I often say that in politics there are people you like and people you approve of. Alas, they are not always the same people. Jack Straw, in the dock at Fleet Street magistrates court in another cash-for-access row, is an exception. I’ve always rated him as a smart, hardworking and practical politician, whose judgements I could easily agree with. I liked him too.
I still think all that, but today’s sting against him and Sir Malcolm Rifkind in the Daily Telegraph – it’s safer to take on a pair of ex-foreign secretaries than a tax-dodging banker – looks bad. Both MPs, now backbenchers aged 68, have popped up on Radio 4’s Today programme to deny wrongdoing and insist they have always stuck to parliamentary rules on outside work.
That may or may not be true, but in the present unforgiving climate, where voter hostility is regularly fanned by ethically challenged media, it won’t cut much ice. The £5,000 a day fees may not raise eyebrows in the City of London, but they do to most people in most parts of the country, most of London included.
In interviews, secretly recorded for Monday’s Channel 4 Dispatches in collaboration with the Telegraph, Straw claimed he went “under the radar” - he meant the alternative to a media campaign - to persuade Brussels to alter damaging EU rules for a commodity broker client, while Rifkind boasted he could arrange “useful access” to Britain’s network of ambassadors. It doesn’t sound good, does it? People of such experience and reputation really shouldn’t talk that way, even to people they know. These were strangers.
No wonder some colleagues think Jack’s lost the plot a bit lately. At the very least Straw, soon to step down as MP for Blackburn after 36 years, should not have allowed his parliamentary office to be used to chat, however informally, with what turns out to be a fictitious Chinese – oh dear, it would be Chinese – company seeking his help. I’ll be in a better position after I cease being an MP – perhaps becoming a peer – he told them. No peerage now, I imagine.
Straw hasn’t been foreign secretary since Tony Blair demoted him in 2005. Rifkind’s position is arguably more serious. The MP for Kensington and Chelsea remains chair of parliament’s highly sensitive intelligence and security committee (ISC) and should have run a mile from discussing even the weather with a Chinese firm. Rules governing ministers conduct might usefully be extended to such sensitive posts.
Various investigations will be launched and verdicts arrived at. In fairness, when a similar sting compromised ex-Labour ministers Geoff Hoon, Steve Byers and Patricia Hewitt just before the last election – coincidence? – Hewitt was not subsequently censured. This might be the likely outcome after actually watching the TV programme, as distinct from the pre-publicity. Context matters.
Straw was quite outspoken at the time, as colleagues were quick to recall on Monday. On Today, he expressed himself “mortified” to have fallen for the same technique while protesting - as did Rifkind (“very serious and unfounded allegations”) earlier in the show - that he’d done nothing wrong. But we all talk more casually, more relaxed, jokier, more indiscreet, in what we take to be private conversations and are mortified – it happened to me the other day – to find ourselves being quoted on Twitter.
That’s one lesson to be relearned from Mondays front pages. When Vince Cable was secretly recorded by reporters pretending to be voters in his constituency surgery (Telegraph again) his predictable views on the Tories made a story, but his hostility to a Murdoch bid for BskyB was suppressed until leaked. Older MPs were scandalised by the deceit – surely a breach of parliamentary privilege? – but younger ones shrugged and said “it’s all on the record now”.
I’m not sure we want to live this way, but Google, Facebook and assorted intelligence agencies seem to find it useful, as internet renegade Andrew Keen keeps warning us. More relevant to this conversation is whether the rules governing MPs conduct should be further tightened or the regulatory watchdog made more independent of parliament. It’s fraught with risk, as Patrick Wintour muses.
This is not something to be rushed into, certainly not on the familiar advice of Sir Alistair Graham, the former trade union leader and standards chief, who is usually a little too eager to pass harsh judgements on others in my view. In their haste to reform abuses of expenses by some MPs, another Telegraph scoop, brilliantly managed but packaged to damage Labour most - do I detect a pattern here? - parliamentarians botched the job and satisfied no one.
What about outside earnings then? Ed Miliband wants to ensure that all Labour MPs work virtually full-time for their £67,000-a-year salaries with no such extra interests beyond the occasional article or paid speech, a 10% cap, say some. Fair enough?
It certainly sounds good money to most people and being an MP is an ever more demanding job. They’re all volunteers, aren’t they? That was part of Nigel Farage’s Ukip pitch when I followed him to Canvey Island last week. We want politicians who are normal people, more like the voters they represent, he said. It’s a good pitch, though the Farage CV is not ideal in this respect.
In practical terms what would the Miliband cap – or even the current tight regime on pay and expenses – deliver in terms of parliamentary quality? It wouldn’t be a problem for the austere and resolutely working-class Dennis Skinner, whose memoirs you might enjoy, or for his old ally, Tony Benn, who was always quite well off.
It wouldn’t matter to a Tory whose career plan requires them first to acquire enough money to afford to become a £67,000 year MP. That pattern has always existed, certainly in the pre-1910 era, when MPs were not paid at all, and still does. Michael Heseltine and Sir Peter Tapsell, wealthy self-made men, are prime examples.
The problem arises for people in the middle, neither asfrugal as Skinner nor as entrepreneurial as Heseltine. Many of them elected full of high hopes and reformist zeal in 2010, find it quite tough . The work is harder, the job of living part of the week in London away from family, both arduous and expensive. Some are stepping down, though there is always a fresh queue of wannabes.
I don’t claim to have the answer, perhaps it’s fewer but better paid MPs and far fewer peers. But trying to balance quality and diversity with the practical realities, cost-effective and accountable, of being an elected parliamentarian in the Twitter era isn’t easy. If Ukip, the SNP or the Greens get a handle on power after 7 May, they may find it harder than they think too.
