The disease of hypocrisy has become endemic
IFrom Cop26 to the House of Commons, elites can’t break the habit of signalling their virtue while behaving appallingly
We always knew leaders could be duplicitous but the pandemic has brought out the very worst in them
t has undoubtedly been an abominable week for the Tories, but Labour has hardly covered itself in glory, either. As Sir Keir Starmer was busily accusing the Conservatives of “corruption”, his party was having to expel Claudia Webbe, the MP for Leicester East, after she received a suspended 10-week sentence for threatening to throw acid in another woman’s face.
It makes Owen Paterson’s paid advocacy look rather tame by comparison – but given that Rightwingers are always worse people than socialists, naturally, the Twitterati largely turned a blind eye.
They were similarly unconcerned about Labour MPS – who purport to represent a “gentler, kinder” form of politics – responding to the Prime Minister’s reference to Mr Paterson’s wife Rose’s suicide in the Commons this week with mock “ahs”. Every mind matters, except when it belongs to #Toryscum.
If you thought the hypocrisy of our elected elite couldn’t have reached greater heights over the past few days, we now hear that Keith Vaz – that bastion of probity – is poised to put himself forward as the Labour candidate for Webbe’s seat, which he held from 1987 to 2019 before being suspended for paying male prostitutes and supplying them with cocaine.
Like Paterson, Vaz was investigated by the Standards Commissioner – who suspended the probe midway through on “health grounds” – even though the politician who had posed as a washing machine repair man called “Jim” had been well enough to travel to India and Saudi Arabia as well as being spotted at several “ribbon cutting events”.
He was also hauled over the coals by Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel, which found in September that he had subjected staff to “sustained and unpleasant bullying”. And yet in the Westminster world of doubledealing, this man apparently believes he is still fit for public office – emboldened, no doubt, by the fact that his party let him get away with it for so many years.
As far as I am aware, no Labour MPS joined the Conservative Andrew Bridgen’s call for a sleaze inquiry into how on earth the former minister managed to amass a sizeable property portfolio on an MP’S salary. Mr Vaz dismissed the claims as “rubbish”.
Similarly, this week we had to endure the spectacle of Ian Blackford, the SNP’S leader in Westminster, crowing about “a whole litany of unacceptable behaviour” and how “there needs to be an inquiry into all of these things”. What, things like you having five different external jobs in 2017? Or why you think you can lecture anyone on this while until recently earning £3,247 a month for eight hours work per quarter as chairman of the Golden Charter Trust?
Sadly, hypocrisy appears to have taken root at every branch of public life. Shortly after they wreaked havoc on the M25 in my neck of the woods, I was dumbfounded to hear Liam Norton, the ringleader of Insulate Britain, admit that he lives in a single-glazed home with gas central heating and has no insulation in his walls.
“I don’t particularly care about insulation,” he said, as he and his fellow eco-terrorists prevented a woman suffering a stroke from getting to hospital, leaving her paralysed.
Yet green glibness rose to a whole new level at Cop26 this week when we – the very people who are condemned for taking an annual budget flight to the Costa del Sol – were forced to sit through endless climate change sermons by big wigs who had arrived in Glasgow by private jet.
They say that 1 per cent of the world’s population cause 50 per cent of global aviation emissions – and I think we can safely conclude around 99 per cent of them were in Scotland, rivalling Harry and Meghan in the do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do-stakes. (Research suggests that the Duke and Duchess of Wokeness took 21 private jet flights in two years while telling the rest of us to save the planet).
If the sight of Joe Biden’s gas guzzling 20-car motorcade – featuring the 20,000lb armoured Cadillac “Beast”, which generates 10 times more carbon than the average car – wasn’t sickening enough, we then found out John Kerry, America’s “climate envoy”, has taken a reported 16 trips this year alone on his “family jet”.
This was swiftly topped off by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declaring that he only realised what a fragile state the earth was in when he blasted through the ozone layer in his own private rocket.
And let’s not even get started on Downing Street’s insistence that the private jet Boris Johnson took to get back to London was “one of the most carbon-effective planes of its size in the world” that used “the most sustainable aviation fuel available”.
Read the room and take the train if you are going to go quoting timetables about there being a minute to midnight to avert Armageddon.
Altogether, a staggering 400 Gulfstream and other aircraft descended on the global powwow – each churning out two tonnes of carbon an hour. To put that into perspective, the average person generates about 10 tonnes of carbon a year.
Of course, world leaders have increasingly got form in refusing to practise what they preach. We always knew they could be duplicitous but the pandemic has brought out the very worst in them.
Who could forget the great and the good at last year’s G7 in Cornwall, happily attending outdoor events while weddings were still restricted and wearing masks when the cameras were rolling before taking them off when they thought they weren’t? When they were wining and dining on publicly funded food and drink, while slapping each other on the back, they did it in a “Covid-secure” way, honest.
Even sainted Barack Obama was at it – with the former US president hosting 400 guests for his 60th birthday at Martha’s Vineyard in August last year amid a rising number of coronavirus cases in the US. Photographs of the star-studded bash later revealed maskless revellers (many of whom had arrived in a similar vein to John Kerry Airways) seemingly breaching social distancing rules.
Our own elected (and unelected) representatives haven’t fared any better. First Professor Neil Ferguson got caught acting as a human face mask to his lockdown lover. Then we had Dominic Cummings flouting the very rules he had helped to impose on the public by testing out his eyesight on the A1.
And then, of course, there was former health secretary Matt Hancock, giving a new meaning to the phrase Hands, Face, Space, in a CCTV clinch with his taxpayer-funded aide Gina Coladangelo.
Brexit hypocrisy is also back with a vengeance – and I’m not just talking about all those Remainers who this week dubbed the Government’s attempts to overhaul the standards system as a travesty, despite having spent three years trying to reverse the referendum result.
In recent months, we have had Brussels attacking Poland for saying its own law overrides EU law when a German court did exactly the same
– as well as threatening Britain if it invokes Article 16, when it almost did precisely that itself.
But the biggest biscuit was undoubtedly taken by Michel Barnier, the EU’S former chief negotiator turned French presidential candidate, for demanding French sovereignty from the EU courts. That beats even Ursula von der Leyen’s 31-mile private jet trip.
Rule breaking is one thing. But it is hypocrisy that really erodes trust. And sadly this disease of there being one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us has become endemic.