David Cameron's decision to abandon all thought of asking his shadow cabinet team to give up their part-time moonlighting jobs in the private sector invites the question: "What on earth made him think they might?"
As Nick Watt reports in today's Guardian, several shadow ministers made it plain they would step down if the party leader insisted on no moonlighting. More explicitly, the Mail's Ben Brogan claims that "William Hague threatened to lead a walk-out."
There's a basic misunderstanding here which causes all sorts of problems in this puritanical age when voters expect their political leaders to behave far better than many of them do themselves. It is that being an MP is a "full-time job".
Well, it is for some MPs, and some of them make a virtuous song and dance of the fact. But for others it's not. They can perform sterling work for their constituents and turn in good work as parliamentarians – better at both than some of the 100% crowd, I suspect – and still have bags of spare brain power to devote to other causes.
We all know people like that in all walks of life, juggling three jobs, a family or two and voluntary work. "Where does she get the energy from? " and "Does he do it for love, money or just satisfaction?" we ask ourselves.
Besides, there are lots of ways to be a decent MP – and a bad one. Some adore the constituency work, hate Westminster. With others it's the other way round. Some are ambitious, some parochial. Far too few want to hold the executive branch's feet to the fire – especially their own party. Some ask loads of written parliamentary questions (quite a costly vice), others none at all. It's no test of virtue. Being an MP isn't a nine-to-five kind of job. All MPs are "full-time." They don't stop when they go home.
Hague is a good case in point. Elected in 1989 as MP for Richmond at 28, the former boy wonder (I heard him lecturing Mrs T from the Tory conference platform at 16) zoomed towards cabinet rank (1995) and was an ex-party leader by the time he was 40 in 2001.
My own diagnosis is that Hague was wrong to leapfrog Michael Howard, whose running mate he was supposed to be in 1997. He'd probably be leader now if he'd been more patient and the voters might well have taken to him when he was older.
Either way he's very clever, hard-working and, incidentally, genuinely witty. I once heard Hague and Rory Bremner do successive turns at a Tory event: Hague was funnier. But as the Mail's list of moonlit jobs indicates, he can also juggle the shadow foreign secretaryship with what looks like three lucrative boardroom/adviser jobs and after-dinner speeches.
Oh yes, and write well-regarded books. I picked up a hardback copy of his William Pitt for £2 and plan to read it when time allows. He's since done another biography of Pitt's chum, William Wilberforce. What an Olympic polymath, well worth that reported £1m a year – and he still has a majority of 39%. No pickings in Richmond for Lib Dem raiders!
The Mail's list suggests that Alan Duncan (business), Andrew Mitchell (a fanatically busy shadow development spokesman) and Lord Tom Strathclyde (Lords) are the shadow cabinet's other main moonlighters, and policy wonk-meister, Oliver Letwin, grandly remains a director of a Rothschild subsidiary.
None of them is daft, lazy or incompetent. You could chuck in Ken Clarke, who sits on boards, including BAT's, the tobacco barons, just to annoy people, but makes Commons speeches on stuff he knows about - quite a lot – which are worth hearing.
At 68, going on 45, he could be said to have done his national service, including 18 years unbroken ministerial office (1979-97). But he likes it and has things to say.
You could say the same about John Gummer, Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Howard, the independent-minded Douglas Hogg and other old hands, or for that matter the clever never-was minister, Bob Marshall-Andrews QC on the Labour left.
BMA still works the courts and finds time to cause trouble in parliament. Only the other day he was exposing the sin of "planted questions" – those circulated by ministers to obliging colleagues so they can "help".
The Tory moonlighting problem is particularly acute for Cameron and his sidekick, George Osborne, because they are the beneficiaries of inherited wealth – Cameron's wife is wealthy too, while Osborne combines newly-remade family money (wallpaper) with being heir to a 1629 baronetcy. Less fortunate colleagues are acutely aware of such disparities.
***Since it is Christmas eve and the spirit of the reformed Scrooge is abroad in the land we should note in passing that Cameron's party treasurer, Michael Spencer, is not as much trouble as some headlines today might suggest.
After David Ross was forced to quit Mayor Boris's side after using shares improperly as collateral, Spencer, who is seriously rich, reviewed his own use of shares as security against a bank loan. His lawyers changed their earlier opinion and urged him to declare it.
Probably nothing will come of rule checks now underway with regard to the loan. But Spencer has previously sailed close to the wind, so it serves as a handy reminder to Dave that voters do not look kindly on self-styled Masters of the City Universe during a recession.
I would not go as far as my old comrade, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who writes in today's Guardian that Cameron is a mere opportunist and not a very skilful one at that. Geoffrey's book, The Strange Death of Tory England, weas unlucky enough to be published in 2005, the very year the Tories started turning the corner.
But it ain't over until it's over. Parties have been known to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before now.
