A trap based on a mistaken idea about politicians
Asting by Channel 4 has apparently collapsed. A few months ago, the programme Dispatches decided to pretend to be a Chinese “boutique strategic communications company”, Tianfen. It enticed ex-ministers to accept offers of money to advise its clients on post-brexit investment in Britain. The three it fastened on were Lord Lansley, Peter Lilley (who left Parliament in 2017) and Andrew Mitchell MP.
Unhappily for the would-be deceivers, the ploy didn’t work. Mr Lilley, for example, specifically explained to the bogus outfit that he could not convey any confidential material to a client. Mr Mitchell said that he could undertake no work without clearing it with the Commons authorities. Being a wily old chief whip, he also smelt a rat, and therefore looked into the company’s purported office in Hong Kong. He wondered if a political game was being played by the Chinese government and duly reported his concerns. MI5 kept watch, until it eventually decided (correctly) that Tianfen was merely a media game.
On Saturday night, frightened, very late in the day, that their methods had failed to expose any iniquity, Channel 4 “postponed” their programme. When they notified their victims of what they had planned to use against them, they had refused to let them see the full transcript of what they had secretly recorded them saying. This was obviously unfair, particularly as they had let the self-righteous and politically motivated Sir Alistair Graham, the former Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, see the transcripts so that he could pronounce his usual death sentence on any Tory he doesn’t like.
The defeat of this trap matters because it is based on a mistaken idea about how politicians should behave. Sir Alistair and others are obsessed with the idea that legislators should have no “second” jobs.
This a strange rule to apply to a peer – since a peerage is not a job – let alone to Mr Lilley, who is currently neither a peer nor an MP. But it is wrong about MPS too. If they are allowed to earn money only from the taxpayer, they will become (as they now very largely are) career politicians with little idea about real life and a growing dependency on the whims of Sir Alistair’s successors and all the growing army of bureaucrats who seek to control the lives of the people we elect.
By the way, if the former ministers were being paid by real foreign companies about how to invest in Britain after Brexit, that would be a public service, not an abuse of power.
Last Friday night, Now Teach descended upon us. A couple of years ago, Lucy Kellaway, then a journalist on The Financial Times, had the simple, true idea that lots of people want to become teachers in later life. She duly established the charity, left her own job, and became a maths teacher. She is one of the scheme’s first 45 teachers (all in secondary schools) who began in the current academic year. Lucy and her team were staying with us in Sussex to launch outside London for the first time.
They had chosen nearby Hastings because coastal towns are particularly short of teachers, especially in the “shortage subjects” of maths, science and modern languages in which Now Teach specialises. Rather like potential soldiers in Oh What a Lovely War!, would-be recruits to the classroom gathered on Hastings pier on Saturday morning and signed up – in unexpectedly large numbers. It turns out there are a lot of people in the target group – engineers or bankers (usually men) who have retired or been made redundant in their early fifties, parents (usually women) who have time for something new and demanding now that their children are at university or beyond.
I found the Now Teach sales pitch interesting. It is, as Lucy puts it, “to be encouraging and off-putting at the same time”. She insists on the “offputting” bit, because it is absolutely no good becoming a full-time, new-minted teacher if all you want is to fill in a few years as you coast gently to retirement. It is hard to over-emphasise how demanding the role is – the intensity, the need to remember everything and take sole charge of the class, the consequent inability to shelter behind more competent, hard-working or senior colleagues. A new teacher has to combine the humility required in an essentially hierarchical structure with the confidence needed to act out the part at all times. Alpha males used to shouting orders at everyone are therefore unsuitable, but so are shrinking violets.
Besides, it can be extremely difficult to teach pupils things, especially in “hard” subjects like maths, and especially in the “challenging” schools which Now Teach exists to serve. Your earlier career probably has not prepared you for children who do not yet grasp, say, the concept of a fraction or a percentage. Your reward will not be monetary (though you will get the normal state school rates).
It can only be the deep satisfaction of helping young people learn and understand. One all too often meets middle-aged teachers who have become disillusioned. If Now Teach continues its good work, it is the middle-aged (and even the slightly old) who will become the most energised of the lot.
‘If MPS are allowed to earn money only from the taxpayer, they will just become career politicians’
READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion