Sleaze: the original sin of the Conservative Party.
Reckless financial behaviour reinforces the media trope of Tory B'stards.
The Tories clearly have a death wish. And no - I'm not referring to Rishi Sunak not wearing his seat belt. I mean the reckless financial behaviour of senior Conservatives who have lost the capacity for political self-preservation. How can they not know that to be in public life nowadays they have to be meticulous in their finances? Cleaner than clean. Beyond suspicion.
The succession of recent scandals has been like a bell tolling for the Tories. Greensill and David Cameron, PPE contracts, Owen Paterson, Boris Johnson, Michelle Mone, Nadhim Zahawi. Every week there seems to be a new story involving cronyism, dodgy loans, non-doms, murky tax affairs. The longer this goes on the more certain that the Tories will go down to a resounding defeat, just as they did in 1997.
In the end voters don't really care about parties in Number Ten organised by civil servants, or Boris Johnson getting a birthday cake during lockdown. Yes, we were furious at the double standards of people in power making the rules and then ignoring them. But that didn't do lasting damage to the Conservative party, any more than minor transgressions over seat belts. Even sexual misconduct is generally regarded by voters as a matter of personal failings, rather than systemic political infirmity. Groping MPs exist in all parties.
What voters really do care about is financial sleaze. It is kryptonite for the Tories. It was cash for questions, rather than “back to basics”, that did for the John Major government in the mid 1990s. The revelations about Tory MPs hiring themselves to commercial interests, the taxi rank principle, were far more damaging than the sexual antics of a few shame-faced adulterers.
It is a deeply ingrained media trope that Tory politicians are all self-interested “B'Stards” - Rick Mayall’s comic character of the 1990s - who despise the poor and are only in it for themselves. But it's no good complaining about media bias and stereotypes when centre right politicians seem so eager to conform to their popular image. The merest whiff of corruption, conflict of interest, tax avoidance is enough for the opposition parties to revive the Netflix view of Conservatives as crooks.
The vast majority are not, of course. But they are being betrayed by the irresponsible conduct of senior figures in the party who seem to have a cavalier approach financial propriety. It's not outright fraud, it rarely is, but it doesn't need to be. A Conservative Chancellor being investigated for tax avoidance is bad enough. It is disastrous for Nadhim Zahawi, now Tory chairman, to be exposed paying a large penalty to the tax man. This for a “careless error” involving his father, millions in unpaid tax, and an offshore trust which any competent accountant would surely have warned him against making.
Boris Johnson has been in hot water before. The government's ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, resigned last year in part over the failure of the then Prime Minister to disclose crucial details of cash he requested from a Tory donor, Lord Brownlow, to refurbish the Number 11 flat. It was “a bit of a tip” he said in a text to his benefactor. Now the hot water is bubbling over his head once more. Shortly before he was installed as the BBC chairman, another Tory donor Richard Sharp, helped Boris Johnson arrange a guarantee on a loan of up to £800,000 to sort his chaotic financial affairs.
Has Number Ten forgotten the meaning of conflict of interest? How could the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who was reportedly aware of these transactions, have allowed the PM to hold a dinner at Chequers with the former Goldman Sachs banker weeks before he made him the preferred candidate for head of the state broadcaster? Any hopes the Tories might have had of an easier ride from the BBC in future has gone up in smoke. Even if Sharp remains in post he will have to bend over backwards to show that he is not involved in issues over BBC impartiality, about which so many questions have been raised since Brexit.
This latest revelation is rather more serious than Lulu Lytle’s costly redecoration of the Downing Street flat since Boris Johnson doesn't own it. We do. Now the issue is about cash, a very large sum of it, going into Mr Johnson's pocket to finance his lifestyle. Nothing illegal of course: it is a loan that will have to be repaid. But the very appearance of a Tory donor being rewarded by the Prime Minister for financial services is ruinous to the Conservative image even though Boris is no longer in Number Ten. It reeks of entitlement.
During Johnson's brief domicile in that infamous flat we kept hearing that he couldn't live on his Prime Minister's salary. Poor chap. Alimony, trophy wife and various stray offspring to support. He should have kept his thoughts to himself. We are in the midst of an epic cost of living crisis. People are unable to heat their homes. Anger at the money go round in Tory circles will persuade many voters that, whatever the shortcomings of Keir Starmer, it is time to kick this lot out.