Dishonesty begins not with the poor but with the powerful
Are people less honest than they used to be? Most would say, bitterly, yes. But it depends on what happens to you. I once carelessly dropped a £10 note in Uxbridge High Street. An urchin ran after me and triumphantly handed it to me. He seemed delighted to do me a service and adamantly refused the coin I offered him as a reward. On the other hand, the celebrated malapropist judge, William Arabin (1773–1841), is often quoted as saying of the citizens of Uxbridge, ‘They will steal the very teeth out of your mouth as you walk through the streets. I know it from experience.’ What is annoying about being robbed is not so much the loss as the evidence of your own folly. Travelling the other week in Belgium, I did something unusual for me: put the case containing my credit cards in my back trouser pocket. At Brussels station, as I was about to clamber aboard the train with a heavy bag, an obliging local (as I thought) helped me on. When I turned round to thank him, he was beetling down the platform with my card case. Then the automatic doors shut and the train and I moved on. Infuriating, thus to fall for such a trick! As it happened, it did not profit the felonious Walloon. Within 30 minutes, thanks to some rapid work on the mobile phone to Barclays Bank, the credit cards had been cancelled and the humbugging rotter was left with bits of worthless plastic. On the other hand, trains can provide evidence not just of honesty but of thoughtful efficiency. Last week my wife, buying a ticket to London at Taunton station, left her Filofax on the booking office counter. The clever girl in the booking office found it, did some quick detective work, and got the Filofax to the train before it left. My wife, as yet unaware of her loss — mislaying her Filofax frequently punctuates and and devastates our lives — was astonished to hear, as the train pulled out of the station: ‘Will Mrs Johnson please make herself known to the conductor, who has got her lost Filofax?’ That is the kind of incident which cheers one up a bit.
Before the second world war, when I was a boy in the Staffordshire Potteries, I never heard of anything being stolen. There was great poverty but there were also the Ten Commandments, and God was around a lot in those days. Indeed, if you lost some thing in the streets, the person who picked it up would go to a lot of trouble to find out where you lived and return it to you. The really poor were more set against stealing than the rich. I have just been reading a delightful new book by Juliet Nicolson called The Perfect Summer, about the year 1911, and it describes, among other things, the coronation of George V and Queen Mary. The cleaners who swept Westminster Abbey after the ceremony found and handed in three ropes of pearls, 20 brooches, half a dozen bracelets, 20 golden balls which had fallen off the coronets of the nobility, and three quarters of a diamond necklace. The total value of these baubles, safely returned to their owners, was £20,000 (at pre-1914 prices!). Hard to decide which was more extraordinary, the profligate carelessness of the aristocratic ladies, or the touching honesty of the poor old charwomen.
Broadly speaking, the poor tend to be more honest than the rich. This is a lesson history teaches again and again. One reason private morality does not improve is because people are set such a bad example by governments. Take just one example: the sale of peerages and knighthoods. How can our rulers expect taxpayers to behave honourably when filling in their returns if they pollute the whole system of honours by selling them for hard cash or, nowadays, non-commercial loans? And on this point there has been surprisingly little change over the centuries. James I, short of money, began selling peerages in about 1615. He charged roughly £10,000 each, and as he created 60 peers, most of whom he charged, he must have gathered in about half a million quid — an enormous sum in the early 17th century. Some people were forced to buy peerages. One of the articles of impeachment against James’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, is that he terrified a West Country gentleman into paying £10,000 in return for a barony. James invented the new order of hereditary knight, or baronet, in order to be able to charge for them.
The poisoning of the fountain of honour has taken various forms, but in many ways the 20th century has seen more government corruption in this field than any earlier age. And the rottenness has always centred on No. 10 Downing Street. The popular version is that Lloyd George debauched the system during his postwar coalition government of 1918–22. But I think the modern practices began under Lord Salisbury, and were certainly going strong under the Asquith premiership. The recently published Duff Cooper Diaries have an entry showing that the father of the conductor Thomas Beecham, who was a pill manufacturer, paid £10,000 for his baronetcy. The largest chunk of this cash went to Lady Cunard, who was then having an affair with young Beecham. The rest went to the Horner family, Edward Horner being a close friend of Raymond Asquith, the prime minister’s son, who obviously arranged the honour through his dad. This was a case of personal corruption: no nonsense about the money going to party funds.
In Lloyd George’s case, what the other politicians resented was that LG had his own party fund, and the honours money went directly into it, the prime minister treating it as his personal bank account. Nowadays, the three main parties have a top-secret carve-up, treating the proceeds as the legitimate spoils of party politics. There is nobody in the Commons to start impeachment proceedings against the three party leaders, which is the obvious way to tackle the problem. So it is all left to the overworked police, who are most unlikely to get to the bottom of it, though one or two minor scapegoats may be found. When I hear people condemn the morality of teenagers, for example, I am tempted to say: why not point the finger at the place where the rottenness starts — Westminster?
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