The perils of thinking you are good

The Sue Gray phenomenon fascinates me as an example of the perils of thinking you are good. (A related case study is that of Sir Keir Starmer.) It strikes me again and again that the most self-deceiving people in modern public life are those who publicly set themselves on the side of virtue. You see this in senior civil servants, judges, university vice-chancellors, NHS administrators, green businesses, heads of big charities and aid organisations. ‘We do good, so we can do no wrong’ is the great non-sequitur of the age, and the proliferation of ‘standards in public life’, ‘propriety and ethics’ committees, experts on ESG, diversity, inclusion, decarbonisation, transparency etc only makes things worse. Ethics are a matter for every single human being and cannot be delegated to a priestly caste, often taxpayer-funded. Many of the people in these trades may be well-meaning, but their déformation professionelle is that identified by Jesus in the scribes and Pharisees, ‘ye are like whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones’. If Sue Gray had done a more normal job than exercising power through ‘propriety and ethics’ for years, she would have quickly seen that her secret negotiations to go and work for the Labour leader while being highly paid as a neutral civil servant were not ethical and her desire to enter government by other means, leveraging her experience for political ends, was not proper.

The Daily Telegraph’s publication of Matt Hancock’s lockdown texts reveals that he cast about rather desperately when the Sun exposed his affair with his special adviser. Could his CCTV-captured cuddle with Gina Coladangelo come within the social distancing rules which his own department had imposed? One exemption from distancing was ‘for the provision of voluntary and charitable services’. ‘Well it was voluntary and arguably charitable!’ Mr Hancock joked, slightly ungallantly, to his aide Damon Poole at 1900 hours on 25 June 2021.