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Berlusconi lends Blair £15 millionYes, good old Silvio Berlusconi has come to the aid of his holiday friend and fellow accused Tony. Tony in turn has agreed to donate £15 million to the Labour Party to enable the party to repay sundry borrowing. Problem solved. Not true you cry – but is this story that implausible? Would Lloyd George have done it? Has Tony Blair and Lord Levy broken the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act? The simple answer is yes – and this time there might be more than a £50 fine and two custodial months. History does tend to repeat itself. Lloyd George’s Lord Levy, Maundy Gregory was the son of an impoverished clergyman, who had gone down from Oxford without a degree, failed disastrously as a theatrical producer but developed a talent for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful. After the First World War, Gregory passed himself off as an ostentatiously wealthy publisher, producing the Whitehall Gazette from a splendid office in Parliament Street, Westminster. He cultivated cordial relations with Scotland Yard and gained access to government ministers, chief among them the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. By the early 1920s, Gregory had been taken on by the liberal Chief Whip, Freddy Guest, as a freelance "honours broker", selling titles in exchange for donations to party funds, while creaming off substantial commissions for himself. Scandalous though it was, there was nothing illegal about such activities until 1925, when an Act was passed making it an offence to trade titles. Lord Levy appears to have many of the characteristics of Maundy Gregory – indeed when one compares the characters about Gregory with those about Blair there are an amazing number of parallels. The stories are true but the names haven’t been changed. You can adjudge for yourself who their modern parallel is or what current happening is reflected – Iraq; Dr. Kelly; Mr Mills; Lockerbie are but some comparisons. Arthur Maundy Gregory Victor Grayson Sidney Reilly Vernon Kell Basil Thompson Zinoviev Letter Thereafter there are two thought provoking essays from the Daily Telegraph – these too are worthy of your consideration. When politicians obsess about money, corruption is inevitable Blair taints not just himself, but his office So, after due consideration, you might then decide some people must go – but who? Martin Frost
2006-03-22 Well, we now know who did it - the 12 Labour lenders had their pictures displayed on the front of this newspaper yesterday - and we think we know why. They probably yearned for a peerage (well, not Lord Sainsbury, who already has one: but who could blame a man worth £1.71 billion for fancying advancement to an earldom or even a marquessate?). And we suspect that politics has always been like this, and this is simply a throwback to a baroque form of indulgence, where magnates rolled up with their pots of gold and bought their way into the Lords. However, to take this view, understandable though it might be, misses part of the point about modern corruption in politics, and fails to expose its true current of sheer badness. Corruption in our political life is more prevalent now, and in relative terms more shocking, than it has ever been. I know about your Walpoles, but that was in an age before the Reform Acts, when everything about the acquisition of power, in either House, was as bent as a nine-bob note. Also, politics was then almost totally the province of men who were already rich, not of those on the make, so the room for personal financial corruption was less. And I know about your Lloyd Georges, but those were the days when a monarch (in this case George V), confronted with an honours list bearing names of rascals and rapscallions, simply refused to make two of them peers. More to the point, for his role as Lloyd George's honours broker Maundy Gregory went to jail, and something called the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act was created to stop such episodes occurring again. And indeed, for almost all the rest of the 20th century, save for a blip in 1976 by Harold Wilson, in the first stages of senile dementia, they were stopped. The whiff of corruption now is down to a series of linked factors. The first is that we have a Prime Minister whose moral judgment has deserted him, as it did with Lloyd George when he sought to fund his sect of the Liberal Party after the First World War. Worse, something only nascent in those early days of rapid social mobility - the assumption that a peerage was an essential adjunct to a high position in mercantile society that should come as of right - is now commonplace. Imagine, for example, being around Lord Levy's sumptuous dining table in what (without irony, apparently) is described as his "hacienda-style mansion" in north London. Three or four of the others present already adorn the red benches of the Lords. You don't. For all your millions, and the self-confident standing they should confer on you, you start with some discomfort to sense you are eavesdroping on the proceedings of an important sub-committee of a club from which, peculiarly, you are for the moment rigidly excluded. You see, in a blinding flash, that you are being denied the final confirmation of your arrival in that elite and select band of Britain's most important and successful businessmen. You can sense the disagreeable feeling of chagrin exuding from your as yet untitled wife at the other end of the table, as your host charms her with tales of life in the Upper House and at the court of King Tony. Why, Lord Levy won't need to ask you to open your cheque book to help rectify this matter. The future Lady Muck will be doing that herself the minute the door of the Bentley clunks shut for the journey home. You might also begin to realise, albeit subconsciously, one of the other truths about all this. It is that the bigger the state has become, and the more power it has sequestered to itself, the more obsessed with spending money - other people's money, that is - politicians have become. Big government likes big cheques, and offers allegedly big rewards in return, without even a nod to scruple. I wish this were just true of Labour, but it isn't. Some pretty rum coves have lent huge amounts to the Tories in recent years and, with Mr Blair's complicity, they now sit in the Lords as well. Before the Lib Dems engage in their own burst of self-righteousness, let us not forget the £2.4 million donation they accepted before the last election from Michael Brown, a businessman who is not even registered to vote in this country, but who is wanted for alleged fraud in America. Just as this malaise affects all parties, so it affects people at all levels in them. There is a climate in the Commons now that, at its worst extreme, allows a Prime Minister to run a party within a party and have a raft of millionaire lenders unknown even to his own treasurer and his Deputy Prime Minister. In the days when people went into the Commons because they were motivated by public service, they were somewhat better judges of the motives of others - such as those who might be eager to write large cheques for their parties. They also knew whom to keep at arm's length. That cordon sanitaire has been dismantled. Anyone's money will do, and they will usually be rewarded in return for it. This cynicism pervades all parties, and reflects the fact that the Commons is now staffed predominantly (though, thank God, not yet exclusively) by those whose main motivation on going into politics is to have a career and make money. So when Lord Levy does the rounds for Mr Blair, almost everyone concerned shrugs his shoulders and accepts such behaviour as now being par for the course. It was not so long ago that matters were conducted differently. When probably the most successful treasurer the Tories had ever had, Lord McAlpine of West Green, raised millions for the party during the Thatcher years, he did so according to strict rules. Money was taken from successful men such as Lord King or Lord Hanson, who had already been ennobled, and for reasons that were blindingly obvious and had nothing to do with bankrolling the party. Donations were refused from people who, having had the rule run over them, were deemed dodgy. Some who sought peerages didn't get them (though one or two got lucky in the Major years, once McAlpine had gone). Mind you, in those days there were no police investigations about honours for sale. It would have disgusted Margaret Thatcher had it been put to her that peerages might be. In exploring legal action over the non-arrival of his own peerage, might one of Mr Blair's donors, Dr Chai Patel, think he was party to a done deal, with Lord Levy or some other senior Labour figure? Dr Patel's experience is pivotal to this matter, and we need to know. Labour would like political parties to be state-funded: and that is entirely consistent with its view that the purpose of the taxpayer is to finance jobbery on behalf of the client state in all its guises. More shockingly, a half-witted pronouncement by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, on Monday had it that the Tory party would favour state funding, too. The public has done nothing to have such self-serving iniquity foisted on it: their hatred of politicians and of what passes for our current political process is quite bad enough as it is, and no one should seek to worsen it. I am afraid that, since they cannot be trusted to behave properly, all political parties will have to be transparent in both loans and donations, and any backdoor attempt to set up trust funds or financial support groups will have to be punishable under the criminal law. And on that front, it is a relief that Scotland Yard should have launched an investigation yesterday into whether the 1925 Act has been breached by Labour selling honours. It may come as a shock to some of the high and mighty, but no one is above the law. Tony Blair has had his fair share of darkest hours since 1997. Insulated for the first eight years by a Commons majority of more than 170, he was able to come through them with flesh wounds rather than wholesale mutilations The loans for peerages scandal, which is now subject to a police investigation, is, however, of a different order. He has sustained a mortal blow to his personal credibility and what remained of his integrity. Worse still for him, his support from all levels in his party is in freefall. Senior MPs and peers have followed the lead of the party treasurer, Jack Dromey, in publicly expressing their dismay at what Mr Blair has done to his party's finances. Mr Blair is losing friends quickly. Now, and to compound this mess, some of the 12 hitherto secret donors are calling in their loans. Normally, Mr Blair would send round his acolyte Lord Levy to round up a subvention from other tame millionaires. But who in his or her right mind would donate, or lend, money to Labour now? After all, the traditional incentive - a high honour - must be out of the question. Nor is it the case that Mr Blair and New Labour make such a compelling case for continuing to govern, with an agenda guaranteed to improve Britain, that people will be willing to open their cheque books to safeguard and perpetuate "the Project". Labour could well face bankruptcy because of this grotesque financial arrangement and mismanagement. That does not merely give the party's activists more cause to despise Mr Blair and feel that he has betrayed them. It also prompts the observation that, if these people are so devious and incompetent when it comes to running their own party, is it safe to entrust them for much longer with running the country? Usually, party leaders are forced out because their adherents come to see they are becoming a liability, and might well lose the next election. Mr Blair has already said that he will not fight that election. What he now has to compute is whether his remaining in office is destroying his successor's chances of winning a fourth term for Labour. With a fourth lender and potential peer, Sir Gulam Noon, withdrawing his name from the list of nominations yesterday because of this scandal, Mr Blair is in a state of embarrassment unprecedented for a modern British prime minister. The mud from these messy dealings has well and truly stuck. That this scandal has damaged him is, in the end, but a transitory consideration. However, the damage done to his high and great office is profound. In using his formidable political brain to judge when it would be best for him to quit, Mr Blair might like to reflect that the damage done by his abuse of trust goes far beyond his own reputation, or that of his party. |
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