The truth is everyone's responsibility
If we want more trust in politics, we all have to be honest and straightforward
Rachel Reeves and Suella Braverman do not on the face of it have much in common as politicians, the Lewisham-born, Bank of England-trained shadow chancellor and the child of Mauritian and Kenyan immigrants who practised law in Birmingham and is now Home Secretary. But this week they have both found their way into the news for reasons which are, admittedly tangentially, connected thematically.
In brief, the Home Secretary is accused of breaching the Ministerial Code by asking civil servants to find out whether she could have a personal, one-on-one version of a speed awareness course to avoid receiving a fine and endorsements to her driving licence. Reeves, meanwhile, has flown to the US for a conference and was “found out” to be flying business class, deemed by some an unacceptably lavish decision, and made her situation worse by deleting a photograph from Twitter, in which her ticket and seat number were visible, replacing it with one in which the seat number was blurred out.
I am not suggesting that these supposed offences against public decency are analogous in gravity or accuracy; but they are united by the fact that they both involve trust, truth and public interpretation. I have written before about the need to rebuild trust in our politicians and public institutions, and the Reeves and Braverman cases are significant because they serve to emphasise that honesty and probity are the responsibility of us all, from MPs to humble Twitter users.
Let us take Reeves first. She was flying to the United States “to promote Labour’s economic policies”, a perfectly reasonable thing for the shadow chancellor to do with perhaps only a year until the general election. If Labour wins and Reeves becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, there will be no time to adapt or acclimatise, and she could be expected to meet on even terms with European finance ministers, the US Treasury Secretary or central bank heads within days of her appointment. British politics has no dress rehearsal, no period of grace, no delay for parliamentary approval of appointments: think of 1945, when the UK government changed during the Potsdam Conference, Churchill was replaced by Attlee and Eden was replaced by Bevin. The Labour ministers had at least held office in the wartime coalition but had to learn their new, more senior roles very much as they went along.
I have no issue at all with politicians travelling business class on official trips, whether ministerial, select committee-related or as opposition spokesmen. Yes, it is substantially more expensive, and the travel can cost sums of money which seem—indeed, are—very substantial to the ordinary public (in which I include myself). I have travelled with MPs using business class and using economy class, and, take it from me, the difference in the condition in which they arrive at their destination in terms of fatigue and temper is noticeable. Moreover, official visits often have very busy agendas: I’ve certainly accompanied select committees which get off a long-haul flight, have perhaps half an hour to “freshen up” and are straight into meetings. Business class is wholly defensible.
That is, however, just my opinion. I may disagree, but it is perfectly valid to don a hair shirt and say that travel must be at the lowest possible cost. So those who attacked Reeves for the “luxury” of flying business class are entitled to their view, however much I take an opposite view. However, other critics—the ones I saw were principally on Twitter—firstly misidentified the accommodation as first class and therefore costing something in the region of £11,000 (as opposed to £4,000 for business class), and merrily began to throw the rotten fruit at Reeves on that basis. Needless to say, I saw rather fewer apologies and retractions than I did vitriolic insults.
The second, more common, accusation was that she was using (or “wasting”) “taxpayers’ money” in this luxurious travel. Now, because I worked in the Commons for 11 years and have seen the system close up, I hesitated at this: if Reeves was on party business, it seemed almost impossible that the taxpayer would have picked up the bill directly, as would have been the case with a ministerial visit or select committee travel. I concluded, and ventured the opinion, that the Labour Party had probably paid for her flight from their own funds. It is true that opposition parties do receive some public funding, known as Short Money after the Labour Leader of the House of Commons who introduced it in the 1970s, and this is intended in part to assist with travel expenses. But that is not the only money opposition parties receive: obviously they have donors, and in the case of the Labour Party most of its income is derived from trades unions, so disaggregating these various sources and saying exactly who paid for Reeves’s flight is impossible as well as pointless.
That did not, of course, stop the Twitterati. It was asserted as fact, not as a question or suggestion, that the flight was taxpayer-funded, and if people do not know that all parties receive money from various sources, not merely the public purse, then, firstly, they should educate themselves, and, secondly, one can always delete tweets or apologise for them. And I don’t think it’s asking too much to check some basic facts about politics if you intend to weigh into a public debate on social media. Google has given us more information at our fingertips than we have ever had, and if you are capable of using Twitter, you are capable of using Google.
My point here is that Reeves did nothing which broke any rules. The party has said that the flights will be declared in the usual manner. It was foolish of her to delete the photograph and repost it with her ticket blurred, and some may feel that, given the Labour Party’s attacks on the government for supposedly extravagant expenditure, Reeves had opened herself to criticism. However, this was a row which emphasised the agency of the public: it was the electorate which spotted the ticket number, made deductions (some of them incorrect), and decided to criticise the shadow chancellor on the basis of faulty information. That impression will stick in however tiny a way. People who do not follow politics avidly, which is most of the population, will remember vaguely a story about a dodgy or luxurious flight and Rachel Reeves’s name, and the damage is done.
When we talk about trust, honesty and integrity, then, we have to recognise that we, the voters, have a part to play and a responsibility to uphold. There were accusations hurled at Reeves which were not true and intended to damage. Even if most were “honest” mistakes or misapprehensions, even if most sprang from ignorance, some did not, and that is a clear instance of voters who are not public figures using the extraordinary platform which social media gives us all to say untrue things for political advantage. That is not honest and it does not show integrity. So when we rail at our leader for their circumlocution, their dissimulation and their obfuscation, we must recognise that “we”, as a group, are not only creating a culture in which this can flourish but actively sometimes guilty of that ourselves.
Braverman’s case is different. What we know is that she was caught speeding last summer (when she was still Attorney General), and was offered an in-person or online speed awareness course rather than having her licence endorsed and being fined. Eventually she chose the fine-and-points option, and her summation of the matter, in typically breezy style, is “What I will say is that in my view I am confident that nothing untoward happened”.
What is alleged is that she sought to have a one-on-one speed awareness course so that she would not be identified, and that she asked her civil servants at the Home Office to see if it could be arranged. These courses exist and some providers proactively advertise them, especially for celebrities who prize their anonymity. However, it would not be the role of civil servants to make such arrangements for the Home Secretary, and to ask them to do so would be a clear breach of the Ministerial Code. The prime minister, dismayed that his attendance at last weekend’s G7 summit in Japan was overshadowed by what should be a trifling matter, is considering whether to ask Sir Laurie Magnus, the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, to examine the issue.
This is where it becomes difficult and shades of grey creep in. Braverman’s supporters claim that she simply inquired of her officials whether such a personalised course could be arranged, and that, when they sought Cabinet Office advice and told her it was an improper thing for them to do, she backed off and accepted the fine and the endorsements. So we are left, in one sense, judging whether there is a significant difference between asking your civil servants to arrange something and asking them whether it is possible to arrange something, and if that difference is substantial enough that one could fall outwith the terms of the Ministerial Code while the other could be in order.
The Braverman camp says this is a footling matter, a distraction from important policy issues like immigration and, perhaps, was provoked by civil servants leaking about the Home Secretary in an attempt to dislodge her because they dislike her ideological stance. (That last theory is, of course, of a piece with some of the discourse surrounding the resignation of the deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab.) Meanwhile her critics say that she was seeking special treatment, abusing her privileges as a minister of the crown and that, anyway, there is something amiss when three Home Office ministers (Braverman, Tom Tugendhat, the Minister for Security, and Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration) all have speeding offences to their name.
There is an additional twist, as if it were needed, over the response to an inquiry from The Daily Mirror by Braverman’s special adviser, Jake Ryan (himself a former hack). It is claimed that a journalist approached Ryan last month to ask whether the Home Secretary had been “done for speeding”, and Ryan denied the allegation some four times (which, one might observe, is once more even than St Peter denied Christ). “When has she been done for speeding? It’s nothing like that”, Ryan told the journalist, before adding, “Oh mate, this is just nonsense, honestly”. Wendy Chamberlain, the Liberal Democrat chief whip, has written to the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to clarify this matter; if Ryan were to have misled a journalist, that would put him in breach of the guidance for special advisers.
As I write, we don’t know the whole story of the Home Secretary’s speeding penalty, nor do we know her fate. But, in a way, that’s not the point I’m making. I return to public trust and integrity. What we have seen is accusation and counter-accusation,l a lack of clarity from the Home Office and a descent to the minutiae of asking for help vs asking if you can ask for help. Plunging to that kind of nuance is a standard response for politicians, because the Devil may be in the detail but so, often, is salvation. If a beleaguered minister can make the debate about whether a particular form of words was used or a specific action taken, he or she can often relieve the pressure by refuting that small thing and blurring into obscurity the wider issue.
But the corrosive nature of this remains. We know that the public thinks politicians are dishonest and avoid answering questions. One of my bugbears of the early days of the Blair government was the habit of Harriet Harman, then Social Security Secretary, of answering a difficult question by saying “What we’ve said very clearly is…” and falling back on her prepared soundbite. It was lazy, dishonest and aggravating, but it saved her from hard-edged scrutiny of a sort she would have found challenging.
Several commentators have offered opinions on what Braverman “should” have done. The truth is that the situation should never have been allowed to come to this absurd argument over who asked whom to do what and in what circumstances. The responsibility lies not just with the Home Secretary but with both political parties for allowing a culture to develop in which information is closely guarded and released only as a last resort, the less, the better. Secrecy is damaging because it is both addictive and prone to exponential growth: rather than think what shouldn’t be made public, civil servants, under ministerial direction, have a tendency to approach the issue from the perspective of what should be made public, with the default setting being not to reveal anything. This tendency is all the more pronounced in the Home Office because of its law-and-order and security responsibilities where secrecy often genuinely is required.
Let’s try to look at the bigger picture. I’m not suggesting everyone should let Braverman’s conduct go unremarked: that hare has been set running and must be pursued to whatever conclusion comes, and she has not behaved well, to say the least, in her high-handed, dismissive attitude to a serious accusation of breaching the Ministerial Code. It is understandable that the Labour Party will seize any opportunity to land a blow on a government it senses it may soon supplant. But the gleeful sound of the hunting horn is still jarring. We desperately need to see the horizon.
We are, to say the least, in challenging economic circumstances. We are recovering from a pandemic which cost us billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of lives in this country alone, we are still trying to find our feet in our post-Brexit world and there is a full-on hot war raging in eastern Europe. There are profound questions facing us about the nature of our society, how we arrange our productivity and workforce, how we interact with each other and how we remain good-tempered while maintaining a healthy democratic discourse. A general election, which could well see a change of government after 14 years, is less than 18 months away. And we are talking about what the Home Secretary asked civil servants to do. For every person who says the opposition is making hay with a trivial matter, there is another who points out that Braverman’s actions put her in this position of vulnerability.
People often say “We can’t go on like this”. The truth is, we usually can. But we shouldn’t. We have to construct a political culture, a civic discourse, in which the first instinct is neither a concealing lie nor a “gotcha” accusation. Together they form a dreadful circularity in which each side eyes the other with hair-trigger suspicion, waiting for a mistake. I agree that it is a shame we are focusing on the Committee of Privileges’s inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled the House of Commons rather than the pan-governmental response to a pandemic, but it was Johnson who raised bare-faced deceit into both an art form and an everyday currency. If we start from a position of seeking to deceive or conceal, or looking for every tiny gap of nuance between statements, it keeps us in the mud of lowbrow political wrestling and means we do not, because we cannot, focus on the wider picture.
Politicians will always think first of damage control. I understand and accept that, and it is not in itself base. But they have to start also thinking of integrity and truthfulness. That has to be the basis for their actions, and, in return, a degree of good faith has to be the basis for ours, the electorate’s. Until we can agree that kind of quid pro quo, that kind of basic compact, we will never create the bonds of trust and confidence in our institutions that a healthy, happy and effective society has to have.