Well, there’s a surprise – the police won’t investigate ‘cash-for-peerages’ allegations this time

The last time a Scottish National Party MP put out a press release saying they were writing to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner about the sale of peerages, it prompted a two-year investigation costing the taxpayer £1.5m in 2006-07, which included the police interviewing a sitting prime minister, before the Crown Prosecution Service concluded it was a waste of time and money.

So it should come as no surprise that a detective inspector should have replied politely on behalf of Dame Cressida Dick, the current Met Commissioner, to Pete Wishart, the SNP MP, on Friday: “There is insufficient information upon which to launch a criminal investigation.”

That should have been obvious to Sir Ian Blair, who was Commissioner in 2006, too, but he was swept along in the madness against his namesake, the prime minister. What Tony Blair had done was as morally reprehensible as most of his predecessors (and successors) as prime minister, but there was never any evidence that he had broken the law.

The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 makes it an offence to promise to nominate someone for an honour in return for money. Nothing as crude as that has happened since the time of David Lloyd George, whose tariff of prices (£40,000 for a baronetcy, worth £2m in today’s prices, and £10,000 for a knighthood, or £500,000 today) was what prompted the legislation in the first place.

But it is obvious to all that if someone does give large sums of money to the governing party, the chances of their being nominated for a peerage is high. For those Tory donors who have also served as Tory party treasurer, the correlation has remarkably been almost 100 per cent. No explicit promise is needed.

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Boris Johnson’s record is worse than Tony Blair’s. In Blair’s case, all four of the nominations that prompted the SNP press release were blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, the independent committee that vets nominations for propriety. In Johnson’s case, the commission rejected the nomination of Peter Cruddas, a Tory donor and former treasurer, but the prime minister overruled it and nominated him anyway.

Those who object to the honours system need to change the law rather than pursue futile prosecutions. But it seems unfair that a Labour prime minister who was relatively conscientious about propriety should have been subjected to a two-year investigation, involving the excessive use of the power of arrest on some of the people who worked for him, while a Conservative prime minister who is less conscientious seems to be treated differently.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator