Political commentary
The loss of indignation
Ferdinand Mount
It was not a loud heckle. It was not even particularly derisive. Nor can I now remember exactly what it was in last Thursday's debate that prompted this unidentified Tory MP to call out in a casual, clubby sort of way: `Gannex!' What struck me rather was how little anybody seemed to care. One or two Conservatives chuckled; so did one or two Labour MPs. It is forbidden for a member to reflect upon the honour of a member of Another Place. Yet not a sword leapt from its scabbard to defend the honour of Lord Kagan or Sir Harold Wilson or to issue a well-merited testimonial to that faintly dimpled, tartanlined impermeable which in its heyday kept the rain off the Prime Minister, the Duke of Edinburgh and me.
The misfortunes of Sir Harold's friends present the most remarkable coneatenation of circumstances. Arrest, bankruptcy, suicide and untimely death seem to follow cruelly fast upon the honours with which he showered them, as though fate were trying to pack the whole play within a single act. Lord Brayley, Sir Eric Miller and Lord Plurenden have come to grief, and now Lord Kagan too is beset by troubles.
It is not part of my purpose to suggest that all or any of these men were or are guilty of any offence against the law. To do so in Lord Kagan's case would not only be libellous; it would be contempt of court. But there must come some point at which we have openly to discuss in print what has long been debated in pubs and clubs and in front of the telly: namely, that never in living memory have so many Parliamentarians been mixed up with the law.
One ex-Minister is in jail. The exleader of the Liberal Party is committed for trial on a charge of conspiracy to murder. A former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer had separate but equally controversial dealings with a British architect and an American businessman both of whom have served prison sentences; he also, like many other Parliamentarians, entered into various controversial arrangements with Sir Eric Miller who later shot himself after his business empire collapsed in what again can only be described as controversial circumstances. A former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party received reimbursement of business expenses from the leader of Newcastle City Council who, like the North East Regional Chairman of the Labour Party, was sent to prison along with a great number of officials all over the Midlands and the North-East as a result of their association with the aforementioned architect.
Compare with this the offences of those MPs who left Parliament under a cloud between the wars after the memorable case of Horatio Bottomley in 1922. The Labour MP for Pontypridd resigned his seat in 1931 after being censured for abusing his travel voucher. Poor Jimmy Thomas was made to quit in 1936 for spilling a Budget secret. In his letter to Baldwin, he wrote am glad the old King's dead.' Retribution in those days was swift and merciless. Baldwin felt desperately sorry for Jimmy Thomas, but his regret did not soften the sentence.
Things are ordered differently nowadays. The Labour Party's only noticeable internal reaction to Poulson's corruption of virtually the whole of the Party in the North-East was to get rid of their long-serving MP for Blyth, Eddie Milne, who had stood alone against the waste of public money for private profit.
The record of the Tory Party as a corporate body is scarcely more creditable either. The Select Committee on the conduct of members found in a temperately phrased report that Mr. Maudling's statement of resignation as Home Secretary was 'lacking in frankness' and that his conduct was 'inconsistent with the standards which the House is entitled to expect from its members' — the latter criticism also being applied to Mr. Albert Roberts, Labour MP for Normanton. Tory MPs voted en bloc not to agree to the Select Committee's report in the case of Mr. Maudling, although many of them then voted otherwise in the case of Mr. Roberts — not exactly a glorious assertion of Parliamentary standards.
There is no dodging the conclusion that the modern House of Commons is not as jealous of its reputation as it once was. The moral tension has suddenly slackened in the past five years. And Parliament's tolerance of sloppy, indiscreet or reckless conduct by individual members is only a reflection of its tolerance of similar conduct by governments. Democratic assemblies need, in Mr. Gladstone's phrase, to 'feed the flame of righteous indignation' — instead of quenching it with bucketfuls of cheap compassion. It is an odd thing to have to complain of, but what this Parliament lacks is rich prigs, men like Gladstone himself who had both the independence of means and the moral certainty to condemn uncompromisingly the slightest deviation from the highest standards.
For the past five years the House of Commons has had the power to control governments on a scale not seen since the mid-nineteenth century — without apparently possessing any of the Victorians' understanding of the moral restraints implicit in the unwritten rules of the constitution. When on 18 June 1866 the Opposition defeated Lord Russell's government by 11 votes on a motion to take the rateable value instead of the rent of a house as the basis of the franchise, the House was in an uproar when the result was declared and Gladstone himself wrote: 'There was shouting, violent flourishing of hats, and other manifestations, which I think novel and inappropriate.' Russell didn't want to resign. The Cabinet had decided two days earlier that the result need not be treated as vital. Yet Gladstone and others persuaded the Prime Minister that to re-try the clause or to seek a general vote of confidence would look like clinging to power — and the government did resign. The point is not so much the outcome as the argument. There was a shared language of restraint. Yet when Mr. Callaghan's government was defeated on 13 December 1978 on what he himself had described as the celltrepiece of his economic policy, only a scattering of Tory MPs bellowed and waved their Order Papers, because they knew there was no question of the government resigning. Can you seriously imagine any Minister in the presertt Cabinet telling the Prime Minister that It was his moral duty to go to the country? More striking still, no OpPositi° spokesman seriously argued that it was the government's duty to dissolve. What was really wrong with Mrs. Thatcher's speech was not that she gabbled it as she sometimes does (a speech which flops hi the House often reads better in the morn: ing papers than a Commons success) but rather that it contained no hint of moral indignation at the government's deter; mination to cling to power after ye' another defeat on a supposedly crueia policy. The Tories seem to have given LIP expecting the government to behave properly, or insisting that it should. Politics now, particularly in the Labour Party, is a profession in exactly the sense , that football is a profession; it is accepted that serious competitors must be Pr pared to commit — and accordinglY tol erate — professional fouls. More and more members of Parliament are entirely dePea.; dent upon political life not only for till income and social prominence but also /o( their amour-propre; and they take it f°r li, granted that their opponents are similari.: dependent. To rob a man of office, let alon' of his membership of the House of Commons, is no longer like getting him out aa cricket; it is more like castrating him. result, a kind of sleazy complaisance " seeped into political life. And if you thin this lot will leave office a moment before they have to, a very Happy Christmas too.
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