It's true that the fountain of honour has ever been polluted by politicians rewarding their bankrollers and buddies with baubles. Margaret Thatcher - the alderman's daughter - did it. John Major - the classless gnome man - did it. Old Labour did it; New Labour does it. Even those saintly Liberal Democrats are not above it. Hypocrisy being the compliment vice pays to virtue, at least the parties used to feel it necessary to pretend that this was not so.
The creation of Lord Ashcroft, peer of the tawdry realm where politics shakes hands with money, tears aside the curtain. This takes us into brazen territory. There has been precious little attempt to pretend that this lording has not been paid for. The apologists for William Hague's apparently suicidal decision say the poor man literally could not afford not to press for an Ashcroft peerage. The Conservatives owe their Sugar Daddy so big. They simply can't manage without their most generous benefactor.
I've heard Lord Strathclyde, the leader of the Tories upstairs, blustering a bit about charitable works. But no one mistakes Michael Ashcroft for Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Everyone knows that his favourite charity is the Conservative Party. The man himself has been commendably candid about his desires. He has told us that he regards the ermine as his due as treasurer to the Tory party. All his predecessors had one. So should he. To a money man, the transaction is straightforward. A perch in the legislature for life is his just reward for being the cash dispenser to the Conservatives.
There's a bit of me that is glad that rich men covet silly titles. Better cash for coronets than cash for contracts. There's another part of me that rather pities the desperate yearning, an appetite by no means confined to Conservatives, to become a gilded nob. What does a peerage bring a man like Michael Ashcroft that he does not already have? He surely does not struggle to secure reservations at the restaurants of his choice. He has the yacht, the jet, the helicopter, the off-shore bank. What is one vote in the British Parliament when he seems to own the whole of Belize?
Those who have passed through the sumptuous portals of his mansion in Westminster offer gob-smacked accounts of the glass lift, the marble escalators and the Victoria Crosses in his medal collection. Is this a clue? If you use your money to buy a piece of other men's heroism, I guess a peerage might seem to be a way of taking a slice of other men's greatness. Park your bum in Parliament and soak up the reflected glory of William Gladstone and Winston Churchill. It does not, of course, make you fit to wipe their plinths.
Truly great men have never needed the diminishing encumbrance of titles. Gladstone was laid in the ground as a proudly plain Mister. Churchill turned down the invitation to take up a hereditary dukedom.
So why was a peerage worth all the grief it has brought down on the head of Ashcroft? So great is the thirst for ermine that he is even prepared to bear the unprecedented humiliation and - doubtless large - expense of not being allowed to acquire his nobbery until he has returned from tax exile. It can only encourage further interest in his exotic business affairs, just as his desire for a title provoked investigation of them to begin with. Was it really worth all that to win for Michael Ashcroft the dubious privilege of sharing those claret-stained benches with Lord Archer of Lies?
You have to conclude that it means so much to the Conservative Party treasurer because he thinks it means something to the rest of us. There is still a cachet to be acquired from the attachment of a feudal handle to your name. He takes us to be a forelocking-tugging, half-democratic country which continues to cringe before a man who is announced as a 'Lord'. The peerage is a purchase on admiration and respectability.
What it has actually brought down on him is another dumper truck of the brown stuff. It is nothing but an embarrassment to the party he professes to love and the leader he says he admires. The shabby haggling with the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee demeans everyone involved, especially William Hague. He proclaimed, when he first became Conservative leader, the laudable intention to deep cleanse his party until it was 'whiter than white'. Now it looks as pure as the driven sludge.
Baroness Jay, Labour's leader in the Lords, wrinkles her nose, curls a lip and calls it 'stinking'. But she is surely grateful that the ripe smell of the Tories masks the unfragrant odour coming off Labour. The Government shares in the disgrace. It is the semi-reformed, bastard House of Lords of Tony Blair's creation which is open for auction. The old corruption of hereditary legislators had to go, and largely has. What lingers on bears no relationship to the clean-limbed, invigorated democracy, 'tough on sleaze and tough on the causes of sleaze', that the Prime Minister once pledged to us.
In so much as Blair ever developed a theory about the Lords, it was an almost entirely cynical one. He has used it as a backdoor into Parliament for able mates whom he wanted to turn into Ministers without the tiresome fuss involved in getting them elected. Arise my Lords Charlie Falconer, Gus Macdonald and David Sainsbury. New Labour has tried packing the Upper House with place-persons who could be relied on to find their way into the Government lobby blindfolded. That compulsion has been mitigated, but not excused, as some of the hands that New Labour fed with titles have turned round and bitten the Government in rebellions.
Tony Blair has also used the Lords - no less than previous Prime Ministers - as a payback for loyalty, especially when it is of the bankable kind. Take a bow, my Lords Ali, Bernstein, Bragg, Gavron, Levy and Puttnam. These may all be fine fellows, outstanding in their achievements in the arts or business, worthy of distinction on their own account, but the presence of money in the equation taints their honours and dishonours our legislature. One half of Parliament should not be turned into a receptacle for Tony's Cronies and William's Bankers.
Both leaders say that their ideal Britain of the twenty-first century is a meritocratic democracy. If they mean it, if that is more than rhetorical flatulence, then they should not find it difficult to agree on what to do next. Send in the bulldozers. Demolish the entire corrupted edifice and rebuild it on the principle of election, the only legitimate foundation for a legislature.
I'm under no illusions. Politicians will eternally feel the need to scratch the backs of their chums. Money will always talk. What we can demand of Messrs Blair and Hague is that they do not let money insult our democracy quite so obscenely.
Entitling Michael Ashcroft to dress in stoat skin does not ennoble him. And it degrades the rest of us.
