Stephen Byers either pimped himself out to big business and betrayed the electorate, or he didn’t, in which case he made fraudulent claims, says Rod Liddle. Either way, the public won’t tolerate this level of corruption
I once fell into conversation with a whore, up on Streatham Hill in south London. A long time ago now; back then, in the early 1980s, it was a renowned red-light district. You’d look out of your window at night and see a street full of parked cars bouncing up and down, as if they were in a weird theme park. Whoreworld©. Most of us who lived there were propositioned from time to time, which always made me feel useful and wanted. Anyway, one time I engaged some rather worn-out old hag in a pious and cringing (on my part) conversation about her trade. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see myself as no different from a taxi cab for hire. Five quid for a ride either way. What’s the difference?’
I was reminded of this lady when I read about Stephen Byers, a former government minister and the MP for North Tyneside, offering his services as a lobbyist for between £3,000 and £5,000 per day to people for whom, he claimed, he could influence government policy decisions. The similarities are pretty obvious. First, he likened himself to a taxi, too, except a more expensive taxi. Second, I suspect that like Stephen, the woman I met was inclined to keep her hosiery on whilst partaking of sexual congress. You may have forgotten that story about Byers: I haven’t. It has stuck with me, him wearing his socks in bed while servicing a Labour councillor (who later blew the whistle) at some godforsaken conference. It has stuck to the inside of my brain like toxic plaque. And third — well, without wishing to be rude, they’re both whores, aren’t they?
There are differences between them, too, mind. For the skag-addled whore, whoring was her only source of income, rather than a useful supplementary to a £65,000 salary. Second, I suppose you might say that while the lady-whore may have been indirectly assisting a certain betrayal on the part of her married clients, the Byers-whore was directly betraying the electorate, parliament, the Labour party and, if he and the government are telling the truth (likely, do you think?), then he was also betraying the clients to whom he offered his services.
Do you think whore is too strong, an overstatement? As Daniel Hannan has pointed out, in some exasperation, the story has not received the sort of coverage that attended the first revelations of fraudulent expenses claims, and he suggested a few reasons as to why this should be so, including scandal fatigue, nothing actually ‘illegal’ done, that the story is a bit complex and confined to only one party, Labour. Dan rightly suggests that it is a far more serious and corrupting issue than the expenses farrago; we would surely grant every MP a free duck house every week for life if they promised not to accept large sums of money from private companies in order to influence policy corruptly. And doesn’t it make all that cash-for-questions stuff, if you can remember that far back, look terribly tame, the equivalent of a parking violation compared to, say, armed robbery?
And how do you feel about those assurances from Harriet Harman that the departments solicited by Byers — and Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt — confirmed that their lucrative approaches had occasioned no influence whatsoever upon policy decisions? Not a wildly surprising statement, that, is it? And Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, cheerfully assuring everybody that he took no notice of Byers. Are these statements sufficient to quell our disquiet? Should we just take their word for it, seeing that this has been such an open and honest administration over the years?
You have to look at the balance of probabilities. Are big, powerful companies so stupid or naive that they will give Stephen Byers £5,000 per day in the expectation that nothing whatsoever will come from his machinations? Byers himself, when bragging to undercover reporters from Dispatches and the Sunday Times, seemed to suggest that he had given very good value for money — until the story broke and he slightly retracted his claims. Looking at it the other way, if Byers secured employment based upon a fraudulent claim that he could influence policy decisions, shouldn’t he be subject to prosecution or at least civil litigation? And shouldn’t all government departments state that henceforth they will receive no representations from Stephen Byers, just to be on the safe side?
I disagree with Dan Hannan about one thing; I don’t think it is a terribly complex issue and nor is there for me anything nebulous, morally, about what has taken place. It may be that the lobby hacks think it so, because they are immersed in Westminster and suffused with its culture; they have been schooled to understand that this sort of thing takes place, that it’s nothing out of the ordinary and of scant interest to the general public. That’s the problem; for a long while some Liberal Democrat MPs tried desperately to alert the lobby to what they believed was an expenses scandal, but to no avail; the story, when it broke, came from outside. My guess is that the public does care about Byersgate and that the political hacks and, for that matter, the Prime Minister, have misread the disposition of the electorate.
There’s one more thing. You look at the names of those implicated in this latest scandal: Byers, Geoff Hoon, Patricia Hewitt. These were Tony Blair’s most loyal lieutenants; they represented the spirit, if you can call it that, of New Labour. He must be incredibly proud of them — for they have held aloft the Blairite banner with every bit as much fervour now they are out of office as they did when they were serving ministers under the man himself. Last week we learned that Blair had trousered vast but unknown sums of money from the Kuwaiti royal family and also from a South Korean company scouting for oil in Iraq, the details of which he had tried desperately to keep from the British (and one assumes, Iraqi) public. Devoid of principle in office, devoid of principle — and venal — when out of office.
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