He’s incompetent. So sack him
It must come as something of a relief to Peter Mandelson that when Labour sources now refer to ‘the Peter Problem’ they mean Peter Hain, the beleaguered Work and Pensions Secretary. Mr Mandelson’s conduct came to be seen by many as an emblem of all that was wrong with the Blair era. The Hain saga, in contrast, symbolises what is wrong with the Brown era (assuming it lasts long enough to be called an ‘era’).
Mr Hain’s failure to register £103,000 of donations to his disastrous deputy leadership campaign last year chimes with the impression of shambolic mismanagement that now clings to this government, from its handling of the Northern Rock debacle to the loss of 25 million benefit claimant records. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself spoke of Mr Hain’s ‘incompetence’ in an interview with ITN on Tuesday.
The Pensions Secretary’s nonchalance about the registration of these sums — compounded by his arrogant and evasive manner in the past two weeks — captures a much deeper problem afflicting Labour, after a decade in power: its disconnection from public feeling and its indifference to the very rules it created to enhance trust in public life. There was a time when Mr Hain, a man of the Left, was respected by his fellow ministers for the sharpness of his political antennae: in particular, he had a powerful sensitivity to feeling within the Labour heartlands. Now, Mr Hain’s antennae seem to have been torn from his permatanned brow.
This week, Labour strategists have deployed two principal lines of defence. First, they have claimed that Mr Hain’s failure to disclose the donations to the Electoral Commission within the legal time limit is an abstruse story whose details transfix the Westminster village but are of no interest to the electorate. This may be true of the minutiae: few voters will be much exercised by the nature of the ‘Progressive Policies Forum’, the phantom think-tank through which much of the money was funnelled. But it is hugely patronising to assume that the public takes no interest in the conduct of senior ministers and lacks a view on the dignity (or lack of it) with which Cabinet ministers go about their business. The fact that Mr Hain is now subject to inquiries by the Electoral Commission and John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and may yet be cross-examined by the police, will have made its mark upon public opinion.
Second, ministers and their spin doctors claim moral equivalence between Mr Hain’s predicament and George Osborne’s failure to register £500,000 in the Register of Members’ Interests. In fact, the two cases are utterly different. The shadow chancellor declared the funds to the Electoral Commission and his party sought advice on whether an additional declaration should be made in the Members’ Register. The guidance from the Parliamentary Commissioner’s office in December was that no such additional declaration was necessary. That advice may turn out to have been wrong. But — if so — that was scarcely Mr Osborne’s fault. He was neither secretive (the money was declared to the Electoral Commission), nor lax (the Conservatives did make inquiries to see if further declarations were required). The contrast with Mr Hain’s conduct could hardly be more pointed.
Labour’s strategy is not hard to decode. In addition to the narrow political objective of creating a smokescreen to protect Mr Hain, the goal is to strengthen the case for state funding of political parties. Look, the spin doctors say, the whole system is malfunctioning and distracting public attention from the substantive issues of policy and government: it is time (the argument goes) for the taxpayer to finance political parties.
There are many objections to state funding, but the most compelling is ethical. Why should the public subsidise the ambitions of politicians, simply because those politicians are incapable of sticking to the rules that they themselves framed? We do not, after all, seek to dissuade burglars by handing them state-funded HD-ready televisions and DVD players.
The real lessons of this episode concern the government, and its dilapidation. It is remarkable that Labour, having parked itself on the moral high ground over Tory ‘sleaze’ during the 1990s, should now be behaving with such shocking arrogance about the laws it crafted itself.
The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has been on the statute books since 2000, and ought to be on the desk of every politician in the land. Its rules are clear and easy to follow. Yet, as Sir Christopher Kelly, the new chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said last week, ‘even now not everyone appears to have understood the importance of being absolutely transparent about political donations’.
It is no less extraordinary that in 2007, even as the cash-for-honours row continued to rock the government, Mr Hain was not punctilious about disclosure as money flowed into his campaign. Yet he seems to have been afflicted by a pathology that grips many governments that stay in power too long: a detachment from political reality, an introspection matched by a recoil from true accountability.
Mr Hain’s contrition looks feigned. He exudes irritation and impatience, as if the various investigations are a campaign of persecution rather than a legitimate (and necessary) inquiry into an apparently flagrant breach of the law by a senior minister.
In Monday’s Sun, the Prime Minister declared that ‘the matter must rest with the authorities’ — an odd and indecisive thing for the man in charge to say. On Tuesday he told ITN that Mr Hain was guilty of ‘incompetence’, but that he hoped the Commons Standards Committee and the Electoral Commission ‘will be able to accept his apology.’ Yet if the PM regards Mr Hain as incompetent, how can he possibly justify his continued management of the £130 billion spent per annum by the Department of Work and Pensions? Mr Brown’s New Year message was that 2008 would be a year of hard decisions. He should start by taking an easy one, and sack Mr Hain.
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