Who's shafting who?

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It would be a very strange political party indeed which managed to somehow contain a Jeremy Corbyn or a Diane Abbott as well as a Natalie Elphicke. Choosing who to keep and who to reject sounds like a job opportunity for another ex-Labour MP. Kilroy-Silk was himself something of an expert in party-hopping as he switched from Labour to UKIP to Veritas, but it’s not his political volatility which comes to mind so much as his short-lived TV game show, Shafted, in which he asked players whether they wished to ‘share’ or to ‘shaft’. That’s the sort of ‘difficult choice’ which ‘Keith’ Starmer insists he needs to make, although choosing to poach one of the allegedly most right-wing members of the House of Commons whilst ditching two of the allegedly most left-wing members doesn’t seem to have caused him to lose a great deal of sleep. When it comes to traditional Labour values and members, ‘shafting’ seems to be Starmer’s default setting.

Perhaps the bigger question, given the weekend’s revelations about Elphicke’s alleged attempts to get her ex-husband a more comfortable pillow in his prison cell, quite apart from such minor matters as lobbying the then Lord Chancellor to get him a different court and a more lenient judge, is who exactly is shafting who? Keith’s initial delight at attracting yet another defector has lost some of its shine given the barely concealed delight of the Tories at having off-loaded her. But their own joy in embarrassing Starmer by revealing that she made serious efforts to abuse her position in order to pervert the course of justice has in turn been dulled somewhat as some unkind souls, such as the Secret Barrister, have pointed out that it means that said Lord Chancellor was a direct witness to an outrageous attempt at corrupting the legal processes and chose to do nothing about it at the time because she was on the same side as him. It’s hard to work out which of the players has lost the most credibility. Self-shafting wasn’t an option in the game show, but seems to be a genuine one in real life. Perhaps the show might have gone on a bit longer if it had reflected that reality. Or perhaps not – it didn’t earn the title ‘the worst British television show of the 2000s’ for nothing.

The revelations about the attempted lobbying of judges and ministers suggest that part of Elphicke’s problem was her own bluntness and naiveté. Whilst Buckland appears to have correctly rejected the approaches at the time (even if he didn’t report the attempt at criminality) the idea that the whole system is completely incorruptible is for the birds. Covering up the attempted interference for four years underlines that. It’s more that it doesn’t work in the simplistic way that she assumed it would when she arranged to meet the Lord Chancellor. The Establishment usually does protect its own, but things work more subtly than that. Informal encounters, casual conversations, use of third, fourth and fifth party intermediaries are more normal, but above all, those who are part of the system ‘know’ what is expected of them without anyone needing to tell them. Trying to corrupt the system through a formal meeting was doomed to failure from the outset; the club doesn’t work that way. Then again, perhaps the Elphickes were never really part of the club anyway – if they had been, they would have known that.