Last month ex-Labour MP David Chaytor was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for false expenses claims. Author and journalist, Francis Beckett has something to say about it...
Whatever they say of him now, I still like David Chaytor, former HMP and now residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I did not recognise the old, ill, white-haired, haunted man whose gaunt, terrified face stared out of last week’s papers. I have happy memories of a tall, erect, dapper, kind and occasionally rather amusing man, and of an intelligent and able politician, who knew, understood and cared about the environment and education; a politician of some integrity, held back by his independence of mind - if he'd been more willing to toe the Blair line, he'd have been in government.
I'm sure his lawyer was right to describe him as a broken man. I saw the start of the decay. It began fast - probably at that dreadful moment in New York when he took a telephone call that effectively told him he'd been found out. I met him a few weeks later. The ease and the poise had gone completely. Every syllable shrieked tension and a growing sense of doom. His judgement, always rather steady, had deserted him - I think he really thought it was all a Tory plot to harm Labour in the run-up to the election. He knew he was finished, though.
I emailed to tell him I was sorry he was ceasing to be an MP, and he could be proud of some of the things he'd done. I meant it.
David cheated the public purse of £18,000. It was very wrong, and he'll pay dearly for it. But his sentence is over the top, a kneejerk response to public indignation and media sanctimoniousness. It’s the same as for a financier, reported yesterday, who cheated shareholders of hundreds of thousands of pounds. You think it’s more serious if it’s a backbench MP? But an important city financier has far more power than a backbench MP.
It’s not Chaytor’s crime which has created our desperate financial plight. His crime, and that of other MPs, is being used cynically to distract attention from the real swindlers - the men in banking and finance whose greed has made us all poor.
I suspect one of the many things he'll torture himself about for the rest of his life is what a small sum of money he destroyed himself for. Bankers, financiers, Tony Blair, none of them would cross the road for £18,000. The people who ruined the country, and the man who arranged for some of its young men to die in an illegal and unwinnable war, will enjoy all their lives the fruits of their greed.
David Chaytor, I think, may never enjoy anything anymore. I know I am not the only old chum who declined to talk about him that night, and I am sure we did so partly to protect the causes for which we campaigned alongside him. Maybe he deserved his fate. But there are many people who deserve it far more, and who won't suffer it. If he fancies a pint when he comes out, the first round's on me.
Francis Beckett's books, How to Create a Successful School and What Did the Baby Boomers Every Do For Us? are available here and here, priced £14.99 and £12.99, respectively.
His forthcoming book, The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, will be published in hardback on 10 March, priced £14.99.