Who monitors the moralists?

If anyone was suitable to be the Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, it was Lord Geidt. Self-effacing, professional, unself-righteous but thoroughly proper, he could be relied on to do his job without an eye to attracting headlines, gaining Remainer revenge and similar modern temptations to which some officials succumb. Yet last week he resigned. It seems a good moment to ask whether the job is doable. Many will say that it isn’t, and blame Boris Johnson. It is undoubtedly true that any system based on rules comes under strain when confronted with Boris’s work methods. Last week, a horse called Etonian ran at Ascot. A newspaper reported that he was ‘evidently hard to train after his smart juvenile days’. That sums up the Boris problem. But I think the matter goes wider and deeper. The whole problem of the ethical invigilation of politics gets worse. This is not primarily to do with a decline in standards among political leaders, which have always varied wildly, but with a misconception about who should decide such things.

I first pointed out the dangers when John Major got Lord Nolan to work in 1994 after ‘cash for questions’.