Things haven’t been going particularly well for the Conservatives lately. The bounce we received in the polls from the Prime Minister’s wielding of the veto proved to be short-lived, the fault lines in the coalition are growing and Steve Hilton has left the building. The odds of us winning an outright majority at the next election are lengthening by the day.
All I can say is, thank God for Ken Livingstone. He’s the gift that keeps on giving. Following the revelation that he’s funnelled £755,778 through a tax avoidance vehicle over the last three years, the sensible thing would have been for him to write a large cheque to HMRC, particularly in light of his own tireless campaigning against tax avoidance. But no. Instead, he appeared on Andrew Marr last Sunday and tried to justify his tax arrangements by claiming he used the company in question to pay for two campaign workers. According to the law on political funding, that should have been recorded as a cash donation or a donation in kind to the London Labour party, yet no such declaration to the Electoral Commission has been made. Keep on digging, Ken.
The best thing about Ken’s car crash of a mayoral campaign is that it’s damaging the Labour party leadership as well. At a press conference on Monday, Ed Miliband responded to a question about Ken’s tax affairs by repeating Ken’s allegation that Boris has engaged in similar financial wizardry. That immediately prompted an emphatic denial from Boris, who said he’d never made any attempt to avoid paying his taxes in full. ‘No income earned by me has ever been paid to a “service” company, through which a person or persons’ freelance earnings can be channelled so that they pay corporation rather than income tax,’ he said. No doubt Ed’s research staff have been working day and night since then to try and find something to pin on Boris, but in the absence of anything turning up Ed will have to retract the accusation.
Ken’s behaviour also makes it difficult for Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to respond to next week’s Budget by accusing the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of helping their posh chums at the expense of the working poor. Every time they claim the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, Cameron and Osborne can throw Ken Livingstone back in their faces. It’s too late for the two Eds to change tack now — their attack lines are set in stone. In effect, they’re committed to providing the PM and the Chancellor with a perfect excuse to remind Londoners what a hypocrite Labour’s mayoral candidate is.
Some commentators have pointed out that there’s something Dickensian about Ken’s hypocrisy, but I beg to differ. The vice the hypocritical characters in Dickens are guilty of — I’m thinking of Uriah Heap in David Copperfield and Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times — is false modesty. Ken’s vice, by contrast, is fake piety, which isn’t quite the same thing. The character he most reminds me of in 19th-century literature is Nicholas Bulstrode, the rich banker in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Throughout the novel, he invokes his Methodism to attack the moral shortcomings of others, in much the same way that Ken invokes socialist principles to rail against ‘rich bastards’. ‘No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in our parliament, unless they are paying their full share of tax,’ wrote the former London mayor in 2009.
Yet by the end of the novel, Bulstrode’s secret past has been revealed and it turns out he’s guilty of the same failings. Similarly, Ken has been exposed for indulging in the very practice he’s been so quick to condemn others for — tax avoidance. His pieties on the subject now seem like a form of deception, something worse than common-or-garden double standards. Ken’s reputation lies in tatters, just as Bulstrode’s did at the conclusion of Middlemarch.
I cannot see Ken recovering from this. In politics, hypocrisy is a more serious crime than most other misdemeanours because it doesn’t depend upon appealing to a moral code that our society supposedly upholds. The only standard we have to invoke is the one the hypocrite has paid lip service to in the past, whether we believe in it or not. Ken himself has said that anyone who avoids paying ‘their full share of tax’ should be banned from public office — end of story.
So in spite of the government’s mid-term blues, I’m not too depressed at the moment. Thanks to the Nicholas Bulstrode of British politics, I’m feeling quite chipper.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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