My wife believes that I will die as a result of my Diet Coke consumption. Every so often she sends me a tabloid newspaper clipping about a fat person in California who had to be winched out of their house after drowning in a bathtub of Diet Coke. A Post-it Note is appended with the words “I told you so” on it.
But Nicky is quite wrong. I do drink, it is reasonable to observe, a fair amount of Diet Coke but long before this catches up with me I will be dead. I will have died of boredom brought on by yet another “who said what to whom” political row.
My interest in politics began when I was 11 years old, lying on the hall carpet, reading The Times as day after day it revealed the incredible story of Watergate. I grew up a political anorak. I follow blogs. I know who the Treasurer of the Labour Party is. So if I find the interminable political wrangling about who saw an e-mail and what they did about it unbelievably, mind-numbingly dull and irrelevant, then so does everyone.
Most political scandals begin with something real, a proper wrong to be righted. Just as the latest one involving Lord Rennard has done. The allegations against him are serious and obviously, and understandably, distressed those making them. But then, like all scandals, it all drifts away from the point as the search starts for “who knew” until the political debate is full of politicians you’ve never heard of talking about each other and referring each other to standards bodies and explaining how much they didn’t know about something you aren’t all that interested in.
The Labour Party has called for a full independent inquiry into the Rennard affair. Oh yes, they really have. And in the process this sucks the life out of politics, diverting attention not just from the scandal, but from ideas and policy and achievement.
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There are two reasons why this drift happens, I think. The first is a legacy of Watergate. The idea has taken hold that it is always the cover-up that gets you, the cover-up that is worse than the crime. It has become a political cliché. Just a shame that it isn’t true. Take Chris Huhne, for instance. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said: “Ah, he shouldn’t have lied, it’s always the cover up that gets you.” But it wasn’t the cover up that got him. It was the getting his wife to take the points that got him.
If, when he was first asked about the points, he had chuckled and said “Mmm, well yes I did do that, but don’t get over-excited,” would everything have turned out all all right for him? No. He would still have been prosecuted, still have had to resign from the Cabinet, still have had to stand down as an MP, and still have had to be, what were the judges words, “under no illusions” about the sentence he faced.
The cover-up myth drives every scandal into a cul-de-sac. Before you know it, the entire energy of Britain’s political class is diverted from discussing our dire economic situation to concentrating on accessing the Microsoft Outlook Inbox Archive file of Nick Clegg’s press officer.
But the second reason is more profound. Politicians, and many journalists, believe that this sort of scandal drives politics. They scramble around for advantage, hoping that if they can squeeze an extra day of news out of their opponent’s difficulties it might help in some way. The sad truth, of course, is that most people just notice it is another politician in trouble without caring much which party.
When Robin Cook’s affair was revealed, pollsters discovered that few voters thought that sleaze had caught up with Labour. As many of them hadn’t much heard of Cook, they just assumed that since he was having an extramarital relationship he must be a Tory.
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My point here is not to defend the Liberal Democrat handling of the Rennard affair, which has been atrocious, nor to defend them as a party, since their tendency towards unctuousness makes sympathy for them hard at moments like this. It is to ensure that criticism is levelled at the right things, at things that matter.
Take Mr Clegg and Lord Rennard. I do have concerns about their relationship, but political ones. Chris Rennard first became a power in the party in the early 1990s when he was responsible for a series of by-election victories. Starting in Eastbourne in 1990, and taking in Newbury in 1993 and then Eastleigh when the Lib Dems first took the seat in 1994, Lord Rennard developed a winning method.
Arriving early, he would canvas the area, listening to local concerns and then playing them back to voters during the contest. Alongside this he would run a campaign to squeeze the vote of the smaller party, usually Labour.
It was very effective and he extended it to national elections, but by 2005 there was a feeling in the party that its disadvantages were beginning to outweigh its advantages. It left the Lib Dems basically supporting the demands of any interest group in a seat they targeted. They couldn’t really say no to anyone.
And many of the demands (against development here, for development there) were contradictory. Many (abolition of tuition fees to win student votes in target university seats) were totally unrealistic.
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Mr Clegg’s leadership was supposed to represent a change from this strategy. It is one of the reasons he was relaxed about Lord Rennard resigning as chief executive in 2009. Mr Clegg wanted to create a serious national centre party. Accepting office with the Conservatives was part of this.
Much more serious than all this stuff about memos and internal investigations is that the Lib Dem leader is failing in his ambition. Five years into his leadership and he is still leading Chris Rennard’s party.
The Lib Dems have gone from constructive coalition partner to obstructive one. Any attempt to craft a centre message has been abandoned in favour of interest-group by-election politics.
Nationally the Lib Dems talk pretty much only of how they are going to tax the rich more and resist further welfare reform. They say they make the Tories “less extreme”. But if they were in government with Labour what difference would they make? What would be their point?
To me this is the failure that matters, and the one that we will be left with when all the fuss about who knew what has all died down (Friday? Monday?).
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Oh, and by the way, Diana Holland. Diana Holland is the Treasurer of the Labour Party. In case you were wondering.