The connection between money and political honours can hardly be called a scandal when that word implies secrecy and subterfuge. Something different is needed to describe a process that has been going on, with varying degrees of brazenness, for decades.
Operating via a fixer, David Lloyd George was said to have charged £40,000 – well over a million in today’s money – for a baronetcy. Explicit transactions of that kind were outlawed in 1925. Favours then had to be brokered through nods and winks. In 1976, Harold Wilson’s “lavender list” of resignation honours attracted ridicule for the inclusion of maverick businessmen and at least one fraudster, but there was no proof that the outgoing prime minister gained any material benefit.
In 2006, Tony Blair was embroiled in a cash-for-honours affair that resulted in a criminal investigation but no charges. One newspaper columnist wrote that the case illustrated “the decay of government and the putrefaction of the honours system”. That journalist was Boris Johnson, who earlier this week used his privilege as prime minister to ennoble Peter Cruddas, a businessman, philanthropist and Conservative party donor. Mr Cruddas’s name had been rejected by the Lords appointments commission. Mr Johnson deemed their judgment unfair and overruled it. That is not a healthy precedent, irrespective of any specific case.
According to one analysis, 22 donors to the three main English parties (the majority of them Tory) have found seats in the Lords since 2007. Their combined contributions amount to £50.4m. That calculation does not include other kinds of cronyism – the draping of ermine on media friends and special advisers. Sometimes the recipients bring valuable expertise to the upper chamber but, if so, it is as likely to be coincidence as the cause of their elevation.
The Lords contains worthy legislators. Some of them happen also to be former party donors. It is not an intrinsically disreputable activity. But they swim in the same pool as all the coasting mediocrities, anachronistic aristocrats and serial absentees who contribute nothing to British public life except embarrassment. There are more than 800 peers. The Lords have agreed that 600 should be the limit, and also that fixed 15-year terms should be introduced. Nothing has yet come of that plan. There are always more pressing things for governments to do. Constitutional reform is not a priority for many voters. Prime ministers do not willingly relinquish levers of patronage. The rot, untreated, spreads.
The deeper problem is complacency in a political culture that expends more rhetoric celebrating its vintage as a democracy than effort maintaining good democratic practice. It should be disgraceful that seats in the legislature are doled out like baubles, but no disgrace sticks. It should be intolerable, but it is obviously tolerated. It should be unsustainable but, for that to be so, politicians must refuse to sustain it. Perhaps a future government will take that step. The present one is too far steeped in the dismal tradition to allow much expectation of improvement.
• The picture on this article was changed on 24 December 2020, from one of judges to one of the House of Lords, to better reflect the content of the editorial.
