Like all of the best fairy tales, the message of the Emperor’s New Clothes has never lost its imaginative grip, even though it is nearly 200 years since it was published. In a latter-day telling, the story might be built around the idea of a group of cunning metrosexuals persuading some 21st-century imperial parallel, like, say, Kim Kardashian, that it is worth wearing a frock that costs as much as it would to keep a family of four in luxury for a month – and then persuading the rest of us to envy her.
Or it could be the entire senior management of one of the world’s most admired car makers convincing global regulators that they only need to believe the results of the lab tests on emissions, and never mind the actual performance.
Or it could be the preposterous effrontery of a man like Lord Ashcroft, a witty and insightful commentator on politics, who has managed to persuade himself that co-authoring a book in order to take revenge on a man who refused to let him buy his way into government would be worse for David Cameron than for himself. It is conceivable that if Cameron had thought he could get away with giving a tax exile a ministerial job he probably would have been pretty chillaxed about it, but that is a whole other story.
The point is that the world is at least as full as it ever was with con merchants who set out to manipulate perceptions, and a great gullible citizenry who don’t mind being manipulated if they feel good afterwards.
That is why the reputational damage to Volkswagen will do more harm to the company’s long-term prospects than losing billions of dollars in fines and legal challenges. Big business rarely appears to lose much sleep over what it does to evade regulators or keep its consumers in ignorance. We know that, but we are still predisposed to believe them just enough to make a choice between their products on the basis of what they tell us.
But now, senior executives at VW, not to mention the Völker of Lower Saxony, which owns 12.5% of the company and 20% of the voting rights, will not be so cosy at night. They may hope that the full and immediate confession that they have made will stop the rot, but they know that there is a ritual to be observed once the fiction can no longer be sustained. Who knows what those famous glass factories will be used for next?
But politics is just as damaged and a lot less likely to do anything about it. It can hardly be a surprise that Lord Ashcroft imagined that £8m and a lot of his time would secure him if not a place in cabinet, a hot seat in the second tier. After all, only a few hundred thousand pounds buys a seat in the Lords these days, and it is commonplace to be both a party donor and a government office holder.
Big business will go wrong again, but probably not in quite the same way. The tension between regulator, consumer and industry is never in perfect balance but there is a relationship that succeeds in changing behaviour at least at the margin.
Maybe politics needs a better regulator. But it would probably have to be something like the Spanish Inquisition to fix its failings without changing anything else. While patronage exists on one hand and big money on the other, it is hard to imagine how to stop the venality of a few besmirching the reputation of the rest.
Maybe the most contemporary aspect of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is that it worked because the con merchant-tailors told their client, and more importantly his court, that the new outfit was so exquisite only those with superior powers of perception could actually see it. It was, by one of those odd coincidences, published just as work on building the new Palace of Westminster was about to start.
