Lobby Fodder

There are a number of things to baffle the Westminster outsider about the latest scandal to embroil the government. No, not David "Playmobil" Miliband's pantomime standing up to Israel; I'm referring to the honeytrap set by Channel 4's Dispatches programme which managed to snare former ministers Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt into confessing that they would shill for anyone if the price was right. According to the Dispatches website,

Dispatches set up a fictional US public affairs company and contacted several senior politicians and asked them if they were interested in a position on the advisory board of our bogus London office.

Stephen Byers memorably described himself in the programme as a "cab for hire", though I think we might agree that he meant a different noun beginning with "c". Peter Mandelson described the affair as "sad and altogether grubby" which, coming from someone with his track record for financial impropriety, is frankly a bit fucking rich.

Anyway, here are the sources of my puzzlement.

1. The three politicians stated that their fees were in the region of between £2,000 and £5,000 per day. Is there really anyone, anywhere, with sufficient combined wealth and stupidity to pay Geoff Hoon £2,000 a day? To do what? Answers on a solid gold postcard please.


2. According to the website, The programme-makers contacted 20 politicians, 15 agreed to meet and ten were invited in for interviews. Therefore 75% of politicians who were asked were prepared to leverage their privileged positions to trouser some extra-curricular cash. After the expenses row, this can hardly come as much of a surprise. But this was a fictitious company, with no real cash to play with. A genuine multi-national, prepared to ship a collection of venal fuckers out to a gin palace in Monte Carlo, might expect to snare fish much more appetising than bottom-feeders like Hoon.

I confidently predict that this is not the last we'll hear of scandalous corporate lobbying. There must be any number of Labour front and ex-front benchers who are in the process of discovering that the imminent removal of the trough to which their snouts have been so firmly connected for the past 13 years represents a hideous prospect, and for whom therefore the promise of a private, corporate money supply is simply too good to miss. Not one of them had the stones, backbone or ethics to stand up to the Iraq war, so looking for any kind of moral guidance there would be a gigantic waste of effort. And one cannot really blame the giant mega-corps, since they haven't signed up to anything like a code of conduct in public service, but are solely concerned with return on investment. Given the choice between a free call to Laurence Robertson MP and a few grand to get the ear, however momentarily, of a self-appointed grandee like Mandelson who (despite being elected by no-one) can actually Get Things Done - well, that would be few grand well spent. Not that I'm suggesting that Mandelson is for hire - oh no, no way. In any case, he's not facing an imminent loss of a job, is he.