Normalcy?

This post is cross-posted to the Martin Meenagh Blog.


There are days when an obvious decline from the standards of a few years ago does shock me. In the Middle Ages, between the twelfth and sixteenth century, the Bishop of Winchester was the chief pimp of Southwark, having the power to license all prostitutes and brothels in the area. In some years, he lived off the rents of cock-lane. A return to that sort of thing in the 2012 Olympics, as when the Germans licensed brothels during one of the latter world cups, wouldn't shock me. But the values of the political class do.

In 1972, one of the most intelligent and decent politicians this country has produced--Reginald Maudling--was forced to resign as Home Secretary because he had accepted a directorship on the company of, and was personally associated with, a bribe-giver and wheeler-dealer named John Poulson. 'Reggie' was subsequently undermined by allegations that he had fixed a deal in Malta, and been the beneficiary of largesse, though the House of Commons decided not to accept, only to acknowledge, the report that sent him tumbling into alcoholism and death.

Reggie was ashamed of his behaviour and resigned. He had twice failed to become Tory leader, despite the fact that he would have made a humane, non-europhile alternative to the awful Edward Heath and that he wouldn't have wasted North Sea Oil on a mad monetarist experiment as Margaret Thatcher would have done. His own acceptance of his culpability--the acknowledgment that his standards were not as high as they could possibly be in exercising the public trust--ended his career and his life.

The response of the political classes to the fall of Maudling, and people like him, was to say 'oh well, we need to live high and bribery is a temptation, so let's filch the money from the taxpayers instead.'

Jacqui Smith has employed friends of mine. They report her to be an impressive woman of substance. She is, however, an example of how the political classes extract money in the clear understanding that they are doing nothing wrong.

I feel guilty when someone buys me dinner; she takes some £141,866 in salary, ten per cent of which can be put into a gold-plated pension scheme. She also lives with her sister, and not in a ministerial residence. This seems to allow her to claim that the house in which her husband and child live is a residence upon which she can claim expenses, which so far seem to have come to around £24006 per year. She seems to have claimed over £100000 of this amount over the years. She is also entitled to office expenses as a member of parliament, and travel expenses.

If Jacqui Smith were getting this money from a private directorship, the media would go spare. She is, apparently, an honest woman and I am not suggesting impropriety of a personal sort. But she gets the money for being part of a government elected by 22% of the voters, for supporting policies not in the manifesto and which are resisted by anyone who knows anything about law, for establishing secret databases on the travel of every passport holder, for closing down pubs at a rate of one a day, for diverting government money to fake charities which then tell the government what it wants to hear, and for sundry other things far worse than Reggie Maudling would ever have been associated with.

Jacqui Smith is a hardworking, personally honest member of parliament and Home Secretary who is not actually doing anything legally wrong. She is by no means the worst example of this sort of thing. Smith is an example of a political and media class which cannot be controlled and which lives off my taxes. Reggie wasn't, really. If you are in the world and part of the world of affairs, are you of necessity part of a dishonest situation?

Amongst maligned British political figures of the past hundred years, one has always stood affectionately out for me. Happily for someone who likes contrarians, my praising him managed to send the head of the government legal service into a bit of a spin at a Middle temple do last year, even though the man of whom I speak has been dead for nearly three decades, and was nothing of a contrarian except by the reaction he invoked in the humourless.

I mean, of course, that great Middle Templar Sir Reginald Maudling. 'Reggie', as he was known to one and all, was the propagator, if not the inventor of what he called the 'well balanced lunch'--something generous accompanied by a bottle of red and a bottle of white, with a friend. He knew his cigars like the back of his hand, and was of the political generation that was myopically condemned for managing the decline of empire and being worried about unemployment instead of making Keynesianism work in a traumatised post-war economy full of shockingly bad management.

Reggie Maudling was also profoundly lazy, not because he actually was lazy in any mental or spiritual sense but because he had no time for the appearance of effort and the expenditure of life's resources on petty aims. As a conservative, he thought that there always needed to be a balance in society; as a politician, he thought that ideas and occasional action were more important than spin and short-term needs.

Unfortunately, Reggie tended to put all this across in the sort of humorous fashion that upsets the permanently humourless, of whom there are plenty in the world. When introduced to one of the first computers in the sixties, for instance, he refused to be awed by geek-babble and instead expressed wonderment that anyone should want to do such complicated sums, or so many.
Ironically, though associated with a 'dash for growth', which he messed up, Reggie Maudling was a believer in limits. I thought of him this morning when reading two specific stories.

One was that, as a panicked response to global price rises, airline companies are bringing back turboprop and propellor aeroplanes. When the Prime Minister put Reggie in charge of the British aircraft industry in the fifties, he made exactly the same decision. He was condemned for silliness, for 'not being with it' and for a 'mad decision'. Forty years later, with the oil running out, how silly does he seem?

The other thing that made me think of Reggie Maudling was the way that all those who confidently assailed him as a drunk who couldn't manage the British economy because he wasn't thrusting and Thatcherite, or even Heathite, are now after an extra £50 billions of public money for the banks. This is on top of a £10 billion rights issue by the Royal Bank of Scotland, and some £80 billions overall as a conservative estimate for Northern Rock. Policies on the part of those who condemned Maudling since 1979, Tory and Labour, have divided British society and delivered growth rates below those he achieved; and the national debt and credit dependence has ballooned.

Reggie Maudling made many mistakes. One was Northern Ireland, where his behaviour caused Bernadette Devlin to slap him in the House of Commons. Another was allowing himself to be beaten by the awful Ted Heath in the Tory elections of 1964, which shouldn't have happened, and which was bad for Britain. A third was his association with shady middle eastern businessmen, which inevitably ended his career under a welter of suspicion even though he was personally very honest.

Reggie's final mistake, of course, was to allow Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath to drive him into the arms of the international wine-tasting societies he got himself elected to, which increased his predisposition to alcoholism and led to his death.

Poor Reggie. Still, at least he was right on many things that mattered, and especially on how to be human. I for one am glad to think of him this morning. Here are some reggie sources, if you want them, including articles detailing the sad death of his son of heroin in 1999.