England is the most class-ridden society under the sun, ruled largely by the old and silly…. One of the dominant facts in English life in the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class George Orwell, writing in the 1930s
My apologies to readers for the unduly long gap between this blog and my previous one. I had long planned to write a blog on the British honours system, expecting to tie it to what I assumed (correctly) would be an appallingly self-serving ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list. But long after his resignation we had to wait and wait… and wait and wait.
Rumours abounded:
- that Johnson had so many nominees for peerages that the House of Lords would comfortably extend its position as the second largest legislative body in the world after the Chinese National People’s Congress;
- that charges of nepotism were being fuelled by Johnson’s intention to honour his father, scarcely a pillar of the community, and Boris having already knighted his own brother;
- that most of his gongs would go to a longish list of mediocre advisers and hangers-on, some extremely junior;
- that he would continue his attempts to reward his old tabloid journalist friends, notably Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail;
- that he would also reward those who had defended him throughout the Partygate scandal.
There were calls for Prime Minister Sunak to intervene to blackball some on the Johnson list. In any event the formal approving bodies (the House of Lords Appointments Committee, and the Honours Committee of the Cabinet Office) had clearly been something of a battleground. It eventually took an unprecedented 9 months before an approved List was published.
Significant dissension also arose over this period about the proposed Resignation Honours List of the ill-fated Liz Truss, who only survived for 49 days (becoming the briefest Prime Minister in British history) but still acquired numerous freebies associated with her brief Prime Ministerial role, as well as the ability to nominate close political friends for honours, not that she had many of those.
I’ll come back to all this later, after examining aspects of the British Honours system over the last century or so, in order to judge whether ‘political corruption’ is an appropriate label for all these goings-on. My title and sub-titles will alert you to where I stand on this issue.
100 Years Of Corruption: From Lloyd George to Boris Johnson
OLD CORRUPTION
Essentially, this label embraces the ways in which bribery, nepotism and patronage maintained aristocratic landed interests in Parliament, and thereby control of the state, largely in the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. The House of Lords was the province of the upper landed interest, the House of Commons also controlled by this interest through ‘placemen’ attached to influential patrons. Political competition developed through the formation of loosely organised political groups we know through the labels ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’, later developing into Liberal and Conservative. These groups would either control the nomination to particular Parliamentary seats or would buy support for their candidates. Many parliamentary seats were held through so called ‘rotten boroughs’, often with sparse populations or sometimes even none.
The divisions of the honours list, formally policed and awarded by the monarchy, but in actuality mostly in the gift of political leaderships, were a steady form of political patronage. It’s astonishing how much this ruling class luxuriated in the awards of honours to themselves and each other, doubtless regarding them as appropriate marks of their elevated social status. Anyone overlooked could feel quite cross. An excellent example is provided by Richard Wellesley, younger brother of the future Duke of Wellington. Richard already enjoyed the powerful imperial position of Governor General of Bengal (from 1797 to 1805). Deeply sensitive about the inferior status of his Irish marquessate, which did not allow him to sit in the House of Lords, he took to his bed for ten days, raging at the perceived insult of the absence of a promotion: ‘I am ruined here, everyone perceives my degradation: I don’t care about any honour except the Garter’. (from William Dalrymple, ‘White Mughals’). On his return to Britain he would become possibly the worst Foreign Secretary ever recorded, at least until displaced by Boris Johnson in that role over a century later.
This essentially aristocratic system did not survive the major economic changes wrought by industrial, agricultural, and commercial transformations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even less the social and political changes driven by the great War of 1914-18. The world of rotten boroughs, politics as an aristocratic playground, quickly crumbled in the Edwardian era. The Parliament Act of 1911 sounded the death knell of the House of Lords, and further broadening of the electoral franchise to all adults, including women, supported the increasing supremacy of the House of Commons. The leading authority on the history of the aristocracy (David Cannadine) describes 1911 as ‘the very year that, in reality, witnessed the most successful attack in recent history on the House of Lords – and thus on the hereditary, titled, landowning classes of the British Isles’.
NEW CORRUPTION
‘You cannot throw a stone at a dog without hitting a knight in London’ (Tory grandee Lord Salisbury early 1900s)
There was a conundrum here. How would political control of these new versions of Lords and Commons be exerted? The answer lay in the increasing competition for office of more closely organised political parties linked to nation-wide Parliamentary constituencies. From the beginning of the twentieth century the system settled down to competition between three parties: the Conservative Party, broadly representing aristocratic and wealthy upper middle class groups; the Labour Party broadly representing the labouring working classes; and the Liberal Party, broadly representing middle class commercial and trading interests. But these arrangements at this period were notably fluid. Winston Churchill happily crossed from Conservative to Liberal and back again as it suited his ambition; Lloyd George fuelled his own equally strong political ambitions by constructing coalitions.
Soon, competing political parties learned that with a universal franchise, and growing modes of communication (newspapers and later radio, then television) electoral success carried a large price tag: and party donations must have a quid pro quo. Hence the sudden expansion of the honours system, no longer monopolised by the landed classes, but spread more widely, The First World War and its political aftermath opened the floodgates and ‘some of those who had accumulated vast new fortunes acquired their titles as they acquired their houses: by paying for them’ (Cannadine). From 1875-1884, 448 knighthoods and been awarded, and 48 baronetcies; but from 1915-25 , the figure was 2791 knighthoods and 322 baronetcies. Titles – peerages, knighthoods, decorations – proliferated. George V professed to hate presenting gongs to clearly undeserving recipients yet invented several new ones including the Order of the British Empire (which, unlike the Empire, survives to this day).
Enter Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard
According to historian AJP Taylor, Lloyd George, the first and so far last Welsh Prime Minister of this country, detested titles, while distributing them lavishly. He saw that political competition and organisation required increasingly substantial amounts of money. Coming up to significant elections after the end of the 1914-18 War he would in effect give a peerage or a knighthood or a baronetcy to anyone willing to pay for it (you will see perhaps why I link him to Boris Johnson in my title). This largesse would include ‘hard-headed’ men who had made money by dubious, even criminal means during the war; wealthy Americans who expected a return for their party donations, such as William Waldorf Astor who would buy a seat in the House of Commons and duly a peerage in the House of Lords; and an assortment of businessman and financiers who sought the kind of status that landed wealth had brought to the old aristocracy. Perhaps most important were newspaper proprietors, who would give political support as well as financial donations, and expected nothing less than a peerage in return. During the Lloyd George time there was even a going rate for gongs: £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for a baronetcy, £40,000 plus for a peerage. Many of these transactions were in the hands of political touts, such as the infamous Maundy Gregory, who fronted a sort of honours auction from an office in Westminster. In this way Lloyd George created 90 peers between 1916 and 1922, many of them extremely dubious characters, and bought up several influential newspaper owners and editors. (Incidentally the going rate for a peerage now appears to be a £3m donation to the Conservative Party.)
The epithet ‘corruption’ had already entered the public domain in the 1890s, but the later Lloyd George regime was widely regarded as a scandal, not least because much of the money he raised by these indiscriminate awards went into his own personal fund. But much of the recrimination came from aristocratic Tory grandees who had lost control of their own system of political patronage; and the ‘new’ Tory leaders who eventually supplanted Lloyd George were little better morally and much less effective politically.
Back to the Future and Boris Johnson
Let’s leap forward a hundred years, when we may compare Lloyd George’s confident and innovative Prime Ministerial grip on British politics between 1916 and 1922 with Boris Johnson’s slippery hold on the Prime Ministership between 2019 and 2022. There have been mixed judgements on the controversial Welshman, but he is credited with real and lasting social achievements in the fields of welfare benefits (introducing the first state pension); and education (reforms that protected and enhanced the lives of young children); with bringing the Great War to a relatively successful conclusion; and with the birth of a new and highly effective form of centralised ‘Cabinet’ government. Given his careless creation of peerages, it is ironic to find that he described the House of Lords as ‘a body of five hundred men chosen at random from amongst the unemployed’.
By comparison, Boris Johnson a century later was much given to expansive promises and pledges that were never realised or implemented. The achievement he would lay claim to himself – engineering the exit of the UK from the European Union – is now generally recognised as an unmitigated economic disaster. We can at least point to an honourable legacy from Lloyd George’s tenure; it is likely that historians will judge Johnson to have been one of the worst British PMs on record, a deeply flawed and failed state leader who demeaned every political office he occupied and was in effect dismissed from Parliament in disgrace.
But there is one area in which their records do bear comparison: the corrupt and immoral use of the honours system. We noted above Lloyd George’s relentless use of honours to raise considerable sums of money for his political campaigns, and his personal grip on these resources. And despite his considerable abilities and real achievements, he ultimately left a divided Liberal Party in a condition from which it never fully recovered.
Johnson’s manipulation of party and public resources was equally shameless, but he had very little to show for it other than personal aggrandisement. His besmirched political and journalistic careers constantly reveal the pursuit of the financial and personal rewards of political power for their own sake, devoid of any wider vision or moral compass. He may well have led his party to long term political ruin. He departs to almost total condemnation and contempt, with few friends except possibly in the tabloid press which Lloyd George also so relentlessly courted.
Johnson’s abuse of the honours system is not, therefore, unique but it seems as if it has been directed more to his own personal advantage, rather than to the well-being of his chosen political party. But then, the Conservative Party has never had any real meaning for him other than as a reliable conduit to political power. They have deserved each other. The actual final episode turned out to be both demeaning and laughable, honours not only as a disreputable system but as a bad joke, the only way to describe a system that regards third rate and under-achieving members of our political class such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Fabricant as worthy of special honour and recognition. Nadine Dorries is still loudly and vociferously demanding to know why she has not been given the peerage she was promised and expected. Meanwhile, Johnson’s final act has been quite pathetic: he goes out of political life, not with a bang, but a whimper.
In straddling a century of political corruption, I have left aside developments along the way. The 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act was an early attempt to respond to the Lloyd George scandal by making illegal the purchase for cash of peerages and other honours. Judged by the most recent attempt to apply it in a case relating to the then Prince Charles Foundation, it is a very weak legal foundation for prosecuting cases. Postwar institutional developments in Cabinet Government, political party organisation, the creation of an independent and politically neutral civil service, and agreed constitutional conventions on political competition and behaviour, created a less hospitable environment for openly corrupt transactions and relationships. There were some celebrated and controversial cases, on the Conservative side, the notorious cash-for-questions scandal under John Major’s government in 1994, in which Tory MP and Minister Neil Hamilton was discovered to have been getting envelopes stuffed with thousands of pounds in cash in return for asking Parliamentary questions favourable to his client, Harrods’ owner Mohamed Al Fayeed. Shortly after, Jonathan Aitken, a Defence Minister, lied about a hotel bill paid for by the Saudi royal family, who had an interest in procuring defence contracts. Aitken lost a court case and went to jail for perjury. These events inspired the Major administration to set up the Committee for Standards in Public Life, and a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, both of which continue today. Neither of these cases were directly connected with the honours system.
Rather less indignation had been generated by Harold Wilson’s so-called Lavender List in 1976. It is still not entirely clear whether Harold Wilson was much involved, with rumours that it had been compiled by the PM’s long-serving secretary Marcia Williams, later herself ennobled as Lady Falkender. The surprising aspect for members of the Labour Party was that many of the Wilson honours went to businessmen, not normally in the Labour Party’s good books. While much fuss was made by a police investigation of Tony Blair into a possible cash-for-honours transaction, nothing was proved, and possibly scarred by all this Blair did not issue a resignation Honours List. Blair accepted a Knighthood in 2022.
It’s reasonable to conclude that in 100 years of British political life there was nothing to compare with the Lloyd George scandals of the 1920s, until we reach the Boris Johnson scandals of the 2020s (with a little support from David Cameron and Liz Truss).
Do Honours Really Matter?
Well, yes and no. Yes, because they are pretty much a universal practice, most states have an honours system. The ‘best practice’ involves a sort of ‘democratisation’ of honours, where they are used to recognise and reward the contributions that representative ordinary citizens, not just the toffs, make to public life. Our own system incorporates this idea, which is genuinely realised in practice through a well-established process. Minor reform is needed, not least a change to the titles which purport to reflect an Empire we no longer possess.
But the political honours lists, in the gift of every Tom Dick and Harry (or Harriet) Prime Minister raise serious issues of corrupt and corrupting practice. Corruption is a slippery notion, for one person’s ‘corruption’ is another person’s ‘sleaze’, and a third person’s ‘opportunism’; in 19th century USA we even get the label ‘honest graft’, corrupt control of major political institutions regarded as both appropriate and necessary. Here in the UK there is a curiously opaque relation to law and legality, largely because of the long-standing reliance in our constitutional system on unwritten rules we call ‘conventions’; unscrupulous politicians are quick to manipulate these conventions in their own interest. Typical here is avoidance of straightforward challenges to illegality by toothless codes of conduct. These are further weakened by the appointment of politically acceptable people to administer them. Controls on behaviours by members of the Houses of Lords and Commons are even weaker, because too easily circumvented through political channels, or by the promise of rewards (ministerial office, honours, high status official positions).
This kind of ‘corruption’ has got completely out of control in our most recent ‘low, dishonest decade’. Honours are only the surface of this, and much more reprehensible corruptions have taken place, especially in relation to the award of public contracts to political cronies, and of appointments to a wide range of public institutions of people whose only qualification for these posts is loyalty to the governing political party. A worrying aspect of all this is the myriad ways in which these political connections and corruptions are linked to foreign interests in ways which are clearly harmful (and sometimes not so clearly). Many concerns have been expressed about the extent of Conservative Party support and funding by the significant number of Russian oligarchs resident in London.
A rather more obvious case for concern has been the elevation by Boris Johnson to the House of Lords in November 2020 of Evgeny Lebedev, son of former KGB spy in London, Alexander Lebedev, known to be a close associate of Vladimir Putin. Johnson overrode concerns expressed by the security services and the House of Lords Appointments Committee. It was reported that government officials had asked Buckingham Palace if the Queen would overrule the appointment, but this request was declined. Back in April 2018, while Foreign Secretary, and during the internationally shocking Skripal poisoning affair, Johnson was reported to have met Alexander Lebedev at a party in Italy hosted by Evgeny Lebedev, without any security or Foreign Office officials present, in breach of all normal protocols. He was photographed alone at an airport the next day, reported as ‘looking like he had slept in his clothes’ and ‘struggling to walk in a straight line’. He remains close to Evgeny Lebedev, who is owner of the Independent and the London Evening Standard newspapers. Alexander Lebedev has meanwhile been sanctioned by both Canada and Ukraine for his activities in Russian-occupied Crimea. This was Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, then our Prime Minister, clearly a walking (just) security risk. At least Lloyd George was never a national security risk, though his enemies claimed that he rarely proceeded in a straight line.
Ultimately the whole business of disreputable honours, the inflated House of Lords, the over-hyped and over-privileged monarchy, the toothless regulatory bodies, and a parliamentary electoral system unfit for purpose, all require a major constitutional overhaul, probably requiring the protection of a written constitution. This will be a long and difficult haul, but when a system is so truly broken there is no real alternative but to mend it.
Tory England – its riches, its schools, its social influence, the inequalities over which it presides, its stranglehold over what is regarded as political common sense – remains as powerful as it was under Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in 1900 Will Hutton, Observer early 2023
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