Corruption in British politics with Simon Kuper

We're talking to the award-winning writer about ‘Good Chaps’, collapsing standards and how to clean up British political and corporate life

Hi, it’s Peter here. Today we have a newsletter first for you - an interview with writer and FT journalist Simon Kuper.

During the summer I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy of Simon’s excellent new book, Good Chaps: How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions - And What We Can Do About It. It's an eye-opening dive into how corruption has taken hold in Britain and what needs to change. (It was also a pleasant surprise to find lots of references to this newsletter 🙂).

We have never run an interview on the newsletter before. I hope you like it. (Do let me know what you think by replying to this email.)

Before we get to Simon I wanted to quickly flag a piece that appeared on Tortoise media on Friday. 

Remember the story we broke a few weeks back about Robert Jenrick taking tens of thousands of pounds from a loss-making firm called Spott Fitness Ltd? Well, Tortoise’s Cat Neilan has been following up our reporting, and found serious questions to answer about exactly who is behind these big donations to the Tory leadership front-runner’s campaign. Well worth a read.  

So here’s the Q and A I conducted via email with Simon a week or so again.

Peter Geoghegan: You have written numerous books about everything from football economics to British spies for the Soviet Union. What made you decide to turn your attention to corruption in Britain?

Simon Kuper: It followed on from my 2022 book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Afterwards my publisher, Profile, said to me, ‘How about a book about what seems to be rising political corruption here?’ I thought: that’s a fascinating and really important issue, and other than your own excellent Democracy for Sale, there aren’t many books about it. There are lots of newspaper front page stories of scandals, but very little that tries to give an overview and understand why all this has got worse.

We know that corruption has been the downfall of states like Russia and Nigeria. The elites there just get their claws on a natural resource, and let the rest of the population hang. I sensed that in the UK, that natural resource is the wealth of higher-end London – much of which was stolen abroad and then imported here by people who then began ‘investing’ in UK politics, chiefly through donations to parties. So I thought: this is a subject worth doing.

Peter: What surprised you most when you were researching the book?

Simon: The degree and the shamelessness with which politicians and especially the Tory party were taking money from autocracies, or people with links to autocracies – and then the impunity of it. I realised that the UK has almost no laws about political corruption. I’d research all this material and think, “What?! Another Russian spy donating to the Tories?” or “Boris Johnson really flew to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He made Lebedev Junior a Lord? Cameron lobbies for Chinese interests? Blair lobbies for everyone? And this is just allowed?” It was the gap between all the stuff that was happening and the absence of any sanction that kept astounding me.

The World Bank defines corruption as using public office to enrich yourself. But here’s a key point of my book: much of this self-enrichment is totally legal in the UK. For example, it’s perfectly legal to be a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, negotiating with defence companies, and then to jump to a defence company and use your inside knowledge to negotiate with the MoD. If you do it too fast you’ll be frowned upon, and you might get a sorrowful letter from the toothless regulator, ACOBA, but it’s legal.

Peter: We often hear talk about the end of the 'Good Chaps' in British politics. What does this mean? Who has replaced the Good Chaps?

Simon: I think the “Good Chap” – a phrase popularised by the great Peter Hennessy - genuinely existed, and some of his descendants are still around and are working in his spirit. I define him (in his heyday the Good Chap was usually male) as a privately educated Oxbridge graduate who had fought in one or the other world war, often as a volunteer - so was willing to die for Britain - and then spent the rest of his career working for the state, as a politician or civil servant or BBC executive or soldier or whatever.

These people thought the highest thing you could do with your life was public service. Coming from the top of society, they presumed their public service would be at the top of the state. They had a strong patriotic moral code, came from a small caste so they knew each other, and most of them weren’t going to steal from the state – so you didn’t need rules or laws to stop them from going to work for a company selling to government, or from meeting the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro on behalf of a hedge-fund manager, as Johnson did. Good Chaps (and World War One volunteers) like Attlee and Eden and Macmillan wouldn’t have done that. Their code wouldn’t have allowed it. Because they were bound by codes, they didn’t need rules. And so the British state doesn’t have many. As Peter Hennessy used to say, the state here works on the Good Chaps theory.

Since about Thatcher, the Good Chaps have been dying out. Younger generations came in who hadn’t served in war, and the Thatcherite ethos was that public service was a bit silly – better to make money in business. Also, from the 1980s, a hyperrich London emerged. So you get a post-Thatcher elite of people like Cameron, Johnson and Blair who don’t have the Good Chap ethos.

 
Peter: You come from a social science background and have talked about writing from an "anthropological perspective". How has that influenced your thinking about what you've seen of corruption in British politics?

Simon: My dad is a professional anthropologist. I’m just an amateur one. But I think I do have that anthropological outlook, meaning: “These people are raised in a culture with certain beliefs, and those beliefs help explain their actions – in this case, using public office to enrich themselves.” It’s my job to understand those beliefs, not simply to condemn them and say that these are Bad People. So I don’t ‘hate’ the people I’m describing. I’m trying to understand them.

Peter: Good Chaps mainly covers the Tories but there is a fascinating chapter on Labour. You write that, for Labour, "the short-term temptation in power will be to take all the dosh that will suddenly be on offer". How confident are you that things will get better?

Simon: Labour has pledged to create an Ethics and Integrity Commission to clean up Westminster. I think they will introduce some measures, partly because anti-corruption is a rare thing they can do that’s almost free – it costs much less public money than, for example, sorting out the trains or the water or the falling-down schools or the underfunded universities. And doing it would draw a strong moral divide between them and the Tories. Serious measures would have to include much stricter controls and limits on political donations.

In the book I also cite various reasons why I think Labour, initially at least, will be cleaner than the Tories: they are new in government so they’re still mission-driven, which the Tories weren’t by the end; Labour politicians tend to have fewer rich Notting Hill mates than Tory politicians, so they don’t feel as poor as someone like Johnson did in Downing Street; the Brexiteer Tories believed that civil servants or judges or journalists who called them out were just sour Remainers, so it was fine for them to break the rules; and more.

But we saw during the New Labour years that lots of Labour people too can totally be tempted by dubious money. Now that Labour is in power, many dubious political donors will flock to them. So we need laws against dubious money in politics.

Peter: Finally, you often lament how little the general public seems to care about corruption. Why do you think this is? What could we do to get people to care more?

Simon: Hang on – I think people care enormously about political corruption. Look at the massive public uproar over the MPs’ expenses case in 2009 – which is why the Commons got cleaned up to the point that it’s now about the cleanest part of the UK political system. People get really angry over famous politicians enriching themselves – Cameron and Greensill, Blair and his autocracies. That behaviour hugely discredits our politicians, and I think helped increase the distrust that was one element in Brexit.

What I do argue is that there are so many scandals that the public can’t keep up anymore. This stuff washes over almost everyone except a few experts like your Substack readers. Most people stop absorbing the details, but just think: “Politicians, they’re all in it for themselves, I’m giving up on politics.”

I want people to feel that we can clean up politics. It’s doable. There will always be some corruption, but British politics used to be a lot cleaner, so it can become a lot cleaner again.

Simon Kuper’s ‘Good Chaps: How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions - And What We Can Do About It’ is available to buy here. Simon is talking about “How corruption works in British politics and corporations and how to fight it” with Dr Armando Castro at University College London on Tuesday September 24.