Politicians and corruption
PERSONAL COLUMN J. H. PLUMB
William Ewart Gladstone, the Victorian states- man, was occasionally forced to reply to a personal letter when he was sitting at his desk in the British Treasury. When he returned home, he went straight to his library and tore up a penny stamp. So undeviating was his rectitude that any other course would have been impossible: enemies as well as friends expected no less from him. When he was Prime Minister, he would take up his stick and hat, leave Downing Street for the raffish side-streets of the Strand, alive with old whores, child prostitutes, pimps and ponces. In these alleys flesh of every variety and age was for sale: the surroundings were as filthy as they were insanitary: violence was commonplace, black- mail rampant Gladstone would politely raise his hat to a woman of the streets, argue with all his immense powers of persuasion and turn on his uncheckable moral fervour in order to persuade the whore to return home with him —not for dalliance, but for tea, cakes, refor- mation and rebirth. And although the more robust Members of Parliament might roar with laughter at his antics and weave about him comic and derogatory stories, his virtue re- mained as unsullied as it was adamantine.
Corruption of the flesh or of the pocket had no place in Gladstone's universe. In the late- Victorian world, adultery once public ended political careers, as it did Parnell's, and pecula- tion was regarded as immoral as the sins of the flesh. And since Gladstone's day, the British have taken a self-righteous pride in the purity of their political life. Even the suspicion of a hint about new taxation ruined J. H. Thomas and a romp with Christine Keeler put paid to Profumo's career. Divorce is just toler- ated, but it had better not be sordid; better still for the politician to be the injured party. At least one famous British statesman's repu- tation was saved by a friend literally filling the breach and claiming the ignominy.
The odour of self-righteousness pours from the Palace of Westminster as thick as a London fog; hence the blank incomprehension that Adam Clayton Powell could remain a Congress- man year after year, hence the hands raised in pious horror when it was learned that Nkru- mah had salted away over £2 million for his personal fortune. The old colonial bands are full of a gloomy sense of prophecy fulfilled. Graft, the ratsbane of politics, ruins countries, saps the people's virtue, renders institutions corrupt and denies a nation greatness. So we are told, but does it?
After two centuries of almost unprecedented rapacity and log-rolling, American politicians, it seems, are beginning to change their tune. They might note that British political purity emerged when Britain had reached the zenith of her powers and was poised for decline. In her days of growth from the age of Elizabeth to midway through the age of Victoria, her politics were as corrupt as any the world has seen—a bonanza with truly noble pickings. Take Elizabeth I's famous minister, William Cecil, and his son, Robert. They shovelled public gold into their private cellars: battened on the Court of Wards and dug deep into the royal purse. Their great houses—Burleigh and Hatfield—were built on the loot of office and the ease and comfort of generations of Salis- burys depended on the acumen and rapacity of their log-rolling ancestors. Girls on the pay- roll? This is old hat. Sir Robert Walpole had his mistresses paid by the Board of Customs and Excise to the tune of some £30,000 a year, and he thought nothing of using official Ad- miralty barges to smuggle in his liquor when he was Secretary of the Navy. And as for graft, Joseph Merceron, who ran East London in the early 19th century, could have taught Boss Tweed many a trick. Of course, these were blatant days, when perquisites of office were not overlaid with hypocrisy, though even Walpole was careful to get his mistress's pension under an assumed name.
Yet it should be remembered that William Cecil was an exceptionally fine statesman and politician. He was wise, perceptive and laboured unceasingly at his job, as earnestly and as successfully as any Gladstone. He proved well worth his plunder. And so was Walpole. True, his pickings were gigantic— probably in modern money around £10 million (think of that, Mr Powell)—but he gave England twenty years of peace, secured her political stability for generations and launched her well and truly on the road to riches and greatness. So, perhaps, he was cheap at the price.
Of course, not all corrupt politicians are worth their salt. England would have been no loser if the Duke of Chandos had never been born, yet he was as greedy as his friend Wal- pole, if not more so. The fortunes of most of the peerage of England- have their origins in political graft, but not many of their ances- tors are memorable for their political distinc- tion. And certainly the story of American politics is no less muddy. So when denouncing Nkrumah and Ghana for political corruption, for graft and log-rolling, it is well to remember our own history.
Young, raw, emergent, politically inept coun- tries are particularly prone to corruption. Some countries, it is true, avoid it. No one can suppose that Stalin had a Swiss bank account or that Mao has salted away a fortune. Their corruptions might be regarded as of a different order—and to my view far worse. And nothing is more irritating in Professor Bretton's The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah (published in New York by Frederick A. Praeger and due shortly in London from the Pall Mall Press) than his constant reiteration of Nkrumah's personal greed, self-indulgence and mild plunder of his state. It is repeated on page after page, yet Nkrumah's political achievements—Volta Dam, the new port of Tema, the beginnings of in- dustry, the astonishing developments in educa- tion—are mentioned but briefly. And srvers at Nkrumah's pan-African idealism seem some- what out of place in the present situation where army coup follows army coup and Africa appears to be well on the way to South American style political systems. Indeed, from the pages of this book rises the unpleasing stench of national self-righteousness: no matter how gross or self-indulgent Nkrumah's methods may have been, his intentions and his sne-
ceases cannot be regarded as negligible. I suspect that he will prove to have been well worth his graft, if not his tyranny.
And, of course, there is graft and graft, and fashions change. Boss Tweed, like Walpole, could be flamboyant; the age permitted it. Today, as Adam Clayton Powell knows to his cost, graft must be grave, discreet, faceless. Mr Powell's mistake was to revel too openly in his luck : new power, like new riches, is very intoxicating and very indiscreet.
I am all for checks on politicians, so long as they are for all politicians. I am for the most severe and restrictive rules on all forms of graft and log-rolling. But when viewed in the long perspectives of history, these are the least serious of a politician's crimes. Most of them are corrupt at a far deeper, a far more tragic level. Think of their complacency in the face of scattered limbs of women and children blown sky-high, think of their indifference to hunger, to the thin-ribbed children and the lifeless eyes of worn-out women, think of their caution, their fears for their own comfort and way of life, the crimes they have committed and still commit in the name of liberty. When do they speak up for humanity, for the future and damn the consequences to their own careers and pay-rolls? How often do their words burn a message into the heart of mankind?
Complacency, pride and dead imagination, these are the corruptions of politics. Most of them are moral prostitutes, randy for power, and theirs, perhaps, is the world's oldest profes- sion. Humanity has paid over and over again in blood and suffering for its politicians. And before we condemn Nkrumah or Powell, let us remember that, frail as they proved to be in the exercise of power, one had vision, the other gave hope, the one to a nation, the other to a race.
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