Clemency suggests

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The Spectator’s Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Charles Moore reflects on the events of the week

Although Peter Hain looks gloriously indefensible in the row about donations to his campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, I am utterly sick of people saying that everything in politics should be ‘transparent’. How could it be? Huge tracts of government and party life depend on the privacy, and sometimes the secrecy, of many dealings. Suppose, for example, that a Member of Parliament is thinking of defecting from one party to another. He will naturally have to negotiate with the party he proposes to join, and he will seek assurances about how he will be treated, perhaps even the promise of a job. These discussions will not necessarily be immoral, but they could never take place if they had to be transparent. What about deals over parliamentary votes? Where would they be without the ‘usual channels’? What about the appointment of people to pro bono posts such as the chairmanship of a national museum? How many good people would submit to a process of selection without some private assurance that they were pretty likely to get it? To pretend that public life has no need for opacity is — transparently — dishonest.

This column has been consistently irritable about the compulsory recycling to which all households are now subject. Convenient weekly collection by paid staff has been replaced by an inconvenient, fortnightly process in which the council taxpayer has to do more work for no less cost. There is another small twist to this: most of the bin-bags now available for holding one’s rubbish are themselves recycled, and therefore burst.