ON December 14 last year, Tony Blair added another soiled feather to his cap when he became the first British prime minister to be questioned by police as part of a criminal investigation. It happened to be the day on which Lord Stevens was scheduled to release the results of his investigation into the death of Princess Diana. The government picked the same day to drop a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into allegation that British arms manufacturer BAE Systems had secured contracts by bribing members of the Saudi royal family. It also announced the closure of 2,500 post offices and published a white paper on the future of British airports.
It could all have been a coincidence, but it’s hard to get away from the impression that it was a concerted attempt to diminish the impact of Blair’s unprecedented encounter with Scotland Yard detectives. The attempted burial wasn’t spectacularly successful, and Downing Street took pains to emphasize that the prime minister was interviewed as a witness rather than as a suspect. It also insisted that the experience was unlikely to be repeated.
It was correct on the first count and wrong on the second. Police officers interrogated Blair a second time late last month: his status remained unchanged, but he was asked to keep the interview secret for a while. Four days later, Blair aide and confidant Lord Levy was briefly taken into custody. Earlier in January, Blair’s director of government relations, Ruth Turner, had been arrested on suspicion of violating the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act and perverting the course of justice.
The investigation that led to these developments was launched nearly a year ago, following a complaint to the police by a diligent young Scottish National Party MP, Angus MacNeil, who was evidently alarmed by indications that sizeable donations and/or loans to the two main political parties could lead to nominations for peerages. Scotland Yard found there was sufficient substance in the allegation for the matter to be pursued, initially centring on the case of four businessmen who had collectively lent the Labour Party £4.5 million in the run-up to the 2005 general election, and who had subsequently been nominated for peerages. Suspicions of wrongdoing grew when the party’s treasurer pleaded ignorance about the loans.
The first person to be arrested, back in April 2006, in connection with what has been dubbed the cash-for-honours affair was Des Smith, who had been involved in finding wealthy sponsors for the government’s city academies. Levy was first arrested in July last year, but that wasn’t by any means the first time his activities had been surrounded by the whiff of corruption. Not the ideal candidate, one would have thought, for the role of the governing party’s chief fundraiser. But that wasn’t the only job that came his way from No.10 Downing Street: he has also served as Blair’s personal Middle East envoy. He has hardly been a resounding success in that capacity either, given his close connections with Israel.
Within the next few weeks, Scotland Yard is expected to complete its investigation and pass on the files to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will then decide whether, and against whom, any charges are to be brought.
Somewhat surprisingly, one aspect of the cash-for-honours scandal that appears to have attracted little attention in Britain is the murky light in which it casts the honours system as a whole, particularly the unelected House of Lords, an anachronistic institution that occasionally appears to serve a semi-useful purpose – as it did in refusing to sanction some of the more egregious restrictions on civil liberties proposed by Blair – but which is otherwise redolent of a class system in which wealth or feudal stature brings special political privileges. Tycoons are the capitalist equivalent of the aristocracy, so the Blair administration’s efforts to elevate its benefactors are hardly a novelty in historical terms. But shouldn’t the sordid tale now unfolding have shattered the complacency that has hitherto hindered reform or relegation of the British parliament’s upper chamber?
There was a time when the idea of transforming the House of Lords into a less undemocratic entity was on New Labour’s agenda. But that was long ago. Now Blair faces the prospect of sudden resignation, in the event of charges formally being laid against Levy or Ruth Turner. A large number of ministers, shadow ministers and MPs on both sides of politics have faced police questioning, and there is some frustration in Labour (and presumably Conservative) ranks over the fact that Scotland Yard has chosen this juncture to look into a breach of the law that has been fairly common practice over the decades. On the other hand, it is never too late (or, for that matter, too soon) to put an end to corrupt practices.
Growing evidence of the sleaze factor has inevitably increased pressure on Blair to hasten his departure. He was anyhow expected to quit as prime minister by the middle of the year, possibly announcing a departure date after self-rule is re-established in Northern Ireland next month. Why not do so without further ado? The going hasn’t been good for four years now, but it seems to get worse with each passing day.
Loyalists, however, are concerned that unexpected haste would seem like a confession of guilt. Even some adversaries are of the opinion that the prime minister deserves the opportunity to clear his name. Some of them are evidently of the view that Blair’s closest aides could have dished out promises of peerages and other honours to potential Labour donors without the prime minister’s knowledge. Were that the case, it would be an even more compelling reason for Blair to depart forthwith. Greed, after all, is a fairly common human failing, not always condonable but hardly a hanging offence. Ignorance in a head of government, on the other hand, is often an intolerable failing.
Besides, more or less everyone knows that Blair is indeed guilty of a much graver breach of morality than the one under investigation. Petty corruption invites a mixture of pathos and contempt; misleading your nation into war is a crime of a different order. The prime minister did not commit it alone, although he was clearly the chief instigator – at a time when, it is now reasonably clear, the British government was well aware that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had no dangerous weapons and posed no conceivable threat to Britain.
It has been suugested that Blair’s accomplices – members of his cabinet who, unlike Clare Short and the late Robin Cook, did not have the courage to resign – are more guilty than him: after all, they did not possess his messianic zeal for regime change or share his faith in unquestioning subservience to the White House. Why, then, did not mount a concerted effort to prevent British embroilment in an inevitably messy conflict? A cabinet revolt would almost certainly have sparked a rebellion in Labor’s parliamentary ranks, and Blair could have been prevented from committing the profoundest folly of his political career. According to the diaries of ex-minister David Blunkett, chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown fell into line over Iraq only after he became convinced that he would otherwise be sacked.
This spineless man is now expected to take over as prime minister once Blair makes up his mind to go, and he is likely to be surrounded by other invertebrates. In retrospect, there is much to be said for the thesis that Tony Blair set out not to reinvent but to destroy the Labour Party. Small wonder, then, that he reputedly enjoys comparing himself with Margaret Thatcher, who boasted a similar agenda and caused possibly irreparable damage to Britain. Thatcher’s political relationship with Ronald Reagan was the pre-eminent ideological romance of the 1980s; even so, she was well aware of his deficiencies in the intellectual department and stopped short of being a blind follower.
Blair apparently can’t help getting turned on by the power that George W. Bush wields, and the lack of reciprocity doesn’t seem to bother him. Once his excuse for obsequiousness was that it allowed poor and powerless Britain the privilege of exerting some influence on American policy-making. That notion turned out to be pure fantasy, but Blair’s passion remains undimmed. He recently told MPs, “The relationship with America is what opens lots of doors everywhere.†That may be true of the Saudi royal household, but it betrays an studied indifference to the overwhelmingly negative global perception of Bush’s America. It’s appropriate, then, that the only door obviously open to Blair at the moment is clearly marked “exitâ€.
It has lately emerged that for the past 18 months Blair has been making plans for his post-Downing Street future, focusing on initiatives for combating climate change. That’s a vital issue, but it’s probably too late for Super-Tony to save the world, given that his stature has steadily been diminishing in recent years. What the world needs even more urgently is a change in the political climate, and in that context Blair can offer no solutions because he is inextricably a part of the problem. It is Iraq and acquiescence to US tutelage that will loom large in his legacy, not Cool Britannia or Kyoto 2. If he is waiting for permission from the White House or the promise of pocket money from Rupert Murdoch before implementing his personal exit strategy, let’s hope he gets it soon. Because as far as Britain is concerned, Blair has outstayed his welcome for much too long.
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