Standards of Behaviour and Honesty in Political Life

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I join in the tributes to my noble friend Lord Morse.

Plainly, the standards of behaviour and honesty in political life bear on the democratic process and a reduction in those standards weakens democracy, because reduced standards lessen public trust and confidence in our rulers and our governing institutions. As a result, people are less willing to participate in the political process, less willing to turn out to vote and then less inclined to accept and comply with the laws Parliament enacts. We surely have a perfect recent illustration of that: as a result of partygate, if there was some future pandemic and Parliament was to enact further hugely restrictive laws, it may be doubted that the public would so readily obey them. All that is pretty obvious.

I want to focus on the position arrived at here and my essential point may not be popular. While I hold absolutely no brief for our Prime Minister, I contend that his flaws, his deficiencies, are a quantum leap away from those not only of murderous autocrats such as Putin but of purported democrats such as Trump.

It is pure nonsense and an illustration of the fallacy of false equivalence to suggest that any useful comparison can be made between Trump and Johnson. Johnson is not Trump-lite, as he is sometimes described. He is not in the same league. Trump is plain wicked. It is almost impossible to exaggerate his monstrous conduct, which in numerous respects is plainly criminal. Not so Johnson’s: his fixed penalty notice was not, of course, for criminal conduct any more than a speeding fine is. His misbehaviour, which I do not understate, is political, not criminal. Those political sins were indeed catalogued by Clare Foges in her characteristically admirable piece in Monday’s Times. She demonstrated truly that our Prime Minister has belied the “good chap theory” of government from the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy: our unwritten constitution’s historical reliance on our rulers recognising where the boundaries of acceptable political conduct properly lie and, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, pointed out, knowing when they ought to resign.

I agree with almost all the points that Clare Foges made, but I make one important exception: the Prime Minister’s unlawful Prorogation of Parliament in 2019. There are some who go so far as to suggest that that act puts the Prime Minister on a par with Trump as an unlawful attempt to remain in power by escaping parliamentary control. I, for my part, regard that as nonsensical. Although I accept the Supreme Court’s judgment as correct on the narrow facts of the case—this is no occasion to go into all that—it is surely absurd to treat it as comparable to Trump’s attempt to force his Vice-President to refuse to recognise the United States election result. Trump, one recalls, and one sees it now in the congressional report, was advised forcefully and repeatedly that Pence had no lawful option but to certify Biden’s election victory. By contrast, Boris Johnson was not merely advised, as clearly he was, by his law officers that Prorogation in the context that it was enacted was lawful; that too was a view fully shared by a strong and unanimous Divisional Court.

In short, therefore, while recognising as I do the Prime Minister’s character flaws and his intrinsic tendency towards dishonesty, he really cannot usefully be compared with Trump. True, his principles can be regarded as somewhat fluid, flexible, elastic and perhaps rather Marxian, in the sense of Groucho rather than Karl—“These are my principles, but if you don’t like them I have others”—but the threat he poses to democracy is in no way comparable to the actual damage now being so obviously inflicted by Trump on democracy and the democratic process in the United States. One has only to watch the nightly reports on, for example, the 6 January insurrection, the storming of Capitol Hill and, before that, Trump’s attempt to suborn the returning officers in the various individual states that he narrowly lost to find him the missing votes to recognise the catastrophic impact of his stolen election lie on America’s faith in democracy. The point has already been made as to the extraordinary numbers who subscribe to the Trump approach.

I end with this: I suggest it is a mistake to say, as a recent letter to the Times did, that the United Kingdom is no longer a functioning democracy. Of course I look forward to the day when, once again, our political leaders can be seen to occupy the moral high ground that is now all too often vacated, but in the meantime it is most unwise to run ourselves down to the point where our international reputation as a sound democracy could indeed be put at risk.