Culture of dishonesty that’s eating away the soul of the Tory party
WHEN David Cameron campaigned for the Tory leadership ten years ago, he promised to remove the ‘nasty party’ stain from the Conservatives’ image and, more generally, eliminate sleaze from the political process.
However, it is now abundantly clear that he has failed in this objective.
Even worse, the Conservatives are today nastier by some distance than when he took over as leader. The evidence is overwhelming. Let me start with the campaign to make Zac Goldsmith the next mayor of London.
As Tory candidate, Mr Goldsmith ought to have placed the great issues which affect most Londoners — such as transport and housing — at the heart of his election policies.
Instead, he has concentrated his campaign on an undignified personal attack on his Labour rival Sadiq Khan, with a series of smears connected with his Muslim religion.
This kind of politics is not just ugly, it is cynical, divisive and sectarian.
Only a political organisation which is losing touch with basic decency would seek to win votes in this way.
I believe that the battle for London’s mayoralty is the nastiest election campaign since 1983, when Peter Tatchell was Labour’s candidate in the by-election in Bermondsey and he was the victim of vile homophobic smears.
In addition to running a shameful London mayor campaign, the Cameron-led Conservative Party has been guilty of other morally disagreeable behaviour through the activities of the so- called ‘Tatler Tory’ Mark Clarke.
The senior election aide was at the centre of claims of ‘ inhuman and degrading’ bullying and intimidation which are said to have led to the suicide of a party worker.
ASUBSEQUENT investigation was set up by party chairman Lord Feldman to look into allegations about a sordid culture of sex, drugs and blackmail that had taken hold at the heart of the Tory campaigning machine. But after Feldman’s team was incapable of getting to the root of the problem, an independent inquiry was established. It has yet to reach any conclusion.
There is a third episode which suggests that Cameron’s Conservative Party has not only been engaged in immoral behaviour but that it may have broken the law.
For the past few months, Channel 4 News and the Mail have been investigating how much money the Tories spent during recent election campaigns.
We have uncovered compelling evidence that it had apparently exceeded the legal spending limit in by-elections in the run-up to the 2015 General Election.
By law, there are strict expenditure limits and the breach of these by individual candidates is a criminal offence punishable by a fine or even a jail term. Those involved deny any wrongdoing. Last week, our investigation unearthed even more disturbing revelations about Tory spending during last May’s General Election itself.
Once again, some of the costs of sending emergency teams of canvassers into key battlegrounds where Tory candidates faced a powerful challenge, especially from Ukip, were not declared to the Electoral Commission, which polices election spending.
The teams’ efforts paid off — with one of the victorious MPs saying the activists had ‘ made a big difference’. He went on to declare that he was ‘immensely grateful’ to Lord Feldman for agreeing to fund the team. This week, Tory HQ acknowledged that it had failed to declare the full spending costs — blaming an ‘administrative error’.
In other words, the Tories cheated, which means that in some key marginal constituencies, last year’s general election was not fought fair and square.
Indeed, this extra spending — breaching the law if it took the totals above the set limits, although the police have yet to decide whether to prosecute — could well have had an unfair effect on the overall result, and, possibly, could have been responsible for the Tories winning an overall majority. Cameron and his crony Feldman (who has never been elected to office and whose friendship with the PM dates back to when they met at Oxford University and played tennis together) stand open to the charge, therefore, that they ‘ bought’ their 2015 General Election victory using money the Tories had received from rich donors.
Crucially, the investigation by Channel 4 News and the Mail has found that the payments were signed off by key Cameron aides, including Feldman.
Considering all this very murky behaviour, is it at all surprising that behind-the-scenes Tory apparatchiks working on the Project Fear campaign to persuade the British people to vote to remain in the EU are employing similarly dubious tactics?
Feldman — along with another official responsible for last year’s apparent election campaign overspending, Stephen Gilbert — has a key role in the referendum campaign.
The June 23 vote is beyond doubt the most important democratic decision facing the British people for half a century, and yet it is turning into an unfair contest.
THREE weeks ago, ministers were condemned by the independent Electoral Commission for spending more than £9 million of taxpayers’ money on a disgraceful propaganda pamphlet in favour of British membership of the EU which was sent by Royal Mail to every household.
This was followed by the equally shameful suborning of Treasury civil servants into preparing a blatantly partisan document making ludicrous pro-EU claims — the most outrageous being that British families would lose more than £4,000 each in the event of Britain quitting it.
Yesterday even the Queen was indirectly dragged into No 10’s propaganda war as she welcomed President Barack Obama to Britain just hours after he had been used by Cameron to exhort the British people to vote for continued membership of the EU.
Regardless of their questionable moral values, Cameron’s ruthless and unscrupulous tactics have thus far worked. He won last year’s General Election, and polls suggest that the ‘Remain in the EU’ campaign has the edge. But at what cost? I’m afraid to say that Cameron has turned the Tories back into the ‘nasty party’ — a tag they had fought for years to escape after Theresa May’s infamous use of that phrase.