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Sunday 7 September 2008

The Spectator’s notes

The Spectator’s notes

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

People have pointed out the contrast between Mr Brown’s uncontested ‘campaign’ for his party’s leadership, which put the cleaning-up of politics at its centre, and what has happened now. Some attribute it to straightforward hypocrisy. But I suspect that the more powerful explanation was the crazed desire to go for a quick election. This took hold of Mr Brown’s inner circle (notably of the non-Reverend Douglas Alexander) almost as soon as their man became Prime Minister at the end of June. It preoccupied everything the government did until, at the end of the week of the Tory conference in early October, the plan was aborted. If you want a sudden election, you want lots of money fast, and you have neither the time nor the inclination to ask searching questions about what has already come in. That would be why Peter Watt, the General Secretary of the Labour party, failed to see the hidden gifts of Mr Abrahams as, to use Mr Brown’s cant phrase, ‘totally unacceptable’ and, indeed, accepted them. Any problems, he and other election managers would have reasoned, could have been sorted out after a Brown landslide had given the government new legitimacy. Alas, the best-laid plans of manse and men went oft agley, and by the end of October, Jon Mendelsohn, Labour’s director of election resources, had to turn his mind to the mess. But by then it was too late.

A friend who is an expert in the psychology of big donors to political parties points out that the desire to give under pseudonyms has grown much greater now that it is considered wrong to give honours to donors. If true, this is another example of how the wrong moral lessons keep being learnt. It is not necessarily wrong to give knighthoods or peerages to people who donate to parties. It is necessarily wrong to take money from people who are pretending to be someone else. The same applies to the proposal to put a ceiling on the amount of money anyone can give. There is nothing wrong with giving large sums honestly and openly: a ceiling would not clean up anything, but would add a new temptation to give money by roundabout means. The call for yet more reform of the law is what you might call a Brown herring.

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