Let’s hear it for corruption

A hasty disclaimer is in order: corrupt politicians are tawdry, and I in no way condone things like bribery, pilfering or cheating on expense accounts.

However, we ought to acknowledge that boys will be boys (or, these days, possibly girls). For the sake of argument, if you were offered a million pounds to advocate publicly something you know is wrong, would you do it? No, of course not. But you can probably understand those who would.

Another personal question, if I may. Would you prefer an honest but dim politician driven by ideological fervour or an outstanding statesman who takes the odd backhander? To name one juxtaposition, Robespierre was nicknamed ‘Incorruptible’, whereas Talleyrand was notoriously venal. Yet I know which one I’d rather have running France today.

Here we are getting to the crux of the matter. Deplorable though fiscal corruption is, it’s extraneous to a politician’s day job (always provided he isn’t so crooked that corruption actually is his day job).

Moreover, our standards of fiscal corruption in politics are highly transient. The sort of things that make us gasp with horror these days used to be considered par for the course in the past – and, critically, vice versa.

Take two seminal figures of British political history, Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli. Burke (d. 1797) is justifiably regarded as a founding philosopher of modern political conservatism. Disraeli (d. 1881) is equally justifiably regarded as a founder of the modern Tory Party.

Yet they were corrupt by our exacting standards of today.

Both Burke and Disraeli coincidentally owned large estates in Buckinghamshire. Burke’s 600-acre property was in Beaconsfield, Disraeli’s 1,500 acres in High Wycombe, some eight miles down the road. Confusingly, it was Disraeli and not Burke whose title was the Earl of Beaconsfield, but that’s a different matter.

Since Burke was a man of modest means, he had to take out a huge mortgage he could ill-afford and never managed to repay in full. All his life, most of which was spent in Parliament as a leader of the Whigs’ conservative faction, he had to scramble to make ends meet.

Remember that MPs were unpaid at the time, and so they remained until 1911. So Burke had to scratch out a living wherever he could find it.

As a major source of his income he was routinely paid – bribed, in today’s parlance – to pose specific questions in Parliament. There were also suspicions of his involvement in the dubious business schemes run by his close relations, including his brother.

None of this prevented Burke from becoming one of the greatest parliamentarians of his time and one of the greatest political thinkers of all time. And anyway, compared to Disraeli, Burke was pristine.

When Disraeli became known as the most talented man in the Tory Party, the powers that be wanted to make him its leader. Yet, as one of the grandees pointed out, theirs was a party of gentlemen, which Disraeli wasn’t.

“So let’s make him one,” suggested another benefactor. And Disraeli was given his estate, worth tens of millions today, with the title – but no strings – attached.

Now imagine that sort of thing happening today: a party leader being bought lock, stock and barrel by pressure groups and contributors. Why, if that became public knowledge, the papers wouldn’t run out of front-page headlines for weeks.

Before long the shamed politician would be hounded out of public life and made to give the estate back. Even if he had the philosophical genius of Burke combined with the political genius of Disraeli, he’d be reduced to making a killing on the speaking circuit and introducing assorted sheiks to his former colleagues.

By contrast, the three most evil politicians in European history, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, were never touched by any fiscal scandal, not a personal one at any rate.

Before the revolution Lenin encouraged what he called ‘expropriations’, ‘exes’ for short, and what you’d call bank robberies. And Stalin, ever the hands-on man, masterminded and led such raids personally.

But they didn’t use the money to buy gaudy palaces or yachts the size of a football pitch. The ‘exes’ and other criminal activities were used to finance the Bolsheviks’ way to power, something they needed to put their ideology into practice.

Having won their victory, the two honest men combined to murder some 60 million people and enslave hundreds of millions around the world. Yet even in office neither Lenin nor Stalin was besmirched by any whiff of personal fiscal impropriety.

Their typological German equivalent, Hitler, wasn’t motivated by money either. But don’t you wish he had been?

For example, Zionist organisations saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by trading 10,000 trucks for their lives. What if that practice had been more widespread, reaching all the way up to Hitler himself?

A villa on the Mediterranean for 1,000 lives, a yacht for another 1,000, a million or two in cold cash for a few thousand more and so on. And, the crowning achievement, twenty big ones for repealing the Nuremberg Laws and tearing up the Wannsee Protocol.

Another, more up-to-date, typological equivalent runs today’s Russia, in ways that seem to undermine the theory of beneficial corruption. After all, both beastly Putin and his ruling gang are as corrupt as they come.

Putin is reliably rumoured to be the world’s richest man, and his whole coterie would dominate the Forbes 100 list if all their assets and income streams were publicly known. And yet under their tutelage Russia remains an evil, aggressive country pouncing on her neighbours and threatening the whole world.

What comes to mind here is my favourite anecdote of the writer Nancy Mitford asking her friend Evelyn Waugh why he was so nasty in spite of being a pious Catholic. “But, my dear,” replied Waugh, “you don’t know how nasty I’d be if I weren’t a Catholic.”

I maintain that it’s the corruption of the Russian regime that’s holding it back (if murdering thousands can be so described). If the criminals in the Kremlin were driven by febrile ideology alone, nuclear mushrooms would already be growing in Europe and elsewhere.

As it is, their fear of losing everything they stole in the sweat of their brow puts dampeners on their bloodlust, applying some method to their madness. And it’s their corruption that shines a ray of hope through the darkness descending on Europe. One way or another, with Putin out of the way sooner or later, this lot can be bought – not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but eventually.

I don’t know if I’ve made an airtight argument to justify the title above – but I’ve made some. The public damage done by personal venality, if any, is so infinitesimal compared to the damage done by ideology or stupidity that it can be dismissed as an irrelevance.

Our problem isn’t that some of our politicians are corrupt fiscally but that almost all of them are corrupt fundamentally, as individuals trusted to work tirelessly for the common good – and, critically, to know what it is and how it can be served.

Fiscal honesty is a virtue, but it only matters in public life if allied to other virtues, those germane to a politician’s remit. In the absence of such, I’d prefer for him to be feathering his own nest – rather than devoting his undivided attention to governance.

He’d do less harm that way.