“Hain must go. No ifs, no buts,” declared The Independent on Sunday, quoting the Work and Pensions’ Secretary’s own departmental slogan, “No ifs, no buts: benefit fraud is a crime”.
Yet this is not a case of fraud, says Dominic Lawson in The Independent. The charge is that Peter Hain failed to report more than £100,000 of payments to his campaign for deputy leadership of the Labour Party and encouraged some donors to give their money via a phantom think-tank called the ‘Progressive Policies Forum’.
But “it was not investigative journalists but Hain himself who revealed that his campaign had been grossly late in declaring the true extent and sources of its funding”. Moreover, Hain’s “unprompted” press release was accompanied by an “outright apology”. He may have presided over an incompetently run campaign, but this does not constitute a “moral failing”.
The Independent on Sunday is being “too draconian”, agrees William Rees-Mogg in The Times. Yes, £100,000 is too big a sum to “slip one’s mind” and he shouldn’t have tried to get around the rules that require the naming of donors, but there was “no apparent element of personal corruption”. None of the donors wanted Hain to change government policy. The key question is whether he is an honest and competent minister, to which I would still answer ‘yes’. “In a government short of talent he belongs to the better half in terms of ability.”
True, he appears arrogant, but “arrogance is more use than wetness in a minister”. Hain’s failure to disclose may not have been deliberately deceitful, but it shows a “disgraceful nonchalance about the rules that new Labour has so piously framed and trumpeted as its own”, says Matthew d’Ancona in The Sunday Telegraph. It shows our governing party regards itself as so special that it “does not have time to obey its own laws”. That is “appalling”.
It is surely more contemptible that we have a “political nexus so self-obsessed that it will spend days talking about a matter of little real consequence”, says Lawson. Quite, agrees Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. What we really want to hear is a political debate about schools, welfare, taxes, health, crime and transport. But the fact that George Osborne is now facing accusations over the non-reporting of £487,000 for his private office reminds us that MPs for all sides “find it difficult to be sure about all the rules”. “If I were Cameron I wouldn’t be saddling up any high horses just yet” – questions remain about the big Tory donor, Michael Ashcroft, as well.
It would be best for the parties to reach a funding solution. Currently, Cameron is making one set of proposals to protect his City funding while Labour is focusing on how to make the Tory system impossible while protecting its own sources. “Unless everyone wants stories about dodgy donors to clog up politics this year (and next) they have to have a peace conference”. Hain’s “stupendous bog-up of his finances” could, unwittingly, lead to his greatest contribution yet.