ermine robes at the bus stop
with the rest of us.
Jeremy Paxman’s latest book,
Black Gold: The History of
How Coal Made Britain, is
published by William Collins
(£25, harpercollins.co.uk)If Britain is truly a
democracy, the
House of Lords
has no place in it
The Sunday Times revealed
last week that Tory treasurers
who give £3 million are all but
guaranteed peerages. The
whole thing stinks, writes
Jeremy Paxman
clearly seized of. Perhaps he
listened too closely when the
Eton beaks were nattering on
about the need for a “brake”
on government.
Apparently, in Britain this
can only be provided by
unelected nobs and
politically congenial pals.
There is no question that
Britain has some of the
cleanest politics in the world.
And yet. And yet.
In the elected House of
Commons, voters are free to
get rid of MPs like Owen
Paterson and Sir Geoffrey
Cox. But they have no powers
over members of the House
of Lords.
I will not speculate as to
why the Conservative Mr
Cruddas could have wanted
his peerage so badly. But the
only obvious reason is the
one that screams from his
freshly minted visiting card
and letterheads.
It is that he will no
longer be plain Mr Cruddas,
like his parliamentary
namesake, the Labour MP forDagenham and Rainham,
Jon Cruddas.
There was a time when Jon
Cruddas was talked of as a
potential deputy leader of the
Labour Party. The big
difference between the two
Cruddas parliamentarians is
that the MP for Dagenham
and Rainham at least went to
the inconvenience of getting
himself elected. His
namesake vaulted ahead of
him in the antediluvian
British game of “class”.
But surely, you ask, the
rules were changed to make
this sort of malodorous
behaviour impossible? Yet
again, we learn that whatever
rules are made by well-
meaning regulators, there is
always a way through.
There is not a legislature in
the world that is free from the
siren call of money. Only in
Britain does it come with a
guaranteed leg up the social
ladder.
For us to be having this
nervous breakdown about yet
another example of how to
get your snout in the trough is
immensely disappointing.
It’s common ground that
politics needs money to
function, and state funding of
parties is not the answer —
how many people do you
know who pay their taxes to
see them spent on advertising
lies and half-truths?
Over the next few weeks
we shall have — yet again —
various know-alls holding
forth about how to clean upThe Sunday
Times Insight
investigation
exposed the
alleged use of
Lords seats for
fundraisingit
Will
stick?
For Johnson,
it’s a moment
of danger
B
oris Johnson was unusually
contrite when he gathered
his cabinet in the state dining
room at No 10 on Thursday,
after a fortnight in which
sleaze had threatened to
derail his premiership. John-
son, a keen tennis player,
admitted the mess was “an
unforced error” and Down-
ing Street ought not to have launched an
abortive attempt to overturn the anti-
sleaze rules to help the former cabinet
minister Owen Paterson, who lobbied
ministers on behalf of a company which
had paid him £100,000. Johnson has
refused to apologise publicly, but his
words were taken by ministers as a clear
signal that he accepts the blame.
By Friday night one opinion poll, by
Savanta ComRes, gave Labour a six-point
lead, their biggest under Sir Keir
Starmer’s leadership and a number that
will give Tory MPs a fit of the vapours. It
echoes private election modelling by
some Conservative pollsters, which
shows that if there was an election tomor-
row, Johnson’s current working majority
of 77 would shrink to between 15 and 20.About a third (34 per cent) said it “will” or
“might” change their vote at the next
election. But this number was higher for
Tory 2019 voters, at 39 per cent.
In the focus group, Duncan, 43, an
operations manager, raised the issue of
sleaze unprompted, equating it with
“corruption” and was one of those who
said he would switch to Labour. He said:
“Every day there’s something new in the
news with sleaze and backhanded con-
tracts to their mates. The Paterson lobby-
ing isn’t as bad as the PPE contracts, I
think, with [the former health secretary
Matt] Hancock handing contracts to his
mates and companies with no pharma-
ceutical experience. We’re the first to
have a go at Russia. I don’t think we’re
that different.” Scott, 25, a landscape gar-
dener, agreed: “We talk about Putin giv-
ing backhanders to his friends, I think we
do something similar.”
Julia was upset at Johnson’s statement
last week that “we are not a corrupt coun-
try” but she and others said they were not
surprised by what had happened — an
echo of some senior Tories who say it is
“priced in”, that Johnson “is a rogue”.
Julia said: “Why would he say that unlesshe thinks the rest of the world thinks
we’re corrupt?” She said the last fort-
night had “confirmed my view of him”.
Claire, 42, a travel adviser, agreed that
the sleaze claims were “what I would
have expected of him” but was more con-
cerned the prime minister preferred to
turn a blind eye to wrongdoing by minis-
ters: “Boris has been quite soft on people
when they’ve broken rules and should’ve
been sacked.”
Adam, 37, a sales manager, identified a
theme that Labour has sought to exploit:
“It’s one rule for politicians and one rule
for the rest of us: do as I say, not as I do.
They’re completely out of touch from the
normal person on the street.” However,
Adam said he would still vote Tory, add-
ing: “It hasn’t changed anything for me.”
But the focus group and the poll sug-
gest it will not be simple for Starmer to
turn sleaze into a sustained advantage for
Labour. Rose, 52, a sales administrator,
said: “There’s always scandals regardless
which party is in charge.” Claire agreed:
“I think all parties break rules.”
Portland’s polling found that 43 per
cent of voters said “British politics has
always been sleazy and it hasn’t changedmuch” while only about one in four (
per cent) thought it had “got a lot sleazier
over the last few years”. Just 11 per cent —
one in nine voters — thought British poli-
tics was “not corrupt”.
By a margin of more than two to one
(33 per cent to 15 per cent) voters thought
the Conservatives were more dishonest
and badly behaved than Labour. But a
larger number of voters (34 per cent) said
“they are both the same”. Indeed, Port-
land found that the most resonant exam-
ple of sleaze remained that “MPs claim
too much in expenses”, 12 years after the
expenses scandal ended the careers of
dozens of MPs.
A senior government official said:
“The most interesting thing for me is how
spectacularly Starmer has failed to turn it
to his advantage.” The Labour leader is
facing personal questions about talks he
had with the law firm Mishcon de Reya
about working with them even after
Labour had called for a ban on such con-
sultancies.
Certainly, Johnson is helped by the
Labour leader remaining an indistinct
figure to many voters. “I’ve not seen Keir
Starmer,” said Rose, when asked about6
POLITICS
Some MPs fear this is a key turning
point, the seedcorn of Johnson’s down-
fall. Others ask the timeless Borisworld
question: will he get away with it again?
Those hoping the PM remains Teflon-
coated would have been encouraged by a
focus group on Thursday evening, run by
JL Partners, founded by James Johnson,
who was Theresa May’s Downing Street
pollster. He spoke for an hour to eight
swing voters from the northwest of
England who backed the Tories in 2019
but are open to changing their vote.
For an hour Julia, 63, a private hospital
administrator, was one of the most vocal
in expressing disillusionment with John-
son, saying: “I’m in despair with Boris”
and branding him “a buffoon”. But at the
end she was one of six participants to say
she would still vote Conservative in a gen-
eral election. She declared: “The sleaze is
irrelevant really about what’s going on in
the world.”
New polling, conducted on Thursday
and Friday by Portland Communications,
suggests this is a moment of danger for
the government. Nearly two thirds of
people (64 per cent) said they had
noticed stories about sleaze in the news.est ofthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhe worlrlllllllllllllld tddhinks
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per c
ovILLUSTRATION: RUSSEL HERNEMANTim Shipman Chief Political Commentator
Voters are fed up with the PM but the jury’s out on
what the long-term damage from sleaze will be