Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  But you’d think, in a system that flattered itself as non-mad, as I believe the British one still does, practices that are legal would be bristling with more boons for the community than those that aren’t. That’s got to be the vague rule of thumb, right? So, then, what are the good things about allowing sitting MPs to take paid work from lobbying firms? What are the upsides to that?

  The downsides are as hard to miss as a few hundred thousand litres of subterranean petrol suddenly exploding. Let’s take an example from the news. It was recently reported that James Duddridge, a Tory MP who was minister for Africa from 2014 to 2016, is being paid £3,300 for eight hours work a month by a lobbying company called Brand Communications. It’s one of the few lobbying companies not to have signed up to the industry’s code of conduct, which prohibits the employment of sitting MPs. You may say that makes it a nasty firm, but I don’t blame it. Why would it sign up to extra rules if it doesn’t have to? That’s like volunteering to observe a lower speed limit than the one prescribed by law.

  The law is absolutely fine with Duddridge’s little earner. Former ministers’ jobs just have to be approved by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, itself described by the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee as a “toothless regulator” (these committees are so bitchy!), since it has no statutory powers of redress. Then again, as its rulings are almost invariably “That’s fine”, what powers does it really need?

  Duddridge himself says it’s all legit because Brand Communications is “not a public affairs company”, but the company’s website says “James will bring his deep knowledge of Africa, experience of operating at the highest levels of government and extensive networks to Brand Communications”, which sounds a bit public affairsy to me.

  But I don’t know. Maybe it’s fine. We can’t know it’s definitely not fine. Admittedly, according to The Times, the head of one of Britain’s leading lobbying firms called it “an appalling example of bad practice”, and the chairman of the Association of Professional Political Consultants said, “MPs should not be lobbyists. It is wrong to be a lobbyist and make the law at the same time,” but maybe it’s still fine.

  Maybe James just pops in once a month and is incredibly helpful in ways that don’t conflict with his public duties. Maybe he’s full of creative ideas, a huge boost to office morale and a master of clearing photocopier jams. And then he pops back to parliament and doesn’t think about Brand Communications until the next month, no matter what issues concerning their interests cross his desk as an MP and member of the Commons International Development Committee. Yes, maybe it’s fine.

  Is that the main plus of letting sitting MPs work for lobbying firms: in any given instance, it might be fine? Because most people have got some sort of conscience, haven’t they? So fingers crossed!

  Another advantage is that it allows MPs to earn extra money, which is nice for them and reduces pressure on the taxpayer to give them more. If we prohibited them from lobbying work and “non-executive directorships” without also increasing their salaries, the job of MP would become even less attractive than it already is, which would inevitably exert downward pressure on the calibre of applicants. A sobering thought. We’re in enough trouble as it is – I’m not sure the country could survive our politicians getting any shitter.

  So those are the advantages. And the disadvantage is that, as a nation, we could be outbid for the loyalty of every single one of our legislators. I think it’s time to extinguish our cigarettes in the nearest sand bucket.

  We can’t know exactly how much MPs’ availability for lobbying work costs the country, financially and morally. But anyone can see that many laws favour powerful interest groups rather than ordinary people, so we can guess it’s a lot. Potentially, it runs to billions and our souls. But if we banned MPs from working for anyone else at all and – let’s go crazy – doubled their salaries, we know pretty precisely what that would cost: it would be £49m a year. That’s a lot of money, in a sense. In another sense, it’s 1.4p a week each.

  So we have an answer: the advantage of letting MPs work for lobbying firms is an extra penny a week each. Just a smidge over. We’re even cheaper than they are.

  * * *

  The 2017 Conservative party conference did not go well for the prime minister …

  The aspect of Theresa May’s calamitous conference speech that worried me most was the letters falling off the wall. For most viewers, that was just the amusing punchline to the sketch. The main bits were the comedian with the spoof P45, the coughing, the water, the throat sweet from Philip Hammond, the throat-sweet joke from Theresa May and, of course, Amber Rudd bullying Boris Johnson into helping her elicit a standing ovation to buy time for their leader to hawk something meaningful up in the hope of restoring medium-term vocal competence.

  Summarised like that, it sounds like a brilliantly entertaining speech. But one must remember that these titbits of non-tedium were spread out over an entire hour. It’s a gag rate that even the least sparky series of Last of the Summer Wine never stooped to. Which is why, even though I am writing an article all about the speech, I have not watched it. I absolutely refuse to watch it. Nothing on Earth is worth that.

  For me, it was all about the letters. Everything else is excusable. It’s certainly not the first time a prankster with a prepared joke has disturbed the mood of such an occasion. I imagine Simon Brodkin was rather hoping he’d be the main, if not the only, disruption to the speech. So, in a way, it was wise of May to cough her guts up to draw attention away from him. If she could have managed a full Hugh Bonneville in Downton Abbey-style blood puke, Brodkin would probably have been completely forgotten.

  She’s got a nasty cold – that doesn’t make her a bad prime minister. Obviously, she is a bad prime minister, but not because she’s got a cold. Some would argue the cold makes her a worse prime minister – and, as giving speeches without croaking and phlegming is part of the job, it’s a persuasive point. Personally, though, I think the cold, by inhibiting how effectively she can put her ideas into practice, will have marginally improved her performance in the post. If she lost her voice completely, she might rise to the dizzy heights of only as crap as Eden.

  The issue is moot anyway, because she will almost certainly recover from the cold. It’s not going to kill her, is it? Though, if it does, I think I’d still rather see her rotting remains propped against the dispatch box until the next election than let Boris Johnson form a government. But recovery is almost certain.

  I suppose, if you press me, there’s a tiny chance she neither recovers nor dies. She could become like one of those children you hear about who’ve been sneezing solidly for years in defiance of global specialists. Theresa could become a late-middle-aged version of that, with coughing and spluttering thrown in – someone just unstoppably sneezing and hacking and croaking and spitting for decades and decades. I think I’m getting a sense of what it felt like to watch the whole speech.

  If that does happen, I think the country can use it. Keep her in office, in Downing Street, but knock down the front wall and replace it with a glass screen and let tourists go and watch. For practical reasons, she’d only really be the titular head of the government, but I think, for Britain going forward, the freak-show element is something we can exploit. Particularly once all that PC nonsense from Brussels has been swept aside. We’ll be free to reopen the viewing gallery at Bedlam, shove all the animals from London Zoo back into their Tower of London dungeon, from which the bleeding-heart liberal elite unaccountably released them in 1831, and decriminalise pickpocketing and child prostitution.

  The whole of London could become a dark, Dickensian theme park, like something Scrooge would dream after a trip to Disneyland and a whole Brie. Lawless, colourful and festive. An impenetrable smog-filled labyrinth of unaffordable street food and random acid attacks. Weave your way via unlicensed minicab between the diesel particulate-smeared glass head offices of accountancy firms and blocks of fl
ats evacuated because of fire-safety concerns. The haunting sight of Theresa May pacing the cabinet room, features ravaged by the effort of constant expectoration, desperately trying to say something audible about council houses, energy suppliers or not giving up, while Japanese tourists tempt her with Strepsils, would fit perfectly into this grisly aesthetic. As a nation, we could really double down on decline.

  Sorry for the emphasis on decline, but those letters falling off really got to me. How did that happen? The specific practical answer we were given was that the magnets holding them up were loosened by the audience’s repeated standing up, sitting down and clapping. It’s an answer that raises more questions: were they not expecting lots of standing up, sitting down and clapping? Perhaps there was slightly more than average because of the need to give the PM extra coughing time, but there was always a chance that there’d be ovations because the speech was really good. Was that a possibility the organisers had ruled out?

  And why were they held on by magnets? Is that how signs are usually made? Are the “M” and “S” on an M&S held up by magnets in case they need to be quickly reversed should the company decide on an overnight kinky rebrand? Why not print the letters on the backdrop? The slogan in question – “Building a country that works for everyone” – is so banal as to insult the intelligence of everyone who sees it but, if it’s about anything, it’s about solidity and competence. Keeping the letters loose, in case of a last-minute central office command to anagrammatise it, is the wrong risk to take.

  Others blamed the fact (which was news to most of us) that the Conservatives took their events management back in-house two years ago to cut costs. That’s quite the metaphor for Brexit. They stopped sending money away to outsiders, took control themselves, and everything fell to bits.

  This was an extremely easy cock-up to avoid and, from some very important people’s point of view, it was very important to avoid it. So the fact that it happened anyway makes me queasy. This bad sign is an incredibly bad sign – about the Tories and possibly the whole country. Led by Theresa May, we’re turning into a place where the absurd and lamentable are commonplace. What an inauspicious moment in our history to become risible.

  * * *

  People don’t want to be rich any more. It’s a world turned upside down. Genies are having to completely rethink their planning strategies in anticipation of an era of altruistic lamp-rubbers. Suddenly they’ve got to find a way to make wishing for world peace turn round and bite you on the arse.

  “I’m thinking maybe an all-life-destroying pestilence, so that the ‘world peace’ is the silence that follows the death of every living thing,” a genie who refused to be named told me. “But I’m just talking off the top of my turban.”

  “It’s actually a fez.”

  “Sorry – I haven’t looked in a mirror for two millennia. Genies can’t see their own reflection.”

  “That’s vampires.”

  After that, the interview turned a bit sour and he refused to be drawn on whether Donald Trump has got any wishes left. “It’s genie–client confidentiality. But I will say I’ve been reading a hell of a lot of books about golf.”

  What I actually mean is that people don’t want to be called rich. They still want the trappings of wealth, I imagine. Big houses, big baths, big dinners, legroom, gold, a willingness to use the sort of cash machine that charges you £1.50. Everyone wants all that. They just don’t want it to be known that they’re getting any of it, if indeed they are – or for the amount of it they’re getting to qualify them for that unfortunate section of society, the fortunate.

  This notion that there’s something unlucky about being called lucky occurred to me in the wake of John McDonnell’s controversial definition of the rich as those earning “above £70,000 to £80,000 a year”. A lot of people objected to that, and even more objected to those objections. The first group pointed out that £70k a year is far from unimaginable wealth, PIYLIL (particularly if you live in London). So, if your image of a rich person is someone in a gold hat lighting a cigar with a £50 note, then the adjective is unfairly applied to a demographic of dutiful mortgage-paying graduates who occasionally go to Carluccio’s.

  These complainants’ detractors, pausing only to mime playing the world’s smallest violin, countered with the undeniable statistical fact that earning £70k puts you in the richest 6% of the British workforce, and the richest 0.09% of the global population. In this row, comparatives and superlatives are oddly less controversial than the terms from which they’re derived. Richest doesn’t necessarily mean rich, any more than poorest means poor. Tony Blair must have been the poorest man at many plutocratic dinners he’s attended around the world, but that doesn’t mean he needs to argue over who ordered extra chips.

  It’s easy to define who’s richer than whom, but at what point do you become actually rich? Are you rich if you’re richer than average? If so, the £70k bunch might qualify as “very rich”. Are you tall if you’re taller than average? Possibly. I reckon many who are only marginally taller than the mean would consent to the adjective “tall” (which is not to imply that mean people are short). But then a lot of us want to be considered tall, while we don’t seem to want to be considered rich.

  Maybe it’s always been like that. Wealth generates hostility, so there’s nothing to be gained from drawing attention to it. “Get it quietly,” as they say in poker. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. What happened to “greed is good”, to conspicuous consumption, to Labour grandees being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, to the whole Thatcherite dream of the promise of wealth driving ambition, invention and hard work, to Britain’s entrepreneurs being lured forward in slavering pursuit of commerce’s golden bra, and the whole of society benefiting from any consequent trickle down?

  I’m not saying I miss all that bombast, but there was something coherent about it. It was a bold rebuke to the Communist bloc, an explicit elevation of liberty over equality. In a free society, the idea goes, people must be able to improve their circumstances, they must be offered the potential reward of riches. Which unfortunately means you have to have rich and poor. But rich and poor beats poor and poor and, in a land of capitalist opportunity, at least the poor have hope.

  In that world, there’s no shame in being called rich. Many would be proud of it and, as with tallness, lay claim to it when it’s only marginally justified. In the society Thatcher was supposed to have ushered in, “rich” and “successful” would be synonyms, and the phrase “well-deserved success” a tautology.

  That’s why last week’s scuffle to pin on others, or tear off oneself, the label “rich” is interesting. It’s become a term of abuse, like “aristocrat” in the French Revolution. Far from assuming the rich deserve their wealth, we’re now assuming the contrary. The rich are the bad guys – so, being called rich, whether or not you are, is to be called bad. “Society’s all wrong, and you’re why!” is what it means. This is unfair because it’s a generalisation. But that doesn’t make it an unfair generalisation.

  I suspect very few people feel rich, either in the neutral sense of having lots of money or the contemporary one of being a profiteer of injustice. All of us, except Bill Gates on the one hand and some poor sod whose name posterity will never record, and who’ll be dead by the time you read this, on the other, are aware of people richer and people poorer than we are. So, subjectively, we’re all the squeezed middle. And, in these unnerving times, even if you know you’re loaded, you probably still won’t feel particularly safe or lucky. Hardly any of us think we’re part of the problem, which is part of the problem.

  For Thatcher’s divisive concept to work even on its own terms, it required Britain to continue to become more meritocratic. Not fairer necessarily – because there’s nothing inherently fair about the distribution of merit – but a country where success is based on what you do, not the circumstances you were born in. If you’re holding a rat race, the prize must go to the fastest rat.r />
  No ideological alternative has really caught on enough to sweep aside Thatcher’s vision of Britain, but the fact that high earnings are now a source of social shame demonstrates how tawdry and discredited it has become. Let’s bear that in mind as our current prime minister exhorts us to vote for it again.

  * * *

  When I read that a group of Eton schoolboys had organised their own trip to meet President Putin and exchange portentous remarks in a big, posh Russian room, I could sense an expression crossing my face that I’m glad no one had to see. It must have been a kind of frowning, closed-eyed, open-mouthed, nauseated sneer.

  I could feel my jowls attempt to detach themselves from my head. My nostrils seemed to be trying to put some distance between one another, while my eyebrows were huddling together for comfort. Of the words that escaped the weird-shaped hole my mouth had become, “oh” and “those” were the only ones you’d hear on Radio 4, unless Jeremy Hunt was about to be interviewed.

  I did not rejoice in the young people’s adventure. The pictures of them smartly greeting Russia’s puffy little tyrant and lounging across the floor of an anteroom making wacky hand gestures didn’t make me think, “Good on them!” Instead, I was filled with loathing, which isn’t very nice of me because they’re basically children and they haven’t really done any harm.

  That’s not to say they did any good. Putin will feel his regime came out of it well. One of the boys was reportedly quoted in a pro-Putin newspaper (how accurately, we can’t know) saying: “Personally, I think that Putin is right to continue defending Assad in his role as president.” Meanwhile, on Facebook, Trenton Bricken, a member of the group, described Russia’s leader as “small in person but not in presence”, and David Wei, who seems to have been the jaunt’s chief organiser, wrote: “Guys, we truly gave Putin a deep impression of us and he responded by showing us his human face.” So rumours the president carries the severed face of a rival are true, then.