My successor as Prime Minister’s Anti-Corruption Tsar is the redoubtable Labour Baroness Margaret Hodge, a five-foot-nothing spitfire who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone.
She’s going to need every ounce of her trademark energy and determination after the Government stepped on not one but two integrity landmines in the last three weeks. First they lost Deputy Prime Minister and vicious critic of real or imagined Tory sleaze Angela Rayner, who was hoist on her own petard after getting her tax affairs in a tangle. And then Peter Mandelson’s emails to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein led to him being sacked over an integrity problem for the third time in his career. Imagine Baroness Hodge channelling her inner Lady Bracknell in the PM’s Downing Street office: ‘to lose one senior figure, Prime Minister, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness’.
It was all supposed to be so different. In opposition Angela Rayner promised a Labour war on sleaze, but in Government they’ve faced a steady stream of embarrassments including donor-funded clothing, freebie tickets to Taylor Swift concerts and the footy, as well as regular resignations over everything from mistreating housing tenants to dodgy WhatsApp messages. In an age when lots of voters think the entire system is rotten, it’s a pattern that will only deepen their cynicism and confirm their fears.
What should Baroness Hodge be telling the Prime Minister, to stop the rot and get the Government flying straight from now on?
She should begin by stamping out the smug assumption among some senior Government figures that Labour are morally superior to everybody else. Human frailty affects every organisation, from companies to charities and even religious bodies, so believing that Labour is somehow immune to sleaze just creates a blind spot which makes problems less likely to be spotted and dealt with quickly. And as Angela Rayner discovered, if you’ve spent years denouncing everyone else, you won’t have many friends when it turns out you’re no better yourself.
So a dose of humility would help, but it won’t be enough on its own. Baroness Hodge should be pushing for an urgent integrity reset too, with concrete changes to armour this and future governments against sleaze.
The first step would be to stop conflicts of interest from the ‘revolving door’ of ministers taking plush jobs lobbying whichever part of government they’d been leading a few months before. The Advisory Committee On Business Appointments (ACOBA) is supposed to handle this, but can’t enforce its decisions if a former minister decides they’ve got little to lose by ignoring them. We should give it sharper teeth and claws by making ministers sign enforceable legal deeds when they are first appointed, binding them to abide by ACOBA’s decisions after they step down.
Next would be for Baroness Hodge to merge her Prime Ministerial Anti-Corruption Tsar role into the Committee On Standards In Public Life, to create a strong new Integrity Advisory Council where the Chair of ACOBA, the Prime Minister’s Independent Ethics Adviser, the Chairs of the Commons and Lords Standards and Conduct Committees and the First Civil Service Commissioner (responsible for the Civil Service Code) would meet to identify issues, solve problems and advise the Prime Minister when needed.
After that should be reforms of political honours, which Prime Ministers and opposition party leaders use to dish out knighthoods and gongs as favours to cronies. Being given an honour ought to be a transparent, meritocratic way to recognise Britain’s brightest and best: a reward for talent and hard work, rather than an opaque, magic circle, establishment back-scratching club. So we should slash the number of political honours which are awarded each year and, to maintain transparency and fairness in future, publish the criteria and weightings which the Honours Approval Committees use to dish out non-political gongs and awards too.
Next Baroness Hodge should clean up lobbyists and lobbying, by making their meetings with ministers, advisers and senior mandarins a lot more transparent. That means publishing clearer details of what was discussed, for which clients, within days instead of months – as is the case at the moment. And making everything digitally searchable so meetings can easily be checked against the people who own or control companies, charities and foundations, to see if they’ve made political donations and whether decisions are clean.
Last but not least, the Conservative Party should match the Prime Minister’s Independent Ethics Adviser by appointing an equally high-profile and respected figure with the same job description, to investigate and advise the Leader of the Opposition on potential integrity breaches by Conservative MPs or senior Party staff, and to do the same for Conservative Group leaders over allegations against Conservative Councillors as well. It would prove that Kemi Badenoch is a new broom who won’t tolerate poor behaviour in future, distance her from difficult investigations and demonstrate the Opposition is preparing seriously for government too.
Labour promised a new dawn of fresh, clean government. If they or a future Conservative government introduce these reforms, they’d deliver it.
If you like this idea, you’ll find more details, soundbites and rebuttals about it under Integrity & Honours in the Policy Thumbnail section of our website
This article is the latest in a fortnightly series of policy proposals by John Penrose and the Centre for Small State Conservatives, published in CapX
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