Peter Hain: in mitigation

I want to say a word in mitigation of Peter Hain.

Yes, he seems almost certain to be in breach of an electoral law. Yes, his defence that he was incompetent sounds ill coming from a cabinet minister. Yes, it appears he was so arrogant that he thought the law didn’t apply to him, like Leona Helmsley saying taxes were for little people. Yes, he seems to have tried to confuse the matter by setting up a pointless think tank to collect money in secret. All this is on the charge sheet and it seems clear to me, and everyone else, that he must resign. We must have some sort of standards after all.

And yet....this was a campaign not for public office or some position of power but for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party. Let’s suppose for a moment that the Labour Party went all democratic and there was an election for the post of who should put up the no smoking signs at the conference, or who should lead the singing. Would it matter if one of the candidates had raised a vast amount of money for his campaign from all sorts of plutocrats and then failed to account for it? It would not because it was unimportant.

Similarly this job is a nothing job. If Gordon Brown were to fall under the proverbial bus (quite easy in London these days) his replacement would not be the Deputy Leader but whoever Her Majesty chose to recognise as carrying most support in parliament (certainly not Harriet Harman for example).

If the Labour Party doesn’t mind having an incompetent spiv in a senior internal position (and the evidence from looking at the others is that it doesn’t), let it.