“We are the servants now,” Tony Blair said in 1997, as he pledged to “restore trust in politics.” Blair’s goal was not to destroy the establishment but to update it, replacing a tired and slightly corrupt conservative elite with a new establishment forged through meritocracy and entrepreneurialism. As Chris Mullin, the former junior minister, wrote in his diaries: “Blair went funny around money.” But it wasn’t just any money. It was new money. The entrepreneurs and risk-takers were the business wing of his new elite. Branson, Stelios, Sugar, Goodwin; all were knighted under Labour. Parliament also began to resemble the nation, with more than 100 women, MPs from ethnic minorities and openly gay cabinet ministers.
Having risen to power on the wave of Tory sleaze, Blair wanted a “purer than pure” party. This may never have been a realistic ambition. Even so, 2009’s events have left this new Labour establishment profoundly weakened. The once lauded City entrepreneurs have been bailed out with a new form of “social corporate responsibility,” as one wag put it. Banking chiefs’ defence of playing by the rules no longer seems viable, at least not in the fickle court of public opinion. Meanwhile, a brick was thrown through the window of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland chief Fred Goodwin.
Now parliament too finds itself bloodied and disorientated, as once respected Labour and Lib-Dem MPs are caught helping themselves just as eagerly as the Tories. The defence was again of acting within the rules, although some of course were not. It was a hard line to sustain when MPs set the rules, inflating expenses allowances in lieu of salary hikes that they knew the electorate would not accept. It will now be much harder with a new, reforming speaker in place, and rules set independently.
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