Standards of Behaviour and Honesty in Political Life

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great honour and pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross. I learned a lot from his father when he was here, so I am grateful for the sober and informative statement that he has made—I shall come back to this later. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Morse, not just for choosing a brilliant subject but for perhaps the shortest speech that I have heard the mover of a Motion make. Like Morse code, he was very succinct and short.

I have sat here and felt like a complete foreigner after a very long period of time. I was born in India, and then I went to America before arriving here. The idea that politicians are honest is completely alien to me. There is some sort of miasma here that, once upon a time, politicians were good and honest. When my friend the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, talks about the “decent chap” theory, he is being slightly ironic, because remember that they were all chaps; they all wore bowler hats and suits, and they were all gentlemen. There was a time when, even if gentlemen told lies to each other, the Times never had to publish it. The press was very obedient and guarded secrets.

The idea that Prime Ministers or politicians do not tell lies is a very great surprise to me because, in the 56 years I have lived here, I have frequently seen politicians not tell the truth. Sir Edward Heath lied on television about the stocks of coal in this country, and drove the country into a three-day week. It was a totally false number, and was shown to be so by Tony Benn—who some people may remember. Within 24 hours, Tony Benn was able to show that the coal stocks numbers quoted by Edward Heath were totally wrong. Anthony Eden lied about Suez, and they all hid the stroke that Churchill had when Prime Minister so that he could continue as Prime Minister. Harold Wilson went on television and said that the pound in your pocket was safe, after having devalued it by several percentage points. Tony Blair lied about the 45-minute gap in which Saddam’s missiles could launch and land—they would have landed in Cyprus, but he implied that it would be an attack on the British homeland.

We have been here before. Having a drink in No. 10 Downing Street is not as great a crime as people seem to think, and we have no need to take the moral high ground. Politics has not been honest. If you do not believe that, talk to anybody who was part of the empire and they will tell you what British politicians did abroad. I will not go into that—it would take me eight days, not just eight minutes.

We must understand that the idea that we had a moral code that everybody obeyed was an in-class conspiracy of a certain class. Everybody knew each other; they were all chaps, as there were no women in those days; and they all agreed with each other. Now, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, implied, we no longer have that world. We now have open media, which has become more democratic; the world may or may not be democratic, but the media has become much more democratic. Given the way that news travels, anything that any politician does is no longer a secret.

It is very interesting that Maundy Gregory was mentioned, but he is not the only one. We have had the selling of honours in the House of Lords for I do not know how long. As we sit here, we know that political parties sell honours and that that is how they are financed. Sometimes you have to take the money away when people turn out to be oligarchs but, until they are found to be oligarchs, they are alright—they are good chaps.

What we need to be clear about is not whether or not Boris Johnson took a drink—he did. As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said, who expected him to tell the truth? At least he is not a hypocrite. What I like about the Prime Minister is that he is not a hypocrite; he lies and lies openly, smiles and thinks he will get away with it. He has got away with it for a long time.

What I would focus much more on is not that he broke his own law but the other things that this Government have done. For example, they reneged on the triple lock and left pensioners suffering last year; they took away universal credit, which made a lot of people suffer; and in the middle of the most serious stagflation, they are still talking about tax cuts—and, let us face it, mean tax cuts for the rich and not for the poor. That they are about to break the Northern Ireland protocol and get out of the European Court of Human Rights are serious things to criticise—not having a drink after work in No. 10 Downing Street.

Let us get our perspective clear: let us criticise the Government for the things they do that actually harm the majority of people. A lot of those things are going on. Yes, there is a breach of standards, but getting out of the European Court of Human Rights—a court that we established to begin with—and to claim that it is to do with Europe and not us, is a serious thing. It is not like discussing whether various people had drinks in the afternoon in No. 10 Downing Street.

Democracy has changed—it is much more open and the world is much more democratic. After all, until 1928 we did not have universal franchise. Democracy is still young in this country; it did not start with the Magna Carta. Let us get it into perspective and criticise real policy damage and not trivial political misbehaviour.