One cannot help but notice the Deputy Prime Minister’s sudden conversion to the cause of electoral purity, thundering against Reform’s handful of well-heeled benefactors while treating the union millions as if they were collected by a choir of angels passing the plate. The Daily Mail, bless its ink-stained soul, appears unable to grasp that a farthing extracted from every last member of the proletariat is somehow morally superior to a fat cheque signed by two gentlemen who actually possess the money.
Permit me, therefore, to remind the assembled company that the Labour movement’s purse has never been quite so unsullied as a freshly laundered union banner. History, that most unwelcome guest, has furnished rather more colourful illustrations than the present sermon would allow.
Consider the Birmingham hotel and conference centre that Unite erected with its members’ subscriptions. What began as a modest scheme ballooned past one hundred and twelve million pounds of working people’s money for a building later valued at a paltry twenty-nine to thirty-eight million. A contractor unencumbered by the tiresome formality of competitive tender was handed the job; the former general secretary described its bosses as “good friends” and accepted private-jet flights and Champions League tickets arranged by the same obliging firm. Auditors later spoke of a “pervasive fraud environment,” a missing fourteen million that remains as mysterious as Baldrick’s last original thought, and overcharging of at least thirty million. The Serious Fraud Office took a polite interest. Sharon Graham has spent years attempting to claw some of it back. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the “cleanest money in politics” rendered in four-star brick and mortar: a white elephant paid for by the rank and file and enjoyed, in part, by those who signed the cheques.
The party’s own ledger is scarcely cleaner. There was Bernie Ecclestone’s million and the convenient exemption from the tobacco advertising ban. There were the undeclared loans that sparked the cash-for-honours inquiry. David Abrahams funnelled more than six hundred thousand pounds through proxies so his name would not appear. Labour Together under Morgan McSweeney failed to declare hundreds of thousands until the Electoral Commission noticed. More recently Lord Alli supplied clothes, glasses, concert tickets and a flat; the Prime Minister and several senior colleagues accepted them with the alacrity of men who have never seen a free lunch they did not like. Companies that donated have gone on to win substantial government contracts. The pattern is not pennies from millions so much as large sums from a rather select few, followed by vigorous insistence that the rules should apply more strictly to everyone else.
One might almost admire the consistency. The same party that now thunders about oligarchs buying democracy has, at various times, accepted money whose provenance was opaque, whose accounting was incomplete, and whose beneficiaries included those who commissioned the very hotel that now sits as a monument to how members’ pennies can disappear into thin air. Baldrick himself could hardly have devised a more cunning plan.