CAMERON’S CRONY AND AN ABUSE OF POWER
WITH worrying complacency, senior Conservatives dismissed yesterday’s unprecedented £70,000 fine from the electoral Commission as a minor matter. They pointed out that all other major political parties had, in the past, broken rules which limit the amount of money that election candidates can spend.
True, politics is a dirty business. But I profoundly disagree with the Tory view that the party’s breach of election rules can be explained away simply as bureaucratic errors rather than criminal conduct.
The fact is that overspending in election campaigns is a crime – and for an extremely good reason. In many countries – consider Donald Trump’s United States or Vladimir Putin’s Russia – politics is in the hands of oligarchs and billionaires.
A similar culture of the rich controlling the levers of power existed in Britain until the Victorian era. The wealthy were able to purchase seats in parliament or secure office by handing out bribes to voters.
This was both immoral and undemocratic, and so the law was rightly changed to prevent this kind of abuse and ensure that all parties – whether rich or poor– got an equal crack of the whip and could not buy power.
I find it very hard to accept what happened was an ‘administrative error’, as the Tories claim.
It is important to remember that during the 2015 election campaign, the then Tory PM, David Cameron, faced the battle of his life. Opinion polls suggested that ed Miliband’s Labour would emerge as the largest party, while Ukip threatened to steal huge numbers of votes from Conservatives who were upset by the way Cameron’s metropolitan, liberal policies had betrayed their core values.
It is too early to say whether the Conservatives committed criminal offences in order to win the 2015 general election. But it is certainly not too premature to say that something went horribly wrong in the Conservative Party’s high command as the 2015 election approached.
One man must take the overall blame. David Cameron himself.
Yesterday – with the £70,000 fine – was a day of shame for him personally because it shows that the Tory Party was calamitously mismanaged under his leadership.
Of course, as prime minister, he had little time to deal with the minutiae of party expenditure. But he was undoubtedly responsible for the catastrophic decision to appoint Andrew Feldman as party chairman – the man whose job it was to control party management and sign off its accounts.
Lord Feldman – as I repeatedly warned at the time – had zero credentials for the job. He was a businessman whose only qualification for the party chairmanship was the fact
that he had been a friend of David Cameron since they played tennis together as undergraduates at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Though Feldman was skilled at wooing party donors (always a notoriously worrying sign in a politician, as history has shown), he lacked any of the usual skills and background required for chairing the Tory Party.
He had no experience in politics. He’d never served as an MP. He had no rapport with party members – he was even suspected of once describing party activists as ‘swivel- eyed loons’, an accusation he denied.
Unusually for a party chairman whose job was partly to be a public cheerleader, he refused to give interviews on television or with the newspapers.
In sum, he had no political weight. He was a crony pure and simple. This was a sorry abuse of power. equally, an abuse of election spending would not have happened under the watch of his predecessors. The job of chairman had traditionally gone to senior and experienced figures. Think of Norman Tebbit, Willie Whitelaw, Lord Thorneycroft. These were men of great sagacity and accomplishment. Not so the abject Cameron Crony Lord Feldman.
Typically, he has remained silent ever since the electoral Commission’s damning condemnation of his failure to do his job properly.
This is wrong. It is essential that he publicly explains his team’s errors.
In the same way that democratic values must be upheld with regard legal limits on spending during election campaigns, similarly, politicians must be accountable for their actions to the public.
Meanwhile, it cannot be stated too strongly that Theresa May is blameless in this affair. That said, she has been handed a wretched legacy.
Her task now is to install rigorous systems to ensure that such a shambles does not recur. When she became PM, Mrs May promised that she would bring a new integrity and decency into British politics.
Now, she has been offered the opportunity to do that by responding robustly and by protecting the Tories’ hard-won reputation for fair play and probity.