Events | 2009.10.21
The bonds of trust have frayed away. Now masochism is the best strategy | Jonathan Freedland
The expenses row has left MPs in public contempt. That\'s why Conservatives think the way forward is to propose the unpopular
The trouble with politics is that it\'s not the law. In court a lawyer should be confident that, so long as his arguments are coherent and buttressed by evidence, he will prevail. He need pay no attention to competing interests or the mood swings of public opinion. The only power that should matter is the power of logic.
Politics is different, as those MPs who on Monday night gathered around their pigeonholes like nervous A-level students, waiting to read the outcome of Sir Thomas Legg\'s audit of their expenses , have learned anew.
They can muster all the arguments they like. But none will help. If the MPs were in court – and some might still try their hand there – they would surely insist that it was grossly unfair for Sir Thomas to change the rules midway through the game, suddenly imposing a new limit – on cleaning and gardening costs – but applying it to claims submitted and approved several years ago. If this were any other walk of life, a judge would doubtless find in the MPs\' favour: "retrospectivity" would be deemed not only an ugly word but an untenable legal concept.
M\'lud might also be swayed by Harriet Harman QC as she set out the going rates for domestic staff in the London area. For the scrupulous employer, keen to do the right thing and pay his or her cleaner through the books, respecting the rules on the minimum wage and national insurance, Legg\'s reported limit of £40 a week is just too low. The judge would surely accept that, lest an unrealistic limit tempt MPs into breaking the law and paying their staff badly and in cash.
Yesterday we were even given a preview of the arguments these would-be-plaintiff MPs might be trying. Ann Widdecombe put it succinctly: "If any other employer said to his employees: \'These were the rules. You stuck fastidiously by them ... but we have now changed the rules, so here\'s a bill\', that employer would be up before a tribunal."
The problem for her and the other MPs is that this was not "any other employer". The employer is the taxpayer, whose cases are heard in the court of public opinion. In politics, as opposed to law, arguments about "retrospectivity" and agency pay scales sound like so much hair-splitting. In politics, MPs have lost this case before it\'s even begun.
So Harman is technically right to talk about fair pay for domestic workers. But most voters don\'t have cleaners at all, and are furious about MPs\' sense of entitlement – their apparent insistence not only that they should have domestic help but that we, the taxpayers, should pay for it. A politician can try, if he likes, to argue about the cost of garden maintenance, but the public reply is concise: get a spade and do it yourself, like the rest of us.
Why is public sympathy so scant for our elected representatives? Some will say it is the consequence of those weeks of water torture as the Daily Telegraph dripped out its ever more mortifying revelations. But the truth is, public esteem for politicians was at rock bottom long before we learned of moats, duck islands and £8,000 flat-screen TVs: the expenses crisis simply crystallised a feeling that – in the words of a leading pollster, "all politicians are lying, cheating bastards" – was already there.
Those looking to explain this decay in the public trust often go back to the Iraq war, and the fraudulent case made for it. Others also cite the Blair period, though pointing more widely than simply Iraq.
Expectations, they argue, were so stratospherically high on 2 May 1997 that, when they were not realised, the disappointment eventually congealed into cynicism. Probably the rot set in even earlier. Let\'s not forget that the government before this one, John Major\'s, ended mired in avarice and brown envelopes. The bond of trust has been fraying for years.
The immediate effects are already visible. The total number of MPs standing down at the next election has now reached 108, most of them Labour, and could rise further. The ones who are leaving will no longer be governed by the rules of politics – why should they care what public opinion makes of their behaviour? – and will have little hesitation in resorting to the law to negotiate, in effect, the terms of their severance package. Those who plan to stay, and pursue any kind of political career, will follow Gordon Brown\'s lead and David Cameron\'s instruction and cough up whatever cash Sir Thomas demands, without a murmur of protest.
Whatever happens, the general election will produce a Commons packed with very different faces. Sitting MPs may find themselves culled in an anti-incumbent backlash, a throw-the-bums-out mood that will disproportionately damage Labour simply because Labour accounts for most incumbents. Add to that the poll numbers that award Cameron higher marks for his handling of the expenses affair than Brown.
He has consistently struck a more decisive, macho posture – even if the two have done little different of substance, and even though Brown\'s claims are surely more legitimate than those of the Tory leader, who paid off one mortgage while taking £102,000 from the taxpayer to pay off another. Cameron clearly thinks the issue is working for him: the warm-up video before his conference speech included a clip of him sternly ordering parliamentary colleagues caught with their hands in the public till to pay the money back.
But if all that helps the Tories win the election, it will do nothing to improve their chances of governing after it. One former Conservative strategist wonders if we are entering a 21st-century counterpart to the "age of ungovernability" of the 70s. Then it was trade union power that seemed to make politics impossible. Now it might be a breakdown in the underlying democratic contract, in the public\'s belief that they can look to the political leadership of Britain to change things. Cameron will not be saddled with the ludicrous expectations that greeted Blair, but he will carry an albatross all the same – of public cynicism.
This question, of the quality rather than the quantity of the coming mandate, is already preying on the most senior Conservative minds. Last week a member of Cameron\'s ruling circle told me that it was declining public trust that explained George Osborne\'s speech, packed with apparently unpalatable pledges on cuts and delayed pensions. "The only way trust is going to be restored is when a government does something truly, hugely unpopular," he said.
The perverse logic at work here is that when voters assume politicians are motivated solely by self-interest, the only way to shake that belief is for a politician to act against his self-interest. In traditional vote-getting terms, it made no sense for Osborne to come over all Scrooge – which is exactly why voters might find it persuasive. Besides, say the Tories, there were no other options. If Osborne had said nothing about his future plans, the electorate would have assumed he was either gormless or hiding something. They are simply too distrustful to accept any other explanation.
Perhaps this is all too clever by half, a strange twist on the "masochism strategy" that saw Blair throw himself before hostile audiences to prove his sincerity on Iraq. But it is a clear sign that politics is already changing. MPs might howl and they might protest. But those staying in the game had better get used to it.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rust-frayed-masochism-strategy
