Stephen Pollard

responsible. But to judge from their reaction, many of those who sounded off about the Presidents Club dinner consider it even worse than the Oxfam scandal.

That is, you see, the logical conclusion one must draw from their loud condemnation of what happened at the Presidents Club and their near-total silence over Oxfam.

Or take the #MeToo campaign. Again, it is all to the good that it has led to wider discussion of sexual harassment and assault and, hopefully, more concerted and serious action against it.

But while MPs and other public figures tweeted and spoke virtually non-stop about #MeToo, where are they now? Where is the same anger, the same determination to change behaviour and the same unwillingness to keep quiet over what has happened at Oxfam – and, we now know, in many other aid organisations? The relative silence is not so much deafening as deeply telling.

Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, has been robust and clear from the start. But it took Labour four days to make even a vague comment when Kate Osamor, Mordaunt’s shadow, finally worked up the energy on Monday to call for an inquiry into the revelations.

You will search long and hard – and fruitlessly – for an echo from her fellow frontbenchers. The same frontbenchers, that is, who have hardly shut up over the Presidents Club and #MeToo. Worse, influential figures on the Left have pushed the notion that this entire scandal is somehow about Rightwingers conspiring to wreak retribution on Oxfam for having dared to be anti-capitalist.

Richard Murphy, a self-styled economist and tax expert who has been widely touted as a Corbynite thinker, has argued that the whole thing is about attacking anyone who challenges the economic order: “What [they are] really angry about is the fact that the world, rightly, believed Oxfam when they said that capitalism distributes the rewards of market activity inequitably and that the world’s wealthiest people did not actually earn their fortunes but extracted them from others. And so, in an attempt to discredit this message [they are] dedicated to raking Oxfam’s muck. And [they] found some.”

This is Mr Murphy’s response to the Oxfam revelations: we only know about it because the wealthy want to discredit Oxfam.

SINCE the story broke last week, many other examples of similar behaviour have been cited – not least among UN workers. Many of these people are paid large salaries, often tax free, with greater relative buying power in the country they are operating in. History tells us that is a recipe for exploitation.

But more generally, aid workers are regarded by some as modern-day saints. NGOs such as Oxfam are treated as if their word is pure and untouchable, and their staff seen as the very model of the morally virtuous. And, crucially, that is how too many of them see themselves.

So however they behave and whatever they do is by definition the right thing to have done, because they are good people. Which did, of course, make it all the more likely that we would end up with the grotesque disgrace of an aid charity failing to protect the most vulnerable.

‘Aid workers are seen as modern-day saints’