By William Rees-Mogg (THE TIMES, 27/02/06):
Why Ken Livingstone? Who is David Laverick? These are the questions to which the press has been giving answers — often wrong ones — in the past week.
There is a mystery about Ken Livingstone. It is that he has twice been elected Mayor of London although he is a militant dinosaur of the old Left, with views that have been rejected by the national electorate at every general election since 1979. If he were a national party he would win only a single seat — his own. Like George Galloway, another one-man band of the Left, he is professionally out of tune.
The voters of London like his aura of anarchy because they are altogether disgusted with the layers of bureaucracy that harass their lives. They have looked at rival candidates, even mild eccentrics such as Steve Norris or Simon Hughes, and shrugged.
They do not believe that such people would make much difference. The more outrageous Ken Livingstone is, the more likely voters are to believe he hates the establishment as much as they do. They also sympathise with the whiff of the open bottle that, rightly or wrongly, occasionally attaches to his late-night statements.
He has now been suspended for four weeks for yet further offensive late-night remarks. What he said was unpleasant to the point of being contemptible. He has not apologised. He attacked Oliver Finegold, a journalist from the Evening Standard, in terms that were particularly offensive to a Jew, and would have been highly offensive to anyone. Mr Finegold kept his temper. Livingstone asked him whether he was a German war criminal and said that he was just like a concentration camp guard. There were legal remedies open to Mr Finegold, but he was too sensible to take them.
Journalists often criticise other people and good journalists accept some offensive knockabout in return. Ken Livingstone ended by saying: “Your paper is a load of scumbags.” A Chicago columnist once called me a “scumbag”, and I had to look the word up. The Evening Standard did not take much offence at the insult.
It was the Board of Deputies of British Jews that complained to the Standards Board for England. It was mistaken to do so; it is not in the interests of the Jewish community that their Board of Deputies should inflate trivial disputes of the late evening into matters of state. The Standards Board for England — a pompous title for a pompous quango — was equally foolish. Perhaps it thought it would be more fun to pursue a Mayor of London than the usual run-of-the- mill councillors. It referred the question to the Adjudication Council for England.
This is the answer to my second and more obscure question. Who is David Laverick? Is he the manager of Bolton Wanderers? Is he the Provost of Eton College? Is he a Lord Justice of Appeal? He is none of these things. He is the chairman of the Adjudication Panel for England of the Standards Board for England. “There’s glory for you, boyo,” as the Welsh windbag himself might say. In other words Mr Laverick is the chairman of the sub-committee of a quango appointed by the Member of Parliament for Hull East, Mr John Prescott.
It is all utter foolishness. The people of London elected Ken Livingstone on two occasions to be their mayor. They may have been mistaken to do so; he has never had my vote. But that was their democratic decision. Mr Laverick, and his two colleagues on the panel, decided that Mr Livingstone should not be mayor for four weeks of his second term.
No one ever elected them to their high office. They are not a court. Their closest connection with democracy is that they were appointed by the Member for Hull East. May Heaven forgive the voters of Hull East. The panel was established by law — one of the many foolish laws passed by the Blair administration — but they were not enforcing the law, they were enforcing their own subjective discretion.
I would not call Mr Laverick a war criminal, a concentration camp guard or a scumbag, because I do not think he is any of these things. I would only call him a pompous donkey, who has no understanding of his limited importance in the scheme of things, or of the respect he owes to the democratic choice of the people of London. No doubt, if I were a local councillor, he would find that my criticisms were “unnecessarily offensive and insensitive” — as indeed I hope they are. Fortunately the press still enjoys free speech, even if the Mayor of London does not.
The issue is more than a matter of a show-off mayor or a silly sub-committee of an unelected quango abusing its inappropriate powers. It concerns the ancient issue of “due process of law” that underlies Magna Carta, the English common law and the Constitution of the United States. Without due process, there is no law. A merely subjective judgment, lacking judicial safeguards, by an unelected tribunal, does not constitute due process. It is no better than the process by which Robespierre sent aristos to the guillotine, though one must admit that Ken makes a comic aristo and a four-week suspension is a milder penalty..
The Prime Minister knows what the issue is. He is against due process as such. He has written a most extraordinary attack on the whole concept in yesterday’s Observer. The article is so incautious that he must have written it himself.
“In theory,” Tony Blair writes, “traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.” This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Minister’s conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.
I wish I could think of an appropriately “offensive and insensitive” epithet to describe Tony Blair. Perhaps “antinomian” would do.