There is no rule or mechanism which guarantees that
members of a political party committed to the pursuit of a cause rather than
merely power will be any more honest or less venal than mere careerists; nor
that they will be any more resistant to temptation when it is waved in front of
their noses. But, somehow, we all want to believe that ‘our’ side are more
inherently honest and genuine than everybody else. As a result, the conviction, last
week, of the former CEO of the SNP (and ex-husband of the former First Minister)
somehow comes as more of a shock, to say nothing of disappointment, than the
secret £5 million payment to Farage, or a whole host of financial scandals
relating to other politicians in recent years.
Having been Treasurer of a party for five years in the 1980s, I’ll
admit that I’m somewhat mystified as to how it can have happened. The level of scrutiny
to which accounts were submitted back then was intense, and I distinctly
remember lengthy meetings examining the budgets line by line looking for
potential savings for a party which was perpetually cash-strapped. Things are
different now: the advent of devolution has transformed the finances of parties
which are now at the centre of events rather than eternally on the periphery.
But still… The defence that the auditors had signed off the accounts looks
rather weak to me. A thorough audit would surely have checked that expenditure
(for large items as a minimum) was properly authorised and had an appropriate ‘paper’
trail in terms of invoices and receipts, but it’s hard to believe that to have
been the case in relation to some of the items on the list. I find myself with
a number of serious unanswered questions.
It’s true, as some of the SNP’s opponents have
suggested, that the guilty plea means that those questions will never be aired
in open court. That’s a pity – as much for the members of the party, who are the
victims here, as for the wider public – but the idea that that justifies some
sort of public inquiry is a strange one. I can see the attraction to the SNP’s
opponents of demanding such an inquiry; keeping the scandal running for as long
as possible has its political attractions for parties which have been unable to
make a serious dent in the SNP’s popularity. But public inquiries are not
cheap, and if one were to be set up for every resolved crime that left the
curious with some unanswered questions, there would be an awful lot more public
inquiries being held. Good news for the lawyers, I suppose, but probably not
for the rest of us.
Whether the initial investigation was
politically-motivated or not isn’t entirely clear – but the way it was handled,
with a ‘murder tent’ outside the house and so forth, certainly looked a lot
like a political act. Even the stated cause for the investigation, that money
had been raised for one purpose and then spent on another, looked more than a
little dodgy; the idea that specific pounds and pennies would somehow be locked
away in a special account doesn’t look like a realistic expectation. It seems,
though, that they found a real crime, even if it wasn’t quite the one they were
looking for. It’s a disappointment, of course – but to return to my starting
point, there is no rule which guarantees honesty, even amongst those apparently
committed to a cause. Clay feet can appear even where they’re least expected.
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