Poor Phil Woolas. How could he reasonably have expected that, for lying about his Liberal opponent, Elwyn Watkins, in the general election, he could be thrown out of Parliament? It is as if a reporter were sacked from the Daily Mail for writing unkind stories about the royal family. It goes against the natural order of things. But the real outrage here is not Mr Woolas’s personal fate. It would not have mattered, for example, if his own Labour party had taken against his lies and deselected him. The real outrage is the power of the judiciary. It is judges who have overturned the result of the poll at Oldham East and Saddleworth, invoking the Representation of the People Act 1983. As with the row about MPs’ expenses and the establishment of IPSA to oversee their allowances in future, people have forgotten that they elect MPs to make laws on their behalf. If they then permit courts and officials to rule those MPs, they take away the point of the whole thing, and eventually establish an unelected dictatorship. Except in judging electoral fraud in the narrowest sense — personation, bribery, postal vote deception etc — the courts should have nothing to do with bad behaviour at elections. It is for the voters to decide who is lying about whom and whether they care.
If you read the judgment in Watkins v. Woolas, you will see that much of the argument turned on what Mr Watkins had or had not said about Muslim extremists (Oldham East is a constituency where Muslim votes are decisive) and the Israel/Palestine question. This is so obviously a political area, and one in which accusations of extremism are hurled by all sides, that the idea that a court can decide such matters is insane. The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), an extremist pressure group, is thrilled about the verdict: ‘MPACUK Make History’ is the headline on its website. How long before our self-appointed, increasingly power-crazed and moralistic judges decide to invalidate the election of anyone they consider Islamophobic, racist, or impertinent towards the legal profession?
Besides, the use of the law in politics requires money. If candidates come to believe that they can litigate about election results, the rich ones, or those backed by pressure groups, will do so. Legal expenses could never count as election expenses, and so there can be no restriction on them. The law will be abused politically. Even if Mr Woolas did lie, I pray he wins his appeal.
Next week, The Spectator celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. (I don’t know why it is doing this now, since the awards began in 1984, but I am not complaining.) I invented these awards myself. Highland Park whisky approached us with the idea of sponsoring a debating competition, but I thought parliamentary awards would be more fun, and would get lots of politicians into the same room — something which whisky companies, permanently irritated by excise duties, always want to do. It shows how differently people thought then that our biggest anxiety was that MPs would boycott awards bestowed by the press — because the only relevant verdict was that of the voters. In the end, we calculated that the politicians would want the free lunch and the publicity; but we did adopt a form of words about how we had no right to sit in judgment on MPs and offered the awards only out of ‘affection and respect’ for Parliament. How sadly out-of-date that sounds now.
To Melton Mowbray last week, to address St Hubert’s Society. This small but flourishing ecumenical organisation is for hunting clergy — not for clergy who merely support hunting, but for those who actually hunt. I was asked to address them on the relationship between the chase and faith, and took as my text Psalm 42 (‘Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God’). It was through a vision of Christ on the cross between the horns of a stag he was hunting that St Hubert realised he must dedicate his life to God. I fear that, in his case, this involved giving up hunting, but those present in Melton manage both. One wiry, weatherbeaten man from Yorkshire, who looked like a terrier-man, told me that when he has to take funerals on hunting days, he turns up in his hunting kit and simply pulls the surplice on top; ‘Congregations never complain, but the vicar [to whom he answers] don’t like it much. I say, stuff ’im.’
After lunch, we went on to the Melton Carnegie Museum, where hunting people have endowed a gallery on the subject. The first thing you see is a mannequin wearing the tall hat, scarlet coat, breeches and boots of the late Major Guy Paget. Next to it, however, is a vast poster which says, ‘What do YOU feel when you look at this figure?’ and goes on to ask rude questions like ‘Perhaps he has too much money and time?’ and ‘How can he enjoy a sport that means killing something?’ These and other bits of propaganda were insisted on, apparently, not by the museum staff, but by Leicestershire County Council. In France, there are seven majestic hunting museums. Only in England are people so mean-spirited as to pervert donations in this way. The good news is that the council has now changed its composition. The capital of hunting may at last be allowed to commemorate its sport properly.
When the Today programme next goes off air because of striking journalists, the BBC should treat it like the General Strike of 1926 and encourage members of the public to come in to the studios and break the strike. There would be no shortage of volunteers from the ranks of reluctant licence fee payers. We would happily provide our own weather forecasters, as well as bold innovations such as broadcasters on Thought for the Day who believe in God. After a bit, listeners would realise that the programme was much more fun without the ‘professionals’, and the entire BBC star salary system would collapse.
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