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Galling sight as Hain refuses to accept blame for his mistakes
BEING a politician these days must be a funny business.
Any hint of wrongdoing and you are mercilessly hounded by the media —
despite all your protestations that you are innocent and any misdemeanours
were simply oversights or mistakes.
Then you hang on to power for a while, hope it will all go away in the
fullness of time and try to stay out of the limelight.
Finally, you resign.
Next, of course, follows the obligatory press conference where you pledge
to clear your name before heading off into the sunset trailing a promising
career behind you.
It’s nothing unusual and has happened so many times before to the
great and good who presume to pontificate on and legislate for the rest
of the nation’s behaviour.
Which makes it all the more perplexing that former North of Ireland Minister
Peter Hain waited so long before finally resigning his post as Work and
Pensions Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Government.
His mistake was to fail to declare in time some £103,000 in donations
to his campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party.
In all Mr Hain spent around £200,000 on a contest in which he trailed
in fifth out of a field of six.
Not, in itself, a performance to inspire that much confidence in a man
charged with overseeing a multi-billion pound budget.
But perhaps the most galling aspect of the whole episode is that Mr Hain
did what we have seen politicians backed into a corner do on so many other
occasions — he tried to cling on to his position despite the palpable
fact that he had broken the rules whether by ignorance or just sheer incompetence.
He only gasped his last excuse when the matter was referred to the Metropolitan
Police and it became clear to everyone that he was now a liability to
the Labour Government.
Inevitably, in his resignation statement he said he had been left with
no choice but to go so he could fight to clear his name. Which he may
well do.
But it is a sad part of political life nowadays that when MPs are discovered
to have broken the rules they seem to blindly believe they can attempt
to sidestep the issue with a blizzard of statements and keep their hold
on the privileged positions they occupy.
The people who vote for them and pay their salaries through an ever-increasing
tax burden rarely have that luxury.
As colleagues queued to pay their tributes to Mr Hain they all missed
the most pertinent point of the whole saga.
The real sadness was not that Peter Hain had gone from Government —
but that he did not have the imagination and courage to see he should
have left as soon as the funding controversy was uncovered. |
