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Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne is the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator.

Our Parliament is rotten to the core

By Peter Oborne Politics Last updated: November 12th, 2010

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Little has changed since the expenses scandal (Photo: EPA)

Before starting in journalism, I worked at the banking house of N M Rothschild. Though fundamentally ill-suited to and, indeed, useless at my job, I did learn the importance of absolute devotion to fact.

All statements of profits, assets or any other material consideration in an offer-for-sale document were rigorously checked, then checked again. It was drilled into us that failure to tell the truth, even inadvertently, was a criminal offence, punishable in the last resort by jail.

This training was one reason why I was so puzzled when, a number of years later, I began work as a reporter in the parliamentary press gallery. Of course, I relished the hyperbole, exaggeration and vulgar abuse which has done so much to enliven political discourse since time immemorial. What struck me hard, however, was the realisation that ministers and government spokesmen were systematically and deliberately making false statements – lying – on the record in Parliament and to the press.

This culture of deception became a perfectly normal instrument of government under New Labour, and, in due course, I documented hundreds of examples in my book, The Rise of Political Lying. One of the worst cases was Tony Blair’s notorious dossier of September 2002 which made the case for the Iraq War. Had this document been an offer-for-sale prospectus, Blair’s fatal tendency to convert speculation into incontrovertible fact would have invited the attention of the fraud squad.

The toleration of deceit carried on for years after the Iraq invasion, reaching its culmination with last year’s expenses scandal, when this newspaper disclosed the appalling truth that the House of Commons itself was engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to steal from the British taxpayer. The scale of the fraud was so audacious that our leading politicians had no choice but to acknowledge that something had gone horribly wrong.

To his credit, David Cameron responded with a promise to restore trust in British politics. Six months have now passed – enough time to make a preliminary judgment on how the Prime Minister is carrying out this task. Sadly, the conclusion must be that little has changed.

Let us examine first the case of the Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who was cleared last month by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner of wrongly claiming some £60,000 in second-home allowances. Central to Dorries’s defence was her assertion that she spent the bulk of her time in her old house in the Cotswolds (billed as her primary home) rather than her Bedfordshire constituency, which she stated was her secondary residence (and, therefore, allowable for expenses). Here, though, Dorries ran into an apparently insuperable problem: she had incriminated herself in her blog by giving the strong impression that she spent the majority of her time in Bedfordshire. Miss Dorries got around this difficulty by informing the parliamentary standards commissioner that “my blog is 70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”

In other words, her blog was, for the most part, a lie, designed to give constituents the impression that she was doing her duty as a diligent MP in Bedfordshire when actually she was in another part of the country altogether. This is a wretched state of affairs and if David Cameron were a Tory leader who valued integrity and honesty, he would surely have ordered Miss Dorries to apologise personally to her constituents, and stripped her of the party whip there and then. Instead, he has done nothing.

Another troubling example concerns Bill Wiggin, an old schoolfriend of the Prime Minister, who claimed interest payments for a property in his Leominster constituency which turned out not to have a mortgage. When the Telegraph exposed this pertinent omission, Mr Cameron was swift to accept Wiggin’s defence that it was all a dreadful misunderstanding. This is what the PM told breakfast television on May 21 last year: “It looks like it’s an honest mistake and he was not claiming money that he wasn’t entitled to. Now if he was, that would be totally different and he would be out of the door.” David Cameron felt so confident in Bill Wiggin’s integrity that he went to the lengths of making him a Government whip when the Coalition was formed in May.

Sadly for Mr Wiggin, the Prime Minister’s confidence turned out not to be justified. Three weeks ago, the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee determined that he had wrongly claimed for his expenses and ordered him to apologise to the House. David Cameron has since failed to take the action he promised. Wiggin retains the backing of the Tory party, and his Government job.

The most troubling of the three recent examples of parliamentary deception, however, concerns last week’s devastating court judgment against Phil Woolas, the MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth. The full gravity of the finding against Woolas can only be properly grasped by reading the judgment in its entirety. But it can be summed up as follows: Woolas used his election literature to assert that his Liberal Democrat opponent was in league with violent Muslim “extremists”, even though he knew this was not true. His lie was especially loathsome because, as private email evidence suggested, it was intended to “get the white vote angry”. In short, Woolas was pandering to anti-Muslim emotions in a constituency disfigured by race riots only nine years ago.

The most extraordinary thing about the Woolas debacle has been the reaction to it. One national newspaper published a leader condemning the judges’ decision. There has been a wave of sympathy from fellow MPs of all parties. Charles Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, is reportedly advising Woolas; Cherie Blair sent a friendly note and Gordon Brown is said to be supportive, as is David Miliband, the former foreign secretary.

Inside the rarefied atmosphere of the House of Commons, the persecuted party has been Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader. With Ed Miliband on paternity leave, she sacked Woolas as soon as the court judgment was made. But poor Harman, who appears to have behaved impeccably, was practically lynched for her pains at a meeting of the parliamentary party.

There is a common thread to these stories. All three cases show that lying and cheating are still regarded as acceptable conduct by the British Political Class. Our MPs continue to regard themselves as somehow beyond the basic morality that applies to their fellow citizens. I used to believe that this arrogant and dishonest approach to politics was peculiar to New Labour. Now it looks like common practice for all parties.

It is true that the job of prime minister is incredibly demanding, and David Cameron has little or no time to attend to what may seem to him like obscure matters of party management. But he should be careful. While he travels the globe making grand bargains with world leaders, the stench of deceit and corruption is once again beginning to fill the Tory benches.

Tags: Bill Wiggin, conservative, David Cameron, Iraq War, labour, MPs' expenses, Nadine Dorries, New Labour, phil woolas