It’s sleaze time again in Westminster. A few good stings by the broadcasters and the press and we see his lordship ‘Nuclear’ Jack Cunningham coining it by asking for £12,000 per month to make use of his extensive contacts and also his ability to get a table on the terrace of the Lords. £12,000 a month! His dad, Alderman Andrew Cunningham, did three years in chokey for his role in the Poulson affair, back in the 1970s. Two other members of the Upper House were filmed similarly grasping at the loot on offer from the Sunday Times.
And then there’s Patrick Mercer MP, who has resigned the government whip and will not be standing again in Newark. He tabled questions about Fiji being readmitted to the Commonwealth without having revealed that he was being paid to ask these questions, it would seem. It’s always fun watching the surreptitious film of these characters, torn between greed and the worry of being found out. Although not being torn very much in any of the above cases.
Patrick Mercer was late declaring the payments he received from a fictitious lobbying company, although not very late. And so I’d better get my own declaration of interest in sharpish: I know and like Mercer and he once gave me a rather nice line-drawing of a hare, as a wedding present. (As it happens, I also quite like Jack Cunningham, though he has never given me a line drawing of a hare or of anything else.) Anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for these disgruntled right-wing Tories, because they dislike the government even more than I do.
But my association with Patrick goes back to my days as editor of the Today programme, when I employed him as our defence correspondent, a role he performed with a more comprehensive knowledge of the subject than most defence hacks, having been colonel of the Sherwood Foresters. There aren’t many of those types in the BBC, believe me, and his affection for the army and therefore shooting people rubbed up a little against the rather more pacific legions within the corporation. He was tersely insightful, clipped and occasionally pungent. Asked on air by John Humphrys if depleted uranium shells were especially dangerous, he issued an abrupt: ‘Yup. Spoil your day’ — before explaining how absolutely bloody marvellous they were, actually. He was an extremely useful corrective, a role he continued to inhabit after being elected to parliament.
There is no side to the man — and this, of course, gets him into trouble. He was sacked from a ministerial position for having admitted that racism existed within the army and that it was one of a number of forms of bullying which he had tried to stamp out. He had answered his interlocutor honestly and with more candour than perhaps was strictly necessary. And now, in what many will consider an entertaining volte face, he is on the rack for not being sufficiently candid. Or not being candid quickly enough.
Why do they do it? How could they be so dumb and gullible? I suspect that this is the first reaction to seeing the likes of Mercer signing his name to a lucrative contract with a lobbying company, aside from a certain disgust. The answer is because they are all at it. Or at least, a large proportion of our MPs are at it, in one way or another. What Mercer did was no different to what scores and scores of (especially Conservative) MPs are happy to do; it’s just that the cameras aren’t there to see them. Take a look through the list of members’ financial interests. David Amess, for example, has not been kicked out for asking a whole bunch of extremely interesting and pertinent parliamentary questions about the Maldives, shortly after returning from an expenses paid trip to the, uh, Maldives, which he did not immediately declare. Nor is there the suggestion that the police should be involved in the questions he asked about caravan sites for the London 2012 Olympics, despite the ten thousand quid or so he receives from the Caravan Club as its ‘parliamentary adviser’.
And then there’s Tony Baldry, whose list of financial interests would fill up most of this magazine. Is it OK to be a member of the British Kazakhstan Group of MPs while being deputy chairman of a Kazakhstan paper recycling company? Seems it is. No problem being deputy chairman of an oil and gas company, for a quoted remuneration of £3,333 per month, and asking questions about oil and gas, either. Or indeed continuing with his other work as a barrister and representing a money-laundering Nigerian crook of a politician called James Ibori — and writing a letter to the government in that capacity suggesting that Ibori and his associates were getting a bit of a rough ride from the Nigerian authorities, all things considered. Should they be allowed to do stuff like that — even if, like Amess and Baldry, they are contravening no laws or parliamentary rules or regulations?
You will notice that the two MPs I have mentioned begin with an A and a B — that’s because it was as far as I got in the list of members’ financial interests before beginning this article. Most of the Tories in that part of the alphabet are non-execs, or just directors, or advisers to companies that value their services. Almost all the MPs have accepted donations from people who donated money presumably because they really, really like each particular politician, and expect nothing in return. I reckon that’s why Mercer signed on the dotted line: he didn’t think he was doing anything different to anybody else.
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