This is a short story about Mark Harper MP, who is making headlines. These days Harper is probably best known as a backbench critic of Covid restrictions, but he once had a promising career as a minister, including a spell in David Cameron’s cabinet between 2015 to 2016.
But that career hit a bump in early 2014 when he quit his post as immigration minister. I was running the Telegraph’s political team at the time. Many ministerial resignations are unmemorable, but Harper’s sticks in the memory. He quit because he learned that a cleaner he paid to look after his London flat did not have legal permission to live and work in the UK. As immigration minister, he had helped strengthen requirements on employers and landlords to check the immigration status of workers and tenants. Given that, he checked on his own case and found himself wanting.
In other words, Harper had broken his own rules, so he quit. The story, as far as I could ever establish, really was as simple as that. And we went to some effort to check. Whenever a politician does anything, it’s good journalistic practice to check the reasons. And when a minister resigns on an apparent point of principle, it makes sense to verify that story. So Team Telegraph devoted a considerable amount of time and effort crawling all over Harper’s account of his resignation.
Surely there had to be more to it? Had someone else discovered his cleaner’s status, meaning he was jumping before he was pushed? Was he pre-empting a hit by another paper? Had he been done in by unhappy officials? Or knifed by some No. 10 black-ops effort? None of these things are exactly unknown at Westminster.
But after dozens of calls and days of poking and prodding, I came to the conclusion that Harper’s resignation was exactly what it seemed to be: an honourable decision to put principle before career. I should say I wasn’t surprised by this. I’d dealt with him a fair bit over the years and always found him honest and decent. I haven’t always agreed with his positions on Covid, but I’ve never doubted that they were based on anything other than genuine conviction and a desire to do the right thing.
Why am I telling a story about the long-ago resignation of a middle-ranking minister? Because Mark Harper is in the news for saying Boris Johnson should resign over Downing Street parties and the law. Harper’s letter to Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee is all over social media. Among its key lines:
We live in a country where those in charge have to obey the same laws as everyone else…. Integrity is about doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.
Back in 2014, if Harper had kept quiet about his cleaner’s status, the chances are no one would have found out. No one was looking, but he did the right thing anyway. Cynicism about politicians is eternal and inevitable. It is always easy to glance at politics and conclude that it’s full of self-serving chancers devoid of honesty or principle. The conduct of many of our most senior politicians only makes it easier to reach that conclusion.
But the story of Mark Harper should serve as a reminder that not all politicians justify that cynicism. He is one of those – and they exist in all parties – who use words like ‘integrity’ and mean it. We should not lose sight of such politicians.
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