Tories don’t take bribes (mostly)

‘Nostalgia’, one of my favourite pieces of graffiti proclaims, ‘isn’t what it used to be’.

Ah, nostalgia, nostalgia. It’s supposed to give you a warm feeling about a past you remember with affection, as better than the present. In reality, though, the past was often no better at all. Or even very different.

Take Britain today. It makes me feel I’m reliving the nineties. That was the last time the Tories had been in power for over a decade, and the place was drowning in sleaze. A friend with a collapsing company once told me, ‘everything’s fine. I’m keeping my nose just below water. It’s great, as long as I don’t try to breathe’. 

That was John Major’s Conservative government. The sleaze was over its nose, and it was failing to swim to the surface again. To what extent that eventually led to its fall, and its replacement by Tony Blair’s New Labour, is hard to say – there are always multiple factors at play when a party loses its grip on power – but it certainly can’t have helped.

Why did we call the scandal merely sleaze? Because Tories don’t go for outright corruption. They don’t take bribes. 

As a rule.

As with any rule, there are exceptions to prove this one. Take Neil Hamilton. With a mate of his and fellow Tory MP, Tim Smith, he accepted brown envelopes of banknotes to ask parliamentary questions on behalf of people rich enough to buy influence in the House of Commons. The Guardian exposed the behaviour, and Hamilton sued. But eventually, realising he had no hope of winning, he dropped the case. In response, the Guardian then published a famous headline, branding him ‘a liar and a cheat’.

He never challenged that description. Which rather confirms it.

The problem with Hamilton is that he’d been in too much of a hurry. He did things which were not actually criminal – he escaped prison – but which weren’t just unethical, they were far too obviously unethical. It became undeniable – literally, since he couldn’t deny it – and that meant he’d gone too far.

If you’re in less of a hurry, and more subtle in your approach, you can get away with plundering the system for far longer and never be exposed. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the French political philosopher Frédéric Bastiat explained:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Which takes us neatly to the scandal engulfing today’s Conservative government. 

The Bullingdon Club, finishing school for entitled vandals
They would trash restaurants knowing their parents would pay
Two future prime ministers appear in this picture:
David Cameron, second from left, back row
Boris Johnson, on the right of the three sitting down
(confirming that he stands for nothing) 

David Cameron, the Prime Minister before last, and Boris Johnson, the current one, were both trained from early days to believe themselves entitled to the best they could help themselves to, from British society. They were together at Eton, the most privileged school in Britain, and their paths crossed again in the Bullingdon club for entitled and vandalistic rich kids at Oxford University, before both being elected as Conservative MPs in 2001. 

Boris Johnson recently claimed with glee that Britain’s Covid vaccine success had been spurred by ‘greed and capitalism’. He was joking, but there’s many a true word spoken in jest. Greed, regarded by some as a mortal sin, is a way of life for him (he even complains about struggling to get by on a Prime Minister’s salary).

His tribute to greed is just the kind of thing Bastiat meant, when he talked about glorifying plunder. Johnson has plundered with great gusto, funnelling taxpayers’ funds to a lover, or awarding contracts to friends who will, in turn, help finance his next election campaign. They’ll no doubt also provide him with a much more substantially remunerated private sector post once he finally leaves office.

That blurring of the lines between public sector and private is at the heart of the latest scandal. While Prime Minister, Cameron employed the founder of the now insolvent bank Greensill as an adviser in Downing Street; at least two senior civil servants moonlighted for Greensill; after he left office, Cameron became a director of Greensill himself and has now been caught lobbying government on behalf of the company. Had he succeeded, he’d have benefited to the tune of £60 million. Plunder, then, on a grand scale. And all within the rules of the system he and other Tories had created.

As Bastiat put it, they build a legal system that authorises plunder.

Johnson, proving that there’s no loyalty even between thieves, has decided to throw Cameron under the bus. There are now six enquiries under way into his behaviour over Greensill. Like so many enquiries, they may just delay things until the public lose interest, and bury the truth in thousands of pages of verbiage, but they’re clearly at least causing Cameron some discomfort. 

Some may say, “it isn’t only the Tories who plunder”. Maybe. Peter Mandelson, close adviser to New Labour’s Tony Blair declared, “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, an extraordinary statement from a Labour politician, apparently indifferent to the fact that celebrating filth only makes everything filthier. Labour failed to clean up the system. However, with so much more time in power, the chief architects of that system were certainly the Tories. 

That’s why they (generally) don’t take bribes. Why would they need to? It was once said of journalists:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, 
Thank God! the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

The Tories will plunder, without scruple, and unbribed. What would they need bribes for? And the worst of it is that people vote for them anyway.

After all, look at what happened to Neil Hamilton. He never made it back into the British parliament. But he’s a member of the Welsh Parliament. A plunderer caught but back in elective office anyway.

Let’s face it, if we vote for plunderers, we can only expect to be plundered.