Sleaze row will tarnish all MPs
BORIS Johnson will lead his battle-scarred Tory troops through the “aye” lobby in the Commons next week to clear up a mess of his own making. MPs are to vote on Monday on a Government motion drafted to scrap the Prime Minister’s botched standards shake-up. Tory whips will order party colleagues to reverse the decision they were instructed to support a fortnight ago.
Downing Street aides hope the vote will finally draw a line under the sleaze storm that has engulfed Westminster this week. “It will be a difficult moment but then we can move on,” said one insider.
Ahead of that ignominious retreat, morale has slumped among backbenchers and ministers alike in the wake of the Government’s ill-fated bid to shield former Cabinet minister Owen Paterson after a report concluded he had breached lobbying rules.
“The newer MPs are particularly aggrieved,” said one backbencher. Tories who captured seats in former Labour heartlands at the 2019 general election fear their opponents will use accusations that the rules are manipulated to suit the Prime Minister and his allies in their effort to regain the territory.
Longer-serving MPs sense that party discipline, already weakened by the newer intake spending much of their first two years in parliament away from Westminster due to the Covid lockdown, is disintegrating.
Yet the PM is determined to stick to the doctrine of the First World War Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher: “Never contradict, never explain, never apologise.”
Mr Johnson was bruised by the experience of being forced to make a humiliating public apology early in hisWestminster career.
He was sent to Liverpool by the then Tory leader Michael Howard to say sorry for an article denigrating citizens of the city published under his editorship of the Spectator magazine.
Mr Johnson was roundly abused and given no credit for his grovelling and self flagellation. He learnt the lesson that in politics a forced apology is a trap deployed to undermine opponents and rivals.
Tory MPs fret that a sleaze storm is a symptom of a Conservative government in terminal decline as happened to John Major’s administration. Labour and the SNP are dreaming the episode has left the Government permanently tainted by a whiff of corruption, albeit never proven.
Just as back in the 1990s, isolated examples of alleged wrongdoing are being mixed with claims of questionable practices in a media frenzy based more on innuendo and prejudice than facts.
Today’s sleaze row bears one important difference from the Major era. There is currently no equivalent of Tony Blair, a glossy and apparently squeaky-clean opposition leader boasting that his team is “whiter than white”.
IN THE ABSENCE of such a figure, the sleaze storm is ultimately more likely to damage politicians of every stripe and undermine the reputation of Parliament as a whole.
Labour is already running into trouble by fuelling the row about MPs’ second jobs when so many of its own MPs, including Sir Keir Starmer, have interests beyond Westminster. Mr Johnson and his party are at last suffering the mid-term dip in popularity they have defied until now, with Labour edging into narrow leads in two opinion polls this week.
Surveys also suggest support remains firm for the Prime Minister among Tory supporters.
With his authority based on his knack for winning elections rather than a powerbase among Tory MPs, he will be nervous about any hint that his electoral appeal is waning.
If anything, the mudslinging about sleaze across the Commons divide is a sign that traditional partisan divisions are returning following the politically confused eras of Brexit and Covid.