The Spectator’s Notes | 28 April 2007

‘A conflict of interest’ is now almost the worst thing known to modern theories of governance. It is considered disgraceful, for example, that the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who is a government minister and was made a peer by Tony Blair, will be the man who decides whether or not there should be prosecutions in the ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair. But it is a strange fact that attempts to sort out such conflicts can make matters worse. Who can doubt, for example, that the Church of England is so scrupulously moderate because it knows that its position as the established Church conflicts with modern ideas of freedom of thought, not to mention the divine injunction to take no thought for the morrow? The governance of the BBC has now been rebuilt, after the Hutton affair, so that the chairman now has a clear duty only to licence-payers, where before he faced both ways, acting to defend the Corporation as well. The change sounds logical, but I expect it will marginalise the chairman’s power in the institution. Again, the Blair government is ending the ancient custom by which the Lord Chancellor is both a Cabinet minister and the head of the judiciary. Yet history suggests that previous lord chancellors, worried about attacks for conflicted interests, have generally been scrupulous in protecting the law from political interference: it is under the present government that things have turned nastier than before. Conflicts of interest are part of everyone’s experience of life, and we need to have consciences to resolve them. It may be unwise to try to sort them out too neatly in the allocation of public positions. The anomalous nature of Lord Goldsmith’s position will tend to push him to the right decision.

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I have always been very sorry that I offended Terry Major-Ball, who died last week, by referring to his brother John Major as ‘the son of a failed trapeze artist’.