The last Prime Minister
but one seemed to believe that rules were for everyone else, but that someone
who would be world king should feel no obligation to abide by them. That sense
of entitlement was coupled with a sense of utter shamelessness; no matter how
egregious his behaviour, he simply ignored all criticism and carried on
regardless. For most of his life, it's an approach which worked. Being ashamed
of nothing and willing to ignore all criticism meant that most problems eventually
ceased to be newsworthy, even if people kept muttering darkly about them from
the sidelines.
Whilst Wales’ new
First Minister isn’t in the same league as Boris Johnson, his approach to the large
donations received from a convicted environmental criminal seems to be modelled
on that used by Johnson – ignore it and hope it will go away. Sooner or later, he
assumes that his critics will simply give up – they don’t have the votes in the
Senedd to force him to do anything, as long as his own side continue to vote
the right way, despite the obvious misgivings harboured by some
of them. The opposition parties will presumably continue to make their repeated
demands for an investigation, although it's far from clear what the point would
be: what would actually be investigated? The First Minister himself has repeated,
what is beginning to seem like endlessly, the mantra that ‘no rules were broken’
and nobody seems to have any clear contrary evidence of any breach of any
rules, whether rules laid down by the law, the rules of the Senedd, or the
rules of the Labour Party.
The complaint,
however, isn’t that he behaved in a way contrary to any rules, but that his
behaviour was unethical and inappropriate, something which anyone capable of
feeling shame might see as being far worse. It is, though, something which is
much harder to ‘investigate’. Whilst the feeling that it was indeed both of
those things might be near universal outside his own immediate circle, whether
behaviour is considered ethical or not is ultimately a subjective issue rather
than an objective one. For those – a group which presumably includes the First
Minister – who believe that ethical behaviour is simplistically defined as doing
no more than avoiding any breach of rules, his behaviour cannot be considered to
be other than entirely ethical. For those who expect that people who would lead
or govern us should be expected to possess a moral compass of their own (and
know how to use it), abiding by ‘the rules’ is never going to be good enough.
Given the ethnic
background of both the First Minister and the current Prime Minister, the old
adage about the colour of pots and kettles seems singularly inappropriate, but
in an outbreak of what one might instead call ‘Comparative Hypocritical Immorality
and Pomposity Syndrome’, the PM who happily accepted either £10 million or £15 million
(his oft-demonstrated inability in basic arithmetic prevents him from knowing
which, but he’s well and truly had his CHIPS either way) from a racist and misogynist
has demanded
an investigation into a FM whose willingness to accept tainted money from a
criminal has so far been limited to a ‘mere’ £200,000 (although that limit hasn’t,
so far as we know, as yet been tested by any higher offer). Is Brexit to blame
for the current shortage of moral compasses, or is there some deeper problem at
work?
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