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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

There are many objections to state funding, but the most compelling is ethical. Why should the public subsidise the ambitions of politicians, simply because those politicians are incapable of sticking to the rules that they themselves framed? We do not, after all, seek to dissuade burglars by handing them state-funded HD-ready televisions and DVD players.

The real lessons of this episode concern the government, and its dilapidation. It is remarkable that Labour, having parked itself on the moral high ground over Tory ‘sleaze’ during the 1990s, should now be behaving with such shocking arrogance about the laws it crafted itself.

The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act has been on the statute books since 2000, and ought to be on the desk of every politician in the land. Its rules are clear and easy to follow. Yet, as Sir Christopher Kelly, the new chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said last week, ‘even now not everyone appears to have understood the importance of being absolutely transparent about political donations’.

It is no less extraordinary that in 2007, even as the cash-for-honours row continued to rock the government, Mr Hain was not punctilious about disclosure as money flowed into his campaign. Yet he seems to have been afflicted by a pathology that grips many governments that stay in power too long: a detachment from political reality, an introspection matched by a recoil from true accountability.

Mr Hain’s contrition looks feigned. He exudes irritation and impatience, as if the various investigations are a campaign of persecution rather than a legitimate (and necessary) inquiry into an apparently flagrant breach of the law by a senior minister.

In Monday’s Sun, the Prime Minister declared that ‘the matter must rest with the authorities’ — an odd and indecisive thing for the man in charge to say. On Tuesday he told ITN that Mr Hain was guilty of ‘incompetence’, but that he hoped the Commons Standards Committee and the Electoral Commission ‘will be able to accept his apology.’ Yet if the PM regards Mr Hain as incompetent, how can he possibly justify his continued management of the £130 billion spent per annum by the Department of Work and Pensions? Mr Brown’s New Year message was that 2008 would be a year of hard decisions. He should start by taking an easy one, and sack Mr Hain.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.