Standard delivery PDF Print E-mail

Leader, March 19, 2007
The Guardian

Sir Alistair Graham, the outgoing chairman of the committee on standards in public life, is not the first to complain of the difficulties of persuading the prime minister to take an interest in the processes of administration. Former cabinet secretaries have lined up to describe his resistance to the formalities of decision-making. And, like the retired mandarins, Sir Alistair does not take it personally. But in interviews since it became clear he would have no second term he has been bitterly critical of Tony Blair's blindness to the importance of being seen to do the right thing. Yesterday he warned that the prime minister now ranked with John Major in the public perception of sleaze.

 

By its very existence, the public standards committee serves as a measure against which to judge honesty and openness, sometimes harder to do than it sounds. Occasionally unnecessarily abrasive, Sir Alistair has none the less done a good job, showing that the seven principles established by Lord Nolan in the 1990s are taken seriously, that those elusive qualities of integrity, objectivity and accountability matter. His reports have not always made soothing reading for No 10: the most recent, which criticised the dangers to the integrity of postal ballots and the lack of bite of the Electoral Commission, was a typical attack. It uncomfortably exposed the government's casual disregard for embedding probity within its reforms.

Once he judged he was unlikely to get a second term, Sir Alistair abandoned caution, attacking the impression created by John Prescott's visit to the ranch of the Millennium Dome owner Philip Anschutz, questioning Tessa Jowell's conduct and suggesting that neither main party ever intended to repay the loans at the heart of the honours scandal. Downing Street points out that none of his predecessors has had a second term. Reports that the standards committee will be allowed to fade away are denied. But it is at least ill-judged that the process of appointing a successor has not even begun as the cash-for-honours inquiry approaches (surely) its climax, reviving earlier memories of dubious decisions and questionable conduct. It is hardly rational, and certainly wrong, to allow rumours to grow that the most visible evidence of a commitment to public probity is to be disbanded. But here Downing Street is a serial offender.

A civil service act to protect Whitehall's integrity, an independent authority to investigate breaches of the ministerial code and a robust approach to freedom of information are all indispensable weapons of good governance in a complex age. All have been neglected. But it is surely now clear that the Blairite mantra of "what works" is not a sufficient rule on which to run a democracy.

< Prev   Next >