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| February | 23 |
| 2005 |
They used to joke that if you wanted to have a small fortune, you should start out with a large one and then gamble it on the horses. Times have clearly changed. The way to rake in a small fortune today is to become a Member of Parliament, fail at your job, and then watch the earnings roll in.
This week’s publication of the House of Commons’ Register of Members’ Interests revealed that William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative Party, earned £1 million last year. His fellow Tory MP, Michael Portillo, pulled in more than half a million. Not bad, really, considering that the most apposite word which could be applied to their political careers is ‘failure’.
Neither man has even come close to achieving what they set out to achieve – helping their party recover from its crash towards obliteration. Indeed, far from helping the Conservative Party survive, both have effectively abandoned it in order to pursue riches away from politics.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of British politics, where success is rewarded with a relatively lowly salary, and failure is met with a succession of job offers, inducements and lavish speaking fees.
When Baroness Thatcher left office in 1990, she was 65. She had spent her most productive years in office, devoting herself to public service. As Prime Minister, she transformed, even saved, the country. By any conceivable definition of the word, her career was a success. Had she chosen to step down in the mid 1980s, having already won two elections, she could have capitalised on that success and earned a fortune on the speaker circuit, not least in the United States, where she was – and remains - revered.
Instead, she ploughed on with what she believed was her duty – public service. For that, she earned the Prime Minister’s then salary of £50,000 (in addition to her salary as an MP). Not to be sneezed at, certainly; but in comparison with the money which would have been available to her in business or on the lecture circuit, a relative pittance.
How things have changed. The height of William Hague’s ministerial career was a minor job as Welsh Secretary, at the fag end of the dreadful Major government. Mr Hague was not a disaster, but the job was hardly taxing and the post was not exactly a major office of state.
His period as Leader of the Opposition was, however, absolutely a disaster. Under Mr Hague, the Tories plunged with an eerie regularity from one low to another, their prospects worsening with every passing day. Mr Hague jumped on every bandwagon, adopted every modish publicity tactic, and deserted every shred of consistency in a record breakingly unsuccessful bid to win power in the 2001 election.
And yet today, it is Mr Hague who is pulling in the pounds. It is Mr Hague, not Baroness Thatcher, who is turning his small fortune into a very large one.
Something is very wrong.
What makes the situation still worse is that, despite his disastrous tenure as leader of the Conservative Party, he has not sought in any way to make recompense to his party. Mr Hague is a hugely talented man. He may not be up to leading his party, but his performances in the House of Commons can be brilliant. His wit is legendary. At a time when the Conservative Party is so devoid of talent that it has had to turn to Michael Howard, a political retread from the ever more distant past, Mr Hague has simply abandoned the party which has given him everything.
How his party – even his country - needs him! Yet he has resolutely refused to help out. What a contrast with a predecessor as leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After losing the 1964 election as Prime Minister, Sir Alec agreed to serve under Edward Heath as Foreign Secretary in 1970. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, Mr Hague would be able to make mincemeat of the government’s case for the European Constitution. Instead, he devotes himself to making money.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with making money. No one is obliged to stick to politics, just as no one is obliged to put public service ahead of all else. But if it was not for the Conservative Party, and his status as an MP and former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Hague would be merely another unknown management consultant, his job before entering Parliament.
Michael Portillo is another case in point. British politics needs men and women of talent. Mr Portillo may – like all politicians - have his faults, but he is undoubtedly a cut above the run of the mill hack politician. Yet Mr Portillo has chosen to leave politics and to turn himself into a media figure. He at least has the excuse that he offered himself to his party as leader, and it responded with a resounding ‘no’. By walking away, he is perhaps doing only what his party has told him to do.
Something is clearly wrong when politicians who have achieved little, but who have the talent to go on to genuine success, see fit only to walk away from public service.
There is now a central paradox at the heart of political life. Financial rewards are no longer available merely to those who have achieved high office, such as John Major, now earning serious money in business, or – when he retires – Tony Blair. Today, money is available even to those who fail at their task.
It is possible now to use a political career not as an end in itself but merely as the stepping stone to a lucrative middle age.
Politicians are now entering the House of Commons at a much younger age than before. No one thinks twice about an MP in his 30s. Yet this is surely the wrong way round. Instead of using politics as a foundation for future activities, we need MPs who have already experienced life and who then opt to enter politics. We need MPs who see public office as a means of giving something back to their country, not a platform on which they can build a subsequent, more financially rewarding, career. Politics should not be a means to an end. It should be the highest form of service.
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What about Mandelson, Kinnock etc? They seem to do very well indeed from sucking the EU tit, and both complete failures at national level.
Some fair points, but other more valid points are missed.
The government is stuffed full of people whose entire careers have been funded at public expense and who have demonstrated no competence whatever to stand on their own two feet.
When Gordon Brown lectures us on the need for 'enterprise' and the need to compete internationally, we should ask whether he has ever had to do this himself. The fact that he ploughs our money into monopolised public services which pay inflated salaries unrelated to what they produce, or to world market prices, tells you the answer. Meanwhile, the ever decreasing number of people who have to compete internationally are expected to pay these inflated costs. Unsurprisingly the result is that our industrial output has shown the worst performance of any G7 country since he became chancellor and we have a huge and worsening trade deficit. Brown has kept this going through borrowing, raiding pension funds etc. A truly incompetent man.
Blair (and his wife) are lawyers, a lovely closed shop with much of its income publicly provided and completely immune to low cost competition from abroad. Neither of them have the calibre to have made it in a competitive industry.
These two - with no previous executive experience then try to run a £500bn enterprise largely by central dictat. It would almost be funny if they weren't doing so much long term damage to our prosperity.
Agreed with the last post. To quote Stephen, "we need MPs who have experienced life and then opt to enter politics". In which case why will Stephen be urging us to vote for Blair and Brown in a few weeks' time?
I don't blame Hague for making as much money as he can while he can....and he certainly shouldn't take lectures from a journalist. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Look how much money Lord Irvine, Chris Patten, Mandelson and the Kinnocks have made from political careers which hardly scaled the heights of distinction. Politicians love to lecture others for being fat cats but their own profession is one vast feeding trough, paid for by the poublic under duress. At a more mundane level. just think of MPs' expenses claims.
Hague has also treated to sort out the mess that is his Party. He learnt the hard way that it is a fractious rabble many of whose MPs are good for one thing only: disloyalty and stabbing each other in the back. He has quite rightly decided to let them get on with the business of cutting each others' throats.
Hague is a clever bloke and speaks very well (unlike many of his colleagues), he is also a rather good writer. Why should we begrudge him making a few bob? Especially after the horrid way the Tory Party treated him while he was their leader.
"politics should be the highest form of public service".
Questionable statement, betraying a statist mindset which regards politics as the ultimate public activity, as opposed to say, serving in our armed forces, or working in the great voluntary institutions. As a libertarian, I happen to think the greatest public service is creating wealth.
Your post has its fair points -- particularly about Maggie -- but it is also very mean on Hague. Nothing short of a miracle would have prevented Phoney from persuading a largely zombified British public into electing the Tories in 2001 and Hague, no doubt a talented fellow, decided to make a crust while he has the chance. Good luck to him.
rgds
in the my last comment I should have written "elected Labour"....not "elected the Tories". Duh.
Actually the more I think of it, the more mean-spirited the original article appears. Come on Stephen, do you honestly think, given how Hague was savaged by large parts of the media and his own party, that he would want to put himself in the firing line now?
Frankly I could not care less how much Hague earns. I am a bit more concerned whether the current Tory Party has the policies and the personnel to kick this bunch of crooks, creeps and fools out of office as soon as possible.
In the recent Michael Cockerell documentary on Michael Howard we were shown a meeting in Westminster where Howard was taking advice from Major, Hague and Blogger Smith - it was, apparently, a regular fixture. How many things does Hague get asked to do and refuses?
Evidently Mr Pollard has such low scruples he should enter politics.
He writes in the Mail today: "As Prime Minister, she {Margaret Thatcher] transformed, even saved, the country."
Yet at the very time Baroness T "saved" the country, Pollard was working for a succession of Labour MPs.
Either Pollard now bitterly regrets his time toiling for the other side or he is prepared to say absolutely anything in his quest for a quick buck.
Which is it?
A good point from Tommy sunshine.
Talking of reward for failure - this is what New labour is all about.
The public sector where productivity has actually been falling in the last seven years has been rewarded by a huge increase of funds, high wage rises, etc. and has had its pensions protected.
The private sector, however, is a different story. I will take manufacturing as an example, not because I'm one of those who rate is as more important than other sectors, but because it accounts for most of our exports and therefore best reflects our competitive position. Manufacturing has shown the fastest productivity growth of any sector of the economy. But instead of this helping it to achieve growing profitability and output, it has been hampered by rising costs in the UK in the face of fierce international price competition. Output has been flat (unlike any other G7 country) and it has lost huge numbers of jobs - many of them highly skilled compared to those in the public sector. It also has to cope with relatively high (by international standards) interest rates which cause an uncompetitive exchange rate. And why do we have relatively high interest rates when there is almost no private sector inflation? - to control inflationary pressures largely generated by the public sector.
if New Labour had controlled public sector costs and lowered costs for the private sector, we could have seen the areas where productivity is growing fastest expand to the benefit of everyone. Instead we have penalised it and invested in the least productive areas.
Well I suppose that as Stephen Pollard has always supported Labour (even, presumably in the Michael Foot days) we can't expect him to wise up now.
The rot started in 1911 when MPs were paid for the first time: £400 a year, a good bourgeois income. Needless to say, that little rat Lloyd George was behind it; with his contempt for the constitution, he delighted in starting the ball rolling which has led to MPs mutating from disinterested legislators into civil servants, formally linking their rewards to those of the administrative class in Whitehall.
Few could make as much outside Westminster; Hague, who was a successful management consultant before entering Parliament, is an exception. It is the label of MP or ex-MP that enables most retirees or rejects to feather their nests, if at all, afterwards. They get non-executive directorships and quango seats, but they still don't create, build or run things. They remain perpetual advisors, decorative additions, consultants, guinea pigs-- talkers, not doers. Hague is merely better at that than most.
When Britain ran the world's greatest empire, MPs only attended the Commons for half the year. The rest of the time they kept in touch with reality, out in the country and the world. That was true no less of trade-union sponsored Libs and Labs from the working class than of landowners and barristers who came to the House after a day in court.
Since the Tory Party has stopped being led by gentlemen and turned itself over to grammar school careerists, it is hardly surprising that noblesse oblige no longer governs decisions about what to do after one loses a top job on the front bench. But when so many businessmen are rewarded for failure with golden handshakes, can one blame talented politicians for fancying a briefer wallow in the same gilt-edged trough?
Two excellent posts from HJHJ - and others. HJHJ's point that Blair and Cherie-Antoinette are two low achievers in a closed shop, funded primarily out of the public purse, who have the stupidity to think they are competent to run a £500bn is spot on. (And Britain is indeed being run by these two knockabouts, with help from the fellow traveller next door, who has never put in a productive day in his turgid, ugly life and thug Alastair Campbell. The cabinet is nowhere.)
On Hague, the Tories just weren't attracted to a wannabee Blair. Tony Blair was already aping the stomach-churning "pretty straight kind of a guy - "I feel your pain" Clintonesque schtik, but without the charisma. Hague was coming in third after Clinton, the master, and Blair, the wannabee. He should have been his own man. He's certainly brilliant enough, but he got cowed by the Blair hype. Personally, I never believed that the country had been simple enough to vote for Blair for any other reason than he wasn't a Tory.
But Hague was a management consultant and management consultants are programmed to be modish. He gives brilliant performances in the Commons, but I don't think he owes the Conservatives anything.
I agree with Stephen that MPs should have experience of the real world before they essay a seat. Look at the Labour ragbag collectively known as "the cabinet". I can't think of one offhand who ever had an actual job.
Tony Blair (Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, and Minister for the Civil Service)
Obtained a law degree at Oxford University, briefly worked as a barrister, before becoming a Labour MP aged 30.
John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State)
After working as a STEWARD in the Merchant Navy for 10 years he went on to obtain a BA in Economic history at the University of Hull. After working as a full time official for the NATIONAL UNION of Seamen for two years, and was elected a Labour MP aged 32.
Gordon Brown (Chancellor of the Exchequer)
Obtained a history degree and a doctorate [in Scottish Labour history] at Edinburgh University, where he TAUGHT before becoming a TEACHER at Glasgow College of Technology. After working as a RESEARCHER in Scottish Television for two years he became a Labour MP aged 32.
Jack Straw (Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs)
Obtained a law degree at Leeds University, and became President the NATIONAL UNION of Students. Worked, briefly, as a BARRISTER, before working as RESEARCHER for the Labour Party and for Granada Television. Became a Labour MP of Parliament aged 33.
Alan Milburn (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster)
Obtained a degree history at Lancaster University, he worked in a Marxist BOOKSHOP, and became North-East president of the Manufacturing, Science, and Finance UNION. He became a Labour MP aged 33.
Charles Clarke (Home Secretary).
Obtained a degree in economics and mathematics at Cambridge University. He became President of the NATIONAL UNION of Students, and then worked as a RESEARCHER for the Labour Party. Between 1992-97 worked as a PUBLIC AFFAIRS MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT. He became a Labour MP aged 47.
Margaret Beckett (Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs)
Studied metallurgy at John Dalton Polytechnic, before TEACHING at Manchester College of Science and Technology, before becoming a RESEARCHER for the Labour Party. She worked as a RESEARCHER for Granada Television. Became an MP aged 31.
Alistair Darling (Secretary of State for Transport and Secretary of State for Scotland)
Obtained a Law degree at Aberdeen University before working as an ADVOCATE at the Scottish bar. Worked for five years as a COUNCILLER on Lothian Regional Council. Became a Labour MP aged 34.
John Reid (Secretary of State for Health)
Obtained a history degree and doctorate (in economic history) at Stirling University, and worked a RESEARCHER for the Labour Party, briefly for Scottish TRADE UNIONISTS for Labour aged 40.
Paul Murphy (Secretary of State for Northern Ireland)
Worked as a MANAGEMENT TRAINEE for the CO-OP Society, before TEACHING in history and government at Ebbw Vale Further Education College. Served as a member of Torfaen Borough COUNCIL for ten years. Became a Labour MP aged 39.
Geoff Hoon (Secretary of State for Defence)
Obtained a law degree at Cambridge. He briefly worked as a BARRISTER, before TEACHING law at Leeds University. Became a Member of the European Parliament aged 31.
There seems to be a pattern. Study [economic] history or law at university, briefly work as a barrister or teacher, or maybe as a Trade Union Official or Councillor, and after working as a researcher in television or for the Labour Party, become an MP in your thirties.