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He’s incompetent. So sack him

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

The Spectator on why the Prime Minister should show Peter Hain the door

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.

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