Greed breeds in our political pool

Main Image : 

Published: 3 June 2010

In the face of increasing greed, we have become a nation of sleepwalkers, couch potatoes and lotus-eaters proud of our political ignorance and indifferent to the actions of our political masters, argues Illtyd Harrington

WE have become a nation of sleepwalkers, couch potatoes, lotus-eaters, proud of our political ignorance, indifferent to our political masters’ capers. 

We hang about waiting to be officially mugged, casting nervous eyes to the future, just stopping to wave the crowded gravy train farewell.

We depend on brave whistleblowers to let us know what goes on in the great corps and organs of state. 

Nobody led a protest march against the scandal of cash for honours affair, or even Tony Blair’s outrageous ability to halt a Serious Fraud Office investigation into alleged bribery surrounding BAE Systems’ contracts with Saudi Arabia. 

Greed is breeding in our genetic pool like a malaria germ. 

Take the case of the humble, contrite, and guilt-ridden David Laws, the Liberal axe-man, who the Tories strongly approve of. 

We are asked to stand back in admiration, for a man who had a double first at Cambridge, a razor-sharp mind, but somehow or other failed adequately to fill in his expenses form. 

Further to that, he seems to have forgotten his male partner, James Lundie, but not the £40,000 which slipped through his hands. 

Inexplicable failings in a banking genius, and inexcusable in a lover. We are told he’s a very private man, and his Roman Catholicism, made him a terrified homosexual. 

He need not worry too much, as he will be welcomed back into the company of his strange bedfellows. 

It seems to me that King Herod is in charge of ethics at Cambridge University. 

Step back a moment into post-war history.

First of all there was John Belcher, a junior minister in Clement Attlee’s post-war government, who was caught sanctioning permits for our limited paper supply. 

A tribunal under Mr Justice Lynskey, more in sorrow than anger, laid bare the smelly trails of wrongdoing. 

Belcher ended where he began, back in the ticket office at St Pancras. 

A impressively large increase in government expenditure for hospitals and schools in the 1960s brought forth John Poulson, a modest architect who inflated contracts and provided only the bare essential structures for hospitals. 

His wings spread over local government, and his talons picked up a hero of Labour’s local government, T Dan Smith, a folk hero, in Newcastle. 

Smith succumbed to importunity, as did Andrew Cunningham, the father of the present Lord John Cunningham and the self-righteous hammer of the Left in the unions and the Labour Party generally. 

This, an easy triumvirate, were unable to share their porridge together.

A now-dead Tory planning chairman I knew in central London, rushed through a planning application, on a busy bank holiday weekend and later, to his delight and astonishment, he received a collection of stamps, two of which were rare and very pricey. 

This gangrene attacked even the Metropolitan Police. There was a senior officer of Scotland Yard’s obscene publications squad who was so contemptuous of investigation that he met London leading pornographers monthly and shared the handsome profits out to his men, all discussed in a Soho pub. 

Again, it was a police constable who brought his downfall, and never received promotion. 

Again there is the strange matter of former members of Gordon Brown’s government, who have no crisis of conscience by joining the boards  of companies that tendered successfully to their former ministries. 

A few months back even former government ministers Patricia Hewitt and Geof Hoon fell for a Channel 4 sting, offering themselves to peddle influence. 

Venality is a more appropriate description. 

Just before his retirement as Master of the Rolls, I spoke to Lord Denning at a City dinner. Tom Denning, the “second judge” of the land, said he was deeply concerned by what he saw as “institutional corruption” in the UK.

I think it was the Greek philosopher Diogenes who walked around the city market place in the midday sun, carrying a lamp. 

When asked to explain himself, he replied “I’m looking for an honest man in government”.

• Illtyd Harrington is a former deputy leader of the Greater London Council