THE SCANDAL OF ARROGANCE

Matthew Parris says New Labour sleaze is

typical of a government in power too long. The point is, though, it hasn't been

IN POLITICS, as in lingerie, everything sags in the end. It is in the nature of power and elastic that, exercised too long, things go slack.

But Tony Blair has only had ten months and already the elastic is beginning to go. After less than a year in office, one clear difference between 'Old' Labour and 'New' is emerging: Old Labour was both upright and uptight on questions of probity; its suc- cessor has compromised standards in pub- lic life to a degree approached by no other Labour administration in history.

This is not difficult. Though the speed with which New Labour has slipped has been spectacular, it was easy for Tony Blair to miss the mark set by his Labour forebears. In everything which touched their recti- tude in office, previous Labour administrations were fastidious at Westminster. The party's clean record in government contrasts with its councillors' behaviour in town halls — cleaner than Liberal or Tory administrations. Readers will forgive a short digression into history but, since all government is corrupt to some degree, general statements about bad behaviour are pointless unless judged against custom and practice.

Of the Liberals it is enough to say that though the 'Marconi scandal' was a long time ago, though MPs like the swindler Hor- atio Bottomley or the mad fantasist Trebitsch Lincoln were hardly their party's fault, and though, more recently, the fall of Jeremy Thorpe may be regarded as a misfor- tune, David Lloyd George really does look like carelessness, and on a grand scale. The guilty man of the Marconi affair, this white- washing, womanising honours-peddler was one of the most disgraceful (and greatest) of our prime ministers; his repeated attempts to whitewash were dubbed by Punch Won't- Wash — and they didn't.

As for the Tories, a list of important ministerial resignations will suffice, though culpability varies: Boothby, Harvey, Gal- braith (over the Vassal affair), Profumo, Maudling, Lambton, Jellicoe, and that only takes us to 1974.

Labour has been different. Tony Blair inherits a shining record. Ramsay MacDon- ald's administrations, in power and in coali- tion, were unspattered by sleaze. There was one kerfuffle over an insider bet inspired by an unguarded Budget leak from the Colonial Secretary, J.H. Thomas, but it was a Tory who placed the bet! Thomas resigned immediately. And poor T.I. Mardy Jones, the former Welsh miner who let his wife use an MP's rail voucher once, at Christmas 1930 — was hounded by Tories and railway directors into resigna- tion. His party dropped him.

Clement Attlee's postwar administra- tion was astonishingly clean. Garry Allighan MP was caught in 1947 taking a retainer from journalists — and resigned without protest or support from his front bench. In an era of rationing, a junior minister, John Belcher (a good man out of his depth), was fingered in a scandal which, foreshadowing cash-for-questions, we might call 'groceries-for-influence'. He resigned, and sank.

Contrary to what many Tories believed, Harold Wilson ran administrations of unusual probity. Apart from George Brown's drinking, the only delinquency of any significance was that of John Stone- house, who was unhinged. Wilson had already sacked him before he fell, and never tried to shield his former minister. The shaming of Robert Maxwell came long after the scoundrel had ceased to be a Labour MP: a scandal with whose conse- quences (and to this we shall return) it should fall to Tony Blair to deal.

So Old Labour offers a lean har- vest for the purveyors of what Mr Blair likes to call 'pathetic' stories. From time to time Labour men and women and their friends in business have found themselves in the soup; but when they have, the instinct of Labour prime ministers has never been to shield: they have acted with rigour and dispatch.

Until now. For the latest crop of ministe- rial problems, I choose the phrase 'found themselves in the soup' with care. In some cases the soup was not of their making; some fell in by mistake and others were pushed. It is important not to question the personal probity of men like Lord Simon, Geoffrey Robinson, Robin Cook, Lord Irvine and others, for I know nothing to the discredit of any, except as regards their judgment — and the judgment of the Prime Minister in responding to their predicaments. His response is always the same, that of a team captain determined to show he will brook no interference.

In each case the individual has been placed, or placed the government, in diffi- culty. In each case the government has tried stubbornly to ignore the difficulty. When questioned, spokesmen have been dismissive, evasive, obstructive and abusive.

`Cover-up', however, has rarely been quite the right term. The search for an expression which, without implying individ- ual corruption, captures the extent to which this administration's standards have been corrupted, must return to three: inap- propriate, arrogant and lacking candour.

Surprisingly, a fourth recurs too: out of touch. When the Lord Chancellor begins to act as though Derry Irvine the man were perfectly indistinguishable from his office; and therefore public funds, works and buildings — because they enhance the office — may be generously bestowed upon the man, the sense we have is surely of fin de siecle. But this is debut de regime!

And when the newspapers succeed in extracting, item by item, truths withheld from us about the scale and forwardness of his pretensions — not to speak of his ambi- tion to restrict access to these glories to friends, friends of friends and MPs' arranged parties — I smell not deceit, but a strong conviction on his Lordship's part that none of this is any of our business.

If Lord Irvine were not this Labour gov- ernment's first lord chancellor, but instead the last lord chancellor of the previous Tory government, would we not be saying that the man's style was typical of a tired and accident-prone administration which had been in power too long and, caring now only for the comforts, privileges and trappings of power, had lost its democratic bearings?

And would we not have said the same, had any of the businessmen who were generous to Conservative party coffers appeared later to secure a valuable and controversial con- cession in proposed legislation? If a Tory were prime minister, and if Mr Bernie Eccle- stone's million pounds had gone to Tory funds, and a Tory government had-given that exemption to Formula One racing, and if our Tory prime minister's response to protests had been that he was sorry the matter had not been presented properly because what everyone should realise was that he was a pretty straight sort of a guy — would we not have added vanity and impertinence to the charges of obduracy, insensitivity and greed?

When the Prime Minister and Chancel- lor lightly assign the role of Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe to a wealthy and sympathetic businessman with a huge shareholding in a business within his department's remit, and give him a peerage to do his job, and then, when criticised, bri- dle and dig in their heels until finally forced to concede, the error is plain. There was no moral fault in Lord Simon; it was even excusable to appoint him, unshorn of his interests, to that post — one of those over- sights which do happen in the hurly-burly of forming a new government. What was inex- cusable was not admitting and correcting the mistake at once. Imagine that John Major had been the prime minister in ques- tion. Would we not be saying this was typical of a battle-weary politician who tried to act tough in defence of his friends — and then had to concede anyway?

Now suppose this: a man who never told us he was the beneficiary of substantial off- shore trusts is placed in charge of Treasury consideration of how to plug tax loopholes. When challenged, he tells us less than the whole truth about his own relationship with these trusts. We later learn there were other interests he did not declare. We dis- cover a closer past involvement than many had supposed with Robert Maxwell's erst- while empire. We ask for an explanation. Voices from Downing Street tell us that none of this matters because it's all a long time ago, or at least in the past, or, so far as it is in the present, nothing to do with his present job, and besides it's none of our business, and anyway he's jolly good at the job and that's what counts — so shut up.

We point out that another MP (but only an elderly backbencher who is not one of the Prime Minister's useful friends) has been hung out to dry for failing to declare what was (relative to this) a minuscule interest. The government simply refuses to comment, denying that the cases are com- parable. Indeed they are not!

Well, imagine that Margaret Thatcher had been that prime minister. Such a story would be cited as an object lesson in how grand, arrogant and out of touch she had become, of how the exercise of so much power for so many years had corrupted her. It is so long, we would have mur- mured, since she has travelled on a bus.

And suppose now that Lady Thatcher had achieved her goal of promoting Cecil Parkinson to foreign secretary, and he had put away his wife despite her protests and moved in with his former secretary; and sacked his diary secretary at the FCO and considered replacing her with his mistress. Would it have been enough for Thatcher to remark that her foreign secretary was doing a good job and accuse the opposition of being 'trivial' and 'pathetic' in their com- plaints and questions? Of course not. This would have been proof, we would have said, that after many, many years power had finally gone to the prime minister's head.

Mr Blair has had ten months. And that is the only impediment to the cartoonist or commentator placing the most natural con- struction on this tatty and dispiriting saga. How can we conclude that Labour are weary in office? How can we conclude that years of power have corrupted? How given the party's daily recourse to the runes we now call 'focus groups' — can we con- clude that Mr Blair is out of touch?

This is not just an idle question asked by a journalist looking for a well-worn image on which to hang a lazy analysis. It is a question of gestalt. Gestalt theory examines the way in which we interpret what on one reading may be no more than a mess of unconnected dots and lines as a picture of something. We can see in a cloud, or a twisted tree trunk, a figure or face. A para- noiac can see in a series of disparate inci- dents a plot. Or perhaps he is not paranoid, and the conspiracy exists.

Gestalt is vital to journalists, for if we can- not remake the world into stories with chap- ters, we are redundant. A strong metaphor is like a wire frame for our commentary. The Profumo affair gave 1960s Britain just such a frame, a human drama on which to hang our vague, unfocused feeling that 1950s Tories had been in for too long and were going squishy in the middle.

Something similar began to occur after the first decade of the Tories' 18 years from 1979. Images of fatigue, exhaustion, loss of backbone, decadence and 'running out of steam' did much — as did one single, almost meaningless word, 'sleaze' — to knit together into 'analysis' a thousand little stories, none of which was of much importance on its own. Fairbairn, Parkinson, Hampson, Proctor, Best, Browne, Amos, Mellor, Lamont, Mates, Norris, Yeo, Ashby, Milligan, Rid- dick, Tredinnick, Smith, Hamilton, Aitken, Stewart, Brown, Hirst, Merchant, the list looks formidable: but it is finding a template for the assembly of the list which is the key.

From Blair's first ten months we already have candidates for a new list: Simon, Sar- war, Cook, Ecclestone, Jowell, Wareing, McMaster, Graham, Robinson, Irvine, Donoughue, some of them innocent, all fingered by scandal-seekers. To these add a malady less newsworthy but disturbing: the Australians call it mateship and it helped bring Bob Hawke down. The corporate cosying-up of those who hope for future favour from this government — Telecom, Branson and others — unsettles. But what is the template? For an administration still in nappies, 'decadence' will hardly do. The search is on.

From the Tories, any questioning of Labour's standards simply reminds voters of the last lot — than whom this lot are no better. Liberal Democrats should be mak- ing the running but have been led by the collaborationist Captain Ashdown into Labour's lobster trap.

Two individuals have so far come closest. At the cerebral level, Charles Moore has written that those for whom politics serves some Higher Purpose, far from acting more scrupulously, often feel authorised to cut corners. Tony Blair may think his (sin- cere) sense of moral imperative licenses him to behave in a way which in a baser man we would call tricksy, but who dare doubt his motives? His New Labour lieu- tenants, who conspicuously lack moral imperative, will do the necessary. At the soundbite level William Hague told MPs something similar at Prime Minister's Questions last month, when he remarked that 'power has gone to their heads'. As a media template for the miscreancy of New Labour in office, the phrase has potency.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.