The secret of Churchill’s gold

Never in the course of parliamentary history has the personal honour of MPs been more widely doubted and discounted than it is today. Last week the Speaker of the House of Commons announced that, from 2004, not just the Register of Members’ Interests but even their expenses claims will be made available to public scrutiny. Will it ultimately work in the public’s favour to subject our politicians to ever more rigorous audits of their financial affairs?

It is not just MPs who are being investigated – always with the automatic assumption of guilt until innocence is proven – by ever-nosier public bodies. Our very parish councillors, whose work is largely unremunerated, have been asked to declare any ‘interests’, and to register gifts of more than £25 in value. The new rules insisting that peers also announce publicly all their business interests and activities have led Lord Cranborne, for one, to give up active participation in the House of Lords.

Are we really happy to go down the American route, by which the Bush administration was forced to forgo employing so experienced a public servant as Henry Kissinger in its 11 September inquiry because of an insistence on the public disclosure of all his business activities and clients? And where are the MPs of the intellectual calibre of Enoch Powell, who resolutely refused to fill in his Register of Members’ Interests, and who successfully dared Parliament to penalise him for it?

It seems that all sense of proportion has deserted our public authorities – primarily the Commons Fees Office and the Committee of Standards and Privileges – when it comes to demanding disclosures supposedly for suppressing ‘sleaze’. I suspect that financial sleaze in politics committed by individual MPs, as opposed to the generalised kind committed by government, such as in the Ecclestone affair, is so rare as not to justify the present massive over-reaction that is putting off talented, public-spirited people from engaging in political life.