The scandal that will force Stephen Byers and Gordon Brown out of office
BRUCE ANDERSON Imust begin with an apology. Last week, I claimed that the government was tainted by lies and corruption. By protecting colleagues whom he should summarily have dismissed. I wrote, the Prime Minister had become their accomplice. It is now clear that I was guilty of gross understatement.
The wretched Vaz still clings to office, a pathetic, discredited husk of a minister, because Tony Blair has decided that supporting Mr Vaz will win him Asian votes. This is an interesting assessment of the British Asians' attitude to public life. Mr Blair clearly assumes that Asians have lower standards than the rest of us, and would be incapable of accepting that a fellow Asian could be guilty of wrongdoing. In ethical terms, Mr Blair regards Asians as secondclass citizens, to be segregated in a form of moral apartheid, with Keith Vaz as their leader. It will be interesting to see how the various Asian communities will respond, and how many of them will realise that they are being treated with contempt.
Last weekend, Jack Straw tried to assist the PM in deceiving the Asians, by accusing Mr Vaz's critics of racism. Recently, Mr Straw claimed that Peter Mandelson had problems with the truth. So does he.
But Mr Vaz's misdemeanours are trivial in comparison with the Geoffrey Robinson affair, which will eventually force both Stephen Byers and Gordon Brown out of office. The Daily Mail, which is serialising Tom Bower's book on Mr Robinson, has referred to 'sensational new evidence of sleaze, dishonesty and cover-up at the very heart of the Labour government'. For once, this is not newspaper hyperbole. It is the literal truth, from an impeccable source.
Tom Bower is a brave man. He has written biographies of Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohamed Fayed and Richard Branson. None of them was an easy target. Mr Bower could not have stayed in business as an investigative biographer but for his command of detail and commitment to truth.
Nor is this a partisan truth. The Mail may be serialising Mr Bower's book, but he is not a man of the Right. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell have been to dinner at his house, and he voted for Tony Blair in 1997, largely on moral grounds. Though no prig, Tom Bower is a moralist. He has written as he did for one reason. He was outraged by what he discovered. In the course of many years of dubious business activities, Geoffrey Robinson received a cheque for £200,000 from Robert Maxwell. He subsequently denied either receiving such a payment or soliciting one, but the invoice exists, marked paid, and the information is revealed in a Department of Trade (DTI) report.
When he was initially asked questions about Mr Robinson, Stephen Byers promised to be 'as open as possible on these matters'. This openness consisted of a Parliamentary answer just before Christmas announcing that his department did 'not propose to take any further action'. Mr Byers said that there could be no question of publishing the internal inquiry, because it had been conducted under Section 447 of the Companies Act, which protects the commercial confidentiality of firms under investigation. But the company in question — Hollis — had been bankrupt for eight years. Moreover, the Secretary of State is entitled to see the report of an inquiry under Section 447, and had the discretion to pass on any relevant information to Parliament. There was only one reason why Mr Byers refused to exercise that discretion. It was in the Labour party's interest not to do so. Mr Byers is now threatening legal action against the Daily Mail for claiming that he 'buried' the report: gagging writs were a crucial weapon in Robert Maxwell's arsenal of dishonesty. But Mr Byers did bury the report. As a result, Mr Robinson claimed that he had been exonerated. That was untrue, and Stephen Byers should have known it to be untrue. Yet — a sin of omission or commission — he aided and abetted Mr Robinson in lying to Parliament: a clear breach of his fiduciary duty. Stephen Byers is unfit to hold office.
So is Gordon Brown. For years, Geoffrey Robinson had funded Mr Brown's office, his entertainment and his holidays. On one occasion, Mr Brown invited Mr Robinson to come on holiday to Cape Cod, so that Mr Robinson would pay the bill (he also provided the Blairs with free holidays). Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Brown, was only able to launch her PR firm because of a £100,000 advance from Geoffrey Robinson.
Suddenly, it was payback time. Now a Treasury minister, Geoffrey Robinson was in trouble because he had concealed the existence of an off-shore trust: his own personal tax haven. Mr Robinson tried to put pressure on Sir Terry (now Lord) Burns, who was then the Treasury's Permanent Secretary, into agreeing that he had been told. But he had not been told. Mr Robinson had merely informed him of the existence of family trusts, not of off-shore trusts. So Sir Terry refused to rescue Geoffrey Robinson. Enter the Chancellor, who had personally typed out a press release for Sir Terry to sign, endorsing the Robinson version of events. Terry Burns refused to put his name to it. As a result, his relations with the Chancellor, which had never been easy, became refrigerated. Within a few months, Terry Burns took early retirement.
There may be a precedent for a senior official being traduced and abused for refusing to rescue a minister from the consequences of concealing the truth. It is the sort of thing that might have happened, under Sir Robert Walpole — but not since then, at least until now.
The Robinson trust affair occurred shortly after Mr Brown had lied about Bernie Ecclestone's donation. As Andrew Rawnsley put it, 'the Chancellor did know the truth and he had not told it'. According to Mr Rawnsley, Mr Brown knew that he was in peril. 'I lied. I lied.' he told his staff. 'My credibility will be in shreds. I lied. If this gets out, I'll be destroyed.' So he should have been, but he escaped. Tom Bower has recaptured him.
Last Sunday, in an interview of astounding pseudo-intellectualism. Mr Blair claimed that he had undergone a philosophical conversion. He had been a utilitarian, he said (funny that: I thought that he was supposed to be a disciple of John Macmurray. who was flatly opposed to utilitarianism). He now believed in natural law, and the problems of human nature.
Anyone who believes in natural law reveals a profound ignorance of nature, but there is no need to take Mr Blair's witless prattlings seriously. He merely wants to dress up his banalities in philosophical clothing. Should he really wish to ponder the problems of human nature, however, he need only look around his Cabinet table.
As for utilitarianism, he still believes in it. He still bases his entire approach to politics on the greatest number of votes from the greatest number of voters. But Tom Bower has now provided every voter who believes in the decencies of public life with compelling reasons to withhold those votes from Tony Blair.
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