Entitlement to Rule versus Entitlement to Question — Finding a British Balance
Given the findings of the Sue Gray report and the fact that the Met issued no less than 126 fines to people involved in Downing Street ‘gatherings’, it’s a mystery to many quite why we have a Privileges Committee investigation into Johnson and ‘Partygate.’ The Committee’s focus on whether or not he ‘knowingly misled’ Parliament illustrates a convenient focus on semantic minutiae and away from the big picture.
Some of the outrage expressed at the process (including branding it a Kangaroo Court) illustrates the fact that many see their own entitlement to wield power as trumping the electorate’s entitlement to question them. This is very problematic and there’s no secret about where it stems from.
Born for Power
Our Prime Ministers are delivered from an Eton/Oxford conveyor belt (Johnson was the fifth since 1955.) According to the Elitist Britain report, in 2019 over half of Ministers were educated at Private schools whilst only 7% of the population is. This is ‘prep’ for power that its graduates will exercise in a real world that they don’t recognise, let alone understand.
It starts from a position of superior otherness. In his book Sad Little Men, Richard Beard describes the words ‘I don’t know’ as being amongst the toughest that Public (largely boarding) School boys can utter. This very early adoption of assurance hardly suggests later development of emotional — rather than academic — intelligence.
Invariably it seems to turn out that way. Similarly, Simon Kuper recounts in Chums that Oxford’s entrance interview tests the “ability to speak while uninformed — to say more than you know” and Oxford Union’s gladiatorial debating regime focuses on “rhetoric over policy” such that its adherents “argue any case whether they believe it or not.” Finding a winning position is more important than meaning it.
Indeed it seems to go further — belief and ideals are positively frowned upon in Oxford debating where Kuper says that Johnson learned to win “not by boring the audience with details” but by indulging in what would become his trademark mix of jokes and (alleged) charisma washed down with the odd Latin aside. Substance was merely an optional extra.
Increasingly these appear to be the rules of the game (and it is a game) not just for Johnson but for too many others. For ‘Us’ they say, the trappings of power equal a status that should remain unquestioned by ‘Them.’
The Public Service Ethos — What Do They Want, a Medal?
MPs like to characterise themselves as public servants and to point out that — as the best of the best — they could earn a lot more by focusing their talents in business rather than politics. Indeed, earlier this year it was suggested that MPs who stand down should be awarded medals to commemorate their contribution to public life. This was seen as one of several necessary innovations to make the job more attractive to newcomers who may otherwise see its tasks as thankless.
There was a time not so long ago when MPs weren’t even thanked with money. Before 1911 they were unpaid which of course created a self-selecting caste of the wealthy or their patrons. We don’t want to go back there but, at the same time, we should be realistic about just who is pulling the levers of power.
They’re Just Like Us Apparently
It’s clearly preferable that MPs come from the real — i.e. our — world and yet that can be hard to verify. Some of their claims of knowledge and success (i.e. of their deserved place in the meritocracy) often turn out to be more than dubious.
Anyway, It’s Not About The Money (Really)
It’s undoubtedly true that some MPs could and would do better outside of politics. However, even allowing for the gruelling hours, breadth of detail they need to cover and the 24/7 public scrutiny they are under, their £86,000 salary with regular rises looks more than OK by most standards.
This though is no measure of their real income. It’s also rarely enough for them. The payment of expenses and additional ‘outside’ income has become an issue of public concern especially since the Expenses Scandal fourteen years ago. Remember back then when MPs proclaimed that, although they controlled their own salary awards, they chose not to vote for a rise because they felt it would be unpopular with the electorate? This position of austere selflessness was comprehensively undermined by their absurd expense claims accompanied by an argument that they saw such claims as part of their remuneration — i.e. if only you paid us more we wouldn’t have to fiddle our expenses. How many of us would try the same argument with our employer?
Nowadays control of their salary award is no longer in their grasp. Since 2009, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has taken the reins in deciding both salaries and what can be claimed as expenses (NB IPSA makes the point that 90% of the money that it allocates to MPs isn’t for their pockets but instead is “invested in local communities” via case workers and assistants who support constituents.)
Outside income has however continued to represent a troublingly grey area. Although MPs must declare additional earnings, gifts and donations (as well as some shareholdings), records have traditionally been kept in three different places making access difficult for anyone wanting to cast an eye over them. A joint project by Sky News and Tortoise Media has sought to change that by creating a publicly accessible and searchable database of all records since December 2019. Now we can all check individual MP’s outside earnings beyond salary and office running expenses. Have a look –
Although the average MP took just over £19,000 in the period, there are some huge headline winners — e.g. Theresa May’s £2.8m, Boris Johnson’s £1.2m and Keir Starmer’s £800k. Maybe the more important finding is the breadth of income types which include consultancy (political and parliamentary consultancy is banned from this month so this will impact the situation in future), speeches, TV appearances and legal work.
There is of course a huge range represented — from some MPs employed as Doctors and Nurses to some making six figure fees for a modest number of advisory/consultancy days per month.
The figures illustrate a clear split between the parties — only two Labour MPs appear in the top 20 earners.
World Leading — and Not in a Good Way
If the 2009 Expenses scandal was hoped to be the nadir of MPs reputational decline, that hope has been thoroughly trashed. In fact, the murky and morally repugnant Covid VIP Lane scandal added another dimension — profiteering in a time of national emergency. Partygate is another flavour of it.
Diligent legal and investigative work by both The Good Law Project and media including The Observer got to the bottom of the VIP Lane. Such work was not helped by the vetting of Freedom of Information requests by the controversial Cabinet Office Clearing House until it was closed last year. Its demise was precipitated by a review which required its replacement to exercise a “better application” of the principle that organisations considering requests must do so irrespective of their source or motive For most of us that’s generally what the ‘Freedom’ in ‘Freedom of Information’ means.
When Transparency International unveiled its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) earlier this year, it was little surprise that the UK’s position had tumbled. The scale of the slip meant that nowadays we are keeping company with Qatar and Myanmar. Transparency International cited 40 uninvestigated breaches of the Ministerial Code over the last five years as well as the ongoing climate of honours for favours (this has been going on for so long that few of us raised an eyebrow when Johnson nominated his Father — for services to what exactly has yet to be revealed.)
Playing by the Rules
Open Democracy recently revealed that over £1m in claimed expenses had been spent by 140 MPs on (largely social) media promotion. This looks to be in contravention of the rules which preclude expenses (i.e. tax payers’ money) funding election campaigns rather than parliamentary work. And yet IPSA was unable to define ‘parliamentary uses’ and also admitted that, whilst it checked the companies that issued expenses invoices, it didn’t check the work to which they related. This all helped MPs simply deny any wrong doing (or at least to have known about it.)
In 2021, after the Owen Patterson lobbying case, Johnson called for a review of the rules around MPs outside work and he signposted that this would likely lead to the imposition of ‘reasonable limits’ on hours and income. By March of last year that was being quietly moth balled as supposedly ‘impractical.’
A list of Ministers Interests must be published twice a year and yet the current Government has failed to do so. In explaining its legal action to force publication, the Good Law Project points out that such a publicly available list would have highlighted BBC Chairman Richard Sharp’s relationship with Johnson and Nadhim Zahawi’s HMRC investigation rather than both having to be highlighted by investigative journalists.
Whilst these loopholes and transparency failures remain, suspicion will too.
Round and Round We Go
Simon Kuper characterises the ‘Ress-Mogg brigade’ as wanting to be in power to “make great British speeches” rather than reflecting any aspiration “to change Britain or anybody’s lives except their own.” It’s about grandstanding.
Richard Beard similarly says of his (then) Public School clique, “Our tradition of leadership continued not because we had a talent for it, but because we resisted giving anyone else a go.” This rather neatly sums up the perceived lack of choice many voters feel at the ballot box — six of one versus half a dozen of the other. They fear that it’s been that way forever and it will continue.
But it needn’t. There are decent, hardworking and honourable MPs who are hampered by this perception. Indeed some of them came via the same school and Oxbridge route — it’s not inevitable that all end up in the same place for the same reasons. But are there enough and are they on our ballot papers? If the answer to both is yes then it’s up to us
Kuper points out that the only three post war British PMs who didn’t ‘boast’ an elite educational background — Callaghan, Major and Brown — didn’t look or feel like Leaders. Do we value showmanship over substance, charisma over competence?
On leaving journalism to take up politics, Johnson apparently told a friend his reason was that “they don’t put up statues to journalists.” In the event, any memorial to Johnson’s political career is unlikely to generate respectful salutes; maybe it could generate a long overdue change in which we reject the entitled and select the deserving.
