Morality in public life.

To all who look upon the bedtime propinquities of David Blunkett with haughty disdain the life of the late John Cordle stands in wise rebuke.  He it was who, being an indignant and apparently righteous soul and a loud defender of public morals, raised himself up in 1963 to denounce John Profumo, Harold Macmillan’s disgraced Minister of Defence, thus:-

“Men who choose to live in adultery ought not to be appointed to serve our Queen and country… I was appalled to hear that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised as to give an Audience to a minister who has proved himself so untrustworthy… it is an affront to the Christian conscience of our nation.”

Unfortunately, Cordle – Conservative MP for Bournemouth East and Christchurch from 1959 to 1977, a disciple of Billy Graham and, for many years, owner of the Church of England Newspaper – was not exactly Snow White of Westminster himself.  He was twice divorced amid tremendous public acrimony at a time (1956 and 1971) when marriage was not yet a revolving-door arrangement and a certain moral standing was expected of our elected representatives.  Alongside his several appointments to Christian evangelical bodies he cultivated a sparkling social life, rising to the station of a Gold Staff Officer at the Coronation, a friend of Princess Margaret and an usher at her wedding.  During the 1960’s his business life became entwined with John Poulson, the international property developer who was to be jailed some ten years later for bribing civil servants and councillors.

From longstanding family business interests in West Africa, Cordle had garnered a good working knowledge of that region.  No less significantly for Poulson of course, he also had an intimate knowledge of the workings of Parliament.  In 1964 he requested and received £1000 to represent Poulson’s company, Construction Promotion, in the placement of some highly rewarding development contracts.  In a letter to Poulson, Cordle was found to have stated, “It was largely for the benefit of Construction Promotion that I took part in a Commons debate on the Gambia and pressed HMG to award constructional contracts.”  In the wake of the Poulson scandal a Commons Select Committee found Cordle in contempt of the House for the technical offence of non-disclosure.  Actually, he was small-fry in Poulson’s net of bribery and corruption.  Others, Conservative and Labour, escaped scot-free.  Cordle resigned from the House in 1977 before a motion calling for his expulsion could be tabled.

After the Poulson affair financial corruption was never the same.  It continues to be politically fatal - even a whiff of it, though the guillotine can take some time to drop.  But nowadays we inhabit an era in which it is the sexual peccadiloes of errant ministers that count for little, indeed nothing.  Or almost nothing (and Ron’s night-time bush shaking on Clapham Common is only remembered for being one of the more spectacularly debunking passages, so to speak, of New Labour rectitude, as it were).

No, today you will not find a John Cordle standing in the House to demand a moral measure in ministerial appointments.  As Peter Bottomley put it in 1995, in that event all that would be left would be self-confessed “flashers and church mice”.  So it is out of expediency, then, that the Parisian model of double standards has been imported into our political culture.

But is that what the people desires of its elected representatives?  What does such a vacuum portend when the House is debating issues of marital and parental responsibility, the future of the family and all the plethora of social governance that, legally at least, describes the moral life of the nation.  And if, being hypocrites in their private lives, MP’s cannot speak for morality among the public, does not the only way open lead inexorably to the value-free, chaotic incrementalism of individual moral choices … actually a free market in immorality?

It is a case of imperfection governing over imperfection, with no recourse but to more of the same.  Is mere expediency an adequate excuse for such a prospect?  That seems to me to be a peculiarly unambitious view to take of the profession of politics.

But then, four decades downstream from the radical sixties and getting on for four centuries from the birth of John Locke, I am reminded that the ratchet effect of liberal reform permits of nothing else.  Liberalism has no reverse gear.

Everything has its context.  Our morality is contextualised within the Christian faith.  Our