http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=477705&in_page_id=1770Serving as a Member of Parliament was, against stiff competition, one of the most shocking experiences of my life – right up there with meeting child soldiers in the Congo when I worked as a BBC war reporter, or the imprisoned victims of child abuse in Afghanistan.
There is still a majority of honest and hard-working MPs in the House of Commons. But it is also a refuge of last resort for an eclectic collection of creeps, cranks and careerists.
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I was permanently astonished by the willingness of so many to put their consciences into storage and vote for measures they did not believe in and against those they did.
I knew an MP who drank himself to death in Annie's Bar. The Whips didn't mind, so long as when the division bell sounded he could drag himself upstairs and vote the way they wanted.
I also sat in astonishment as I watched another MP trade his vote for a peerage. There was no doubt about it, he knew exactly what he was doing. He had a reputation for integrity and the issue was one on which his vote would carry some weight.
The Whips were watching. The MP in question justified it on an argument of unity and the debt that he owed to his party. Now grandly titled, he sits in the House of Lords.
On becoming the independent MP for Tatton, Cheshire, in May 1997, I watched and listened for a while as new Members should, to get the feel of the place and judge what kind of parliament it was.
After a couple of months, the uneasy feeling dawned on me that it resembled nothing so much as the old East German Volkskammer, where the system counted for everything and the people for nothing; where the place was stuffed to the rafters with stooges and the parties were mere husks of what they pretended to be. Why did we allow this arthritic grip on the windpipe of democracy?
Yet it had all begun so optimistically. Remember that time of 'hope beyond ordinary imagining', as Tony Blair put it? In May 1997, Labour swept into power on a tide of popular rebellion against Tory 'sleaze', both real and perceived, and on the offer of a different kind of politics. Its manifesto promised: 'We will clean up politics.'
Those words hang in the air to this day. Did New Labour's leaders really say that and did they mean it? The answer to the first is yes, to the second no.
Like millions of others, I wished to believe them. Things could hardly get worse, could they? I even had a walk-on part in the brave new world in prospect, defeating the Tories' Neil Hamilton, an MP who had come to seem symbolic of a party and government that had lost its moral compass.
The Tatton campaign was used, I realised at the time, to keep the 'sleaze' issue bubbling away at the top of the agenda. I had no problem with that, except that it was treated as a kind of stage prop, to disappear at the touch of a conjuror's wand. And Blair could conjure like no Prime Minister since Lloyd George.
Public trust in public life was as important an issue then as it is now; but as soon as the campaign was over most of those who were elected on the promise of restoring it seemed to shed it like yesterday's fashion accessory. It had served its purpose and did not seem to matter to them any more.
Sir Alistair Graham, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, was among those pushed overboard. On leaving office earlier this year, he said: 'My greatest regret has been the apparent failure to persuade the Government to place high ethical standards at the heart of its thinking and, most importantly, behaviour.'
Apart from the Iraq disaster, the Blair Government was by no means the worst I have lived under. The management of the economy was generally sound. It was strongly committed to providing aid for the developing world.
It helped bring about a political miracle in Northern Ireland, which may be its most enduring legacy. But on the issue on which it was elected, public trust in public life, its record was wholly and unforgivably negative. It traded in patronage. It squandered a golden opportunity to draw people in and reinvent the entire culture of politics.
It even dodged the effect of its own reforms on party funding. And this was the party that declared: 'Our mission in politics is to rebuild the bond of trust between government and the people.'
But it didn't. And that is why, after the most dazzling, disappointing and ultimately dangerous decade in recent politics, it is necessary to write the obituary of the Blair model of New Labour. For if we do not understand the mistakes, from the abuse of patronage to the nonchalant military adventurism, we shall surely be doomed to repeat them.
Gordon Brown has made a start in separating himself from the record of the previous regime (to which he contributed), and from the years of utter madness in foreign policy. And yes, he may upset the Americans in doing so – but perhaps it's time they were upset. He must also place particular emphasis on the hitherto neglected practice of honest politics.
If such an instrument as a sleazometer existed, I believe it would register the scandals of the Labour years on a higher scale than those of the Tories. An air of moral dishevelment settled around them. With the exception of the two jailbirds, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, the Tory scandals involved mainly obscure backbenchers and minor figures.
The Labour scandals reached right into the heart of Government, touching senior Ministers, some of whom were repeat offenders.
Some survived, others did not. Blair was judge and jury on allegations of ministerial misconduct. He ruled like the Sun King, Louis XIV. He saw no reason, he said, to fine-tune the code.
But when an MP was accused of breaking the rules of the House of Commons, then that was a matter for the House itself. And here I had a ringside seat.
For three-and-a-half years I sat on the Standards and Privileges Committee as a parade of MPs came before us, including some Ministers of the Crown. It was instructive to see which of the committee's 11 members left their party allegiances at the door.
There was a group who were consistently sympathetic to Labour MPs, especially those of Ministerial rank, accused of a breach of the code of conduct. Whether they were doing the Whips' bidding I had no way of knowing. But their words and actions would hardly have been different if they had been.
This was also the Parliament that undermined its own Standards Commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, with a disgraceful whispering campaign against her by Ministers and backbenchers. She was eventually let go for doing her job too well. This also undermined trust in the House of Commons. I doubt if it can be restored under the present Speaker, Michael Martin.
The Tories' curse was cash-for-questions – Labour's was cash-for-peerages. The fact that no charges have been pressed does not mean the scandal has gone away. The evidence is still there and will come out in the long run, to the lasting discredit of those who funded their Election campaigns with loans that pushed the law to its limits and beyond.
Large sums of money flowed from wealthy individuals to political parties. The leaders of those parties nominated the donors and lenders for high honours. On the face of it, it was a clear case of corruption. So arise, Lord Megabucks. Step this way, Lady Cashpoint. The means are there to secure you a seat at the grander end of the Palace of Westminster.
But for the Government to be hung out to dry on this issue was a bit like Al Capone being done for tax evasion when considered in the context of the invasion of Iraq, the worst mistake by a British government in living memory, and with the proclaimed cause of war turning out to be a falsehood.
The irony was that Blair was a most gifted apologiser. But he apologised only for the things he did not do, such as the slave trade or the shooting of Army deserters. He was unrepentant about the things that he did, such as trading in peerages or waging illegal wars.
Here was a man who sent the Armed Forces to war on the basis of a grand self-deception, and whose answer to those who did not trust him was typically that it did not matter, because he trusted himself.
To the end of his premiership he retained his faith – not a soldier's faith, but a civilian's – in the effectiveness of hard power. He never understood that the weapons of shock and awe, deployed in a war among the people, recruit more than they kill. And military commanders are not magicians: they are the managers of organised violence.
The 15th Century Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus said war is sweet to those with no experience of it. Neither Blair nor anyone in his Government – not a single Minister at any level – has ever worn the Queen's uniform or known anything of the reality of warfare.
Their elder statesmen, such as Denis Healey, who was a beach-master at Anzio in 1944, knew better. 'I don't think that people with war experience would have ever got us involved with the Americans in the way that Tony Blair did,' Healey said.
The untold story of the war in Iraq was the mood of unease that turned to anger among the soldiers sent to fight it.
They were in the front line as the politicians were not. As soon as it was clear that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist, there was a groundswell of disquiet in the ranks of the Armed Forces, especially the Army. It started with the medics and spread to the infantry, cavalry, artillery and supporting arms and services.
It found a voice in the statement by the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, that the time to get out of Iraq was 'sometime soon'.
On a visit to Basra last December, I met old friends from earlier conflicts I had covered for the BBC. They had the gravest doubts about this one and were well aware that their lives were on the line every day for no sufficient reason.
Many were on their third or even fourth tour of duty in Iraq. One was an officer who had seen the conflict through all its phases, from liberation to occupation, and from shock and awe to hearts and minds to a qualified cut and run.
'I'll tell you what this feels like,' he said. 'It's like being a German in the Wehrmacht in France in the Second World War. We, too, are an occupation force. That's how it seems to me.'
I was a soldier once, though not a very good one. Today's Army represents the best of British, as the House of Commons does not. Never in my lifetime has the Army been so overstretched and over-committed, undervalued and under-equipped, ill-directed and ill-used. This has happened on New Labour's watch.
The new politics that we were promised back in 1997 turned out to be the old politics redecorated with bells and whistles, Cool Britannia, surfeits of spin, glittering promises and a great cascade of peerages.
Brown has promised a clean-up and this time Labour has to be serious. That means taking the award of peerages out of the hands of the Prime Minister and other party leaders. It means a return to Cabinet government and Parliamentary accountability. There are encouraging early signs, I am pleased to say, that this is actually starting to happen.
It means respecting or reinventing the Committee On Standards In Public Life. It means the Prime Minister visiting soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. It means no more optional and ill-considered wars. It means no longer parking foreign policy up the Potomac. It means wiping the slate and starting all over again.
One of the Blair Government's catchphrases, as the debacle in Iraq unfolded, was that it was time to draw a line under what had happened and move on. But lines do not just draw themselves. They have to be drawn with something.
An obvious instrument would be an apology, supported by a detailed accounting of what went wrong and why: to track back along the trail of decision-making from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; to explain why the military option was chosen when others were still available, and to express at least a measure of contrition.
It would be a waste and a tragedy if a man of such gifts as Blair, leaving office at the height of his powers, were to spend the remainder of his years in some sense embroidering a falsehood and living a lie. He has it in him, with grace and courage, to do much more than that.
Did anyone ever do so? Yes, Robert McNamara did. Defence Secretary to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and principal architect of the Vietnam War, he wrote a penitent memoir decades later in which he said: 'We were wrong, we were terribly wrong – if only we had asked more questions back then, if only we had looked at more options, perhaps there would be fewer names on the memorial wall today.'
Step by step and surge by surge, the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq grow ever closer. But there is not yet a memorial wall to those who have died in Iraq. It is still too soon. We have no idea of the size of wall we shall need. We owe it to future generations to explain why. We cannot do so without a full accounting by those responsible.
There is no other way.
