Where are the good guys?

The last few years has seen a major decline in public standards. Together, a generation of fast revolving ministers have disfigured public life, and the scandals of wallpapergate, Pinchergate, partygate and others have tainted parliament and government.

During the governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, in particular, the good people who are essential to our curious informal constitutional arrangements seemed to have deserted public service; constitutional niceties were trampled underfoot; the civil service increasingly lacked the independence to speak truth to power—frit, no doubt, that of suffering the same fate as Sir Philip Rutnam, Tom Scholar or Jonathan Slater, former permanent secretaries who were brutally terminated. 

Johnson’s period in Number 10 was arguably the most corrupt and immoral we have seen in the UK since that of Lloyd George, a prime minister with a lucrative sideline selling peerages. Johnson was, of course, the first PM to have been found to have misled parliament. But the nadir of public standards was when, with an 80-seat majority, he ignored the finding of Alex Allen, his independent adviser on ministers’ interests, that Priti Patel had breached the ministerial code by bullying her officials. After sitting on the report for months, Johnson took no action against her and instead called for colleagues to “form a square” around “the Prittster”. In doing so, he stuck two fingers up to the ethics regime which has governed Britain since the 1995 Nolan Report on standards in public life. 

Real damage has been inflicted on the body politic as a result. Cynicism about the political process is now rampant. Moral authority has dissipated. Trust, the foundation of government in a liberal democracy, is at a record low. The latest British Attitudes Survey shows that only 14 per cent of the public trust the government to put the needs of the nation above the interests of their party all or most of the time, while 79 per cent think the way we are governed is in need of “a lot or great deal” of improvement. 

Johnson’s misdeeds only exposed the weakness of our informal system of ethical regulation: that it only works if politicians behave well. That is, in effect, the theory behind our constitutional conventions, with the prime minister acting as the guardian of so many of them. It took the resignation from Johnson’s government of more than 50 ministers over outrages “up with which they could no longer put” (to paraphrase Churchill) for ethical standards finally to reassert themselves—but, eventually, they did. You could say that the good folk eventually triumphed and the “system” is now secure with Keir Starmer as prime minister—but this would risk dangerous complacency.  

As the new government settles in, it may feel that we are entering a new political age. Unlike Johnson and key figures in the last Conservative governments, Starmer will refer to the Nolan principles of standards in public life as a matter of course. And we may see a powerful ethical regulator for the first time. But we must remember that the issue with public standards is not just about Johnson, and not even just about the Conservative party. Our constitutional ethical architecture has decayed over decades, since long before Covid and Brexit. Wider structural problems are in play: parliament is not respected by the executive; ministers change at dizzying rates; the civil service is denounced by ministers as “the blob”; too many senior civil servants have been dismissed or eased out. 

We know who some of the “bad guys” are in this story: for example, Nadhim Zahawi (who had tax penalties), Chris Pincher (who groped men at the Carlton Club) and Matt Hancock (responsible for the VIP lane during Covid), as prime exhibits. And many of them were rewarded with “prizes” for their efforts, despite chequered ethical records or a lack of competence. 

Gavin Williamson retained his post after he had messed up on the A-level fiasco; in contrast, the department’s permanent secretary was forced to resign. Williamson also presided over a series of other disasters (alleged leaks of secrets from the National Security Council and various education-related shambles) before eventually being dismissed in the September 2021 reshuffle, yet then received a knighthood for his “services”, which even the Number 10 Press Office did not feel able to justify. 

Patel became a Dame. For a while it looked as though Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams, Johnson cheerleaders both, would make it to the House of Lords (they were disappointed). Lord Lebedev of Richmond and Siberia did get to wear the ermine robes. 

Who, in this time, has stood up for public standards? Some of the ethical regulators—including the independent adviser on ministers’ interests and the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments—were supine during the Johnson period. To be fair, some are designed to be so. But there were others (I am thinking of the Electoral Commission and the National Audit Office) who barked loudly. 

On taking office in October 2022, Rishi Sunak, who had belatedly resigned from Johnson’s government, pointedly promised to put “integrity, professionalism and accountability” at the heart of his own. His record ended up being patchy. 

His government was generally more sober and ethically straight than those of Johnson and Truss, but he still decided to work with Zahawi, Williamson and Dominic Raab, tolerated Suella Braverman, despite several lapses and toxic rhetoric, and for many months supported Richard Sharp, a personal friend, as he sought to cling on to the chairmanship of the BBC. 

His government’s omnibus response to the important recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Public Administration and Constitution Committee and Boardman’s Report on the Greensill scandal, was distinctly tepid. It was two years late and offered little by way of change. There is in particular to be no statutory embedding of the ethics regulators and little reform of the revolving door or lobbying.

One might be Chris Bryant, the long-standing Labour MP for Rhondda and Ogmore. He chaired the Commons Standards Committee and then ceded the Chair to Harriet Harman as he had shown how much he despised Johnson, which you might think was a selfless act. He tells me that he thinks there is still much work to do to restore high public standards, and that due process needs to be reinstated. He says that this is a wider issue than Johnson alone, that we need to reclaim a sense of propriety. 

Harriet Harman, until this June the Labour MP for Camberwell and Peckham, then worked hard to gain a cross-party consensus on the Commons Standards Committee about whether Johnson misled parliament. Tory members of that committee, such as Sir Bernard Jenkin and Alberto Costa, took great risks politically to attack their then party leader. In the questioning I saw they were, if anything, tougher on Johnson than MPs from opposing benches.

Dame Meg Hillier also deserves mention. Like her predecessor as chair, Margaret Hodge, she skilfully steered the Public Accounts Committee, working closely with the National Audit Office. This office is an institutional hero too, for regulating standards in public administration. Their reports on the garden bridge (a vanity project of Boris Johnson as London mayor) and PPE contracts are classics of their kind. They have also carefully considered such mundane matters as how to recover revenue by reducing the use of offshore accounts to evade tax, and how efficiency savings can be made in local bus services.

The Electoral Commission—a good example of a statutory body which can call for documents and has a team of investigators at its disposal—can also be pleased with itself. It made a forceful investigation of Vote Leave (and this led to the non-reappointment of the chair in 2021, Sir John Holmes, a career diplomat). And it conducted an impressive inquiry into the wallpapergate scandal over the refurbishment of the prime minister’s Downing Street flat, funded by a Tory donor. This led to fines for the Conservative party. For this, John Pullinger, the chair of the commission who has an unlikely background in statistics and at the House of Commons Library Service, deserves acknowledgement.

In contrast, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, then Lord Geidt, provided only a tepid report, and was fobbed off by Johnson on his relationship with the donor. Incidentally, this double reporting shows the unhelpful overlapping jurisdictions of these regulators. There were no less than three reports into the Greensill scandal (involving David Cameron, since re-hired by Sunak, incessantly lobbying former underlings for Covid loans for Lex Greensill) for example, although happily they came to similar conclusions.

Across the universe of ethical regulators, Jonathan Evans, Lord Evans of Weardale, also stands as a colossus. The former head of the security services has been an outstanding chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and has made many important interventions in the public arena on ethical issues. Among them, he led the revival of the committee, a body which was the brainchild of the Nolan Report. Boris Johnson, he tells me, had a conceptual discomfort with regulation. 

Peter Riddell, a former commissioner for public appointments, is another hero. In part through force of personality, he turned his bailiwick into a hive of activity, calling out the way public appointments were made by the Johnson government, a Tory chumocracy with centralised decisions taken at Number 10, especially to the chair of Ofcom, the media regulator. The jury is out on his successor William Shawcross who was close to Johnson’s Number 10.

Laurie Magnus, who took over in 2022 as the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministers’ interests, also deserves recognition. He conducted an efficient and fast inquiry into Zahawi, who Sunak had appointed to be chair of the Conservative party despite him having made a settlement of £5m for unpaid taxes to HMRC. (Although Sunak said he had not known at the time about penalties being exacted.) 

A week before Zahawi was finally forced out, on 29th January 2023, Sunak announced that Zahawi had “addressed this matter in full”. This had added piquancy because the negotiation with the HMRC took place during Zahawi’s short tenure as chancellor in July 2022, when he was responsible for HMRC. Zahawi’s misconduct was exacerbated because he described the allegations as “media smears” and hired lawyers to silence the whistleblower against him, a tax solicitor called Dan Neidle. 

Magnus reported swiftly and judged decisively against Zahawi, saying that he had misled Sunak and breached the ministerial code on no fewer than seven occasions, including making untrue public statements and repeatedly failing to act with openness and honesty.

Lord Simon McDonald, the former permanent undersecretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, intervened magnificently and with impeccable timing to finish off Chris Pincher, then a Johnson ultra-loyalist, deputy chief whip and MP for Tamworth. 

Johnson’s final demise—his “Clownfall”, as the Economist called it—came about in the strangest of circumstances. On 29th June 2022 at the Carlton Club, a watering hole of the right established by the Duke of Wellington, Pincher got drunk and groped two men. 

When questions were inevitably asked as to whether Johnson knew of previous such incidents involving the long serving MP, the prime minister, who had brought Pincher back to government after a long period in the wilderness said “no”. But McDonald said (on Radio 4, no less) that there had indeed been several allegations against Pincher, of which Johnson had been made aware during his tenure as foreign secretary, when Pincher was a minister at the foreign office. 

This was sweet revenge for McDonald, who had been “encouraged” to resign as permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office by Johnson’s government. The incident opened the floodgates to criticism of Johnson from all wings of the Conservative party. It was also rumoured, and not denied, that Johnson had made the comment “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature” to colleagues. For calling this out, MacDonald joins the heroic ranks.

Perhaps the ultimate good guy was John Major, Johnson’s predecessor (and long-time antagonist, primarily over Europe). Major still has not been given enough kudos for setting up the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life in October 1994, even though this arose from his infamous “Back to Basics” campaign promoting traditional values. 

The report led to the ethical architecture we have, and the seven principles of public life, which apply to every holder of public office in Britain: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. They are respected around the world and held up as aspirations, unlike our present reputation for ethics. These standards are principles, not law or constitutional conventions, although they have achieved a quasi-constitutional status. They have power: you could say that Johnson was in the end brought down because he did not comply with these principles. 

Nolan’s general and balanced judgment in the 1990s was that “the great majority of men and women in public life are honest and hard-working and observe high ethical standards”. 

This is still the case, even though the number of chancers and schemers in public life has probably risen. There are certainly fewer politicians with a real background outside politics, without a hinterland. And that is not just nostalgia. We need to honour those heroes and heroines who saved the system, with as much strength as we should criticise the wreckers. That’s the only way for the good guys to win.