It is always worth asking what comes first – a dysfunctional system or the risk of corruption?

One week, two countries. In the UK, the public learned for the first time of the truly staggering sums that ministers had shelled out for medical supplies in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, and how much of this largesse had been shovelled towards “chums”.

In France, meanwhile, a former president went on trial charged with corruption and influence-peddling. The trial is stuttering along, in part because of Covid-19 restrictions, and may or may not end in the scheduled two weeks. The crime carries a possible sentence of 10 years in prison.  

Nicolas Sarkozy is not the first senior French politician to be charged with corruption. The Paris city hall, Cannes casinos and Marseille have all been hotbeds of malfeasance at various times. Former president Jacques Chirac received a suspended sentence after he left office, for offences committed during the time he was mayor of Paris. 

But Sarkozy is the first former president actually to stand trial (Chirac was considered too unwell and was tried in absentia). And a section of French opinion never liked him; his nickname “President Bling-Bling” said it all. 

If there is a message, it might be that France can cope with a president (Francois Hollande) who separated from the mother of his four children, and ventured out of the Elysee Palace on a scooter to see his alleged girlfriend; with a president (Francois Mitterrand) who kept the existence of his mistress and their daughter under wraps, and with a prime minister (Alain Juppe) who settled his son in a luxurious Paris flat done up at the council’s expense – but that it can’t cope with an upstart who lacks good taste.

The charges against Sarkozy, who denies all the charges against him, are unusual in actually reaching court, but they reflect a very French form of alleged corruption, which has less to do with personal enrichment – though that happens – than with financing political parties or election campaigns. As such, it exposes a defect of the political system: the problems of legal political fundraising.

Which should perhaps set the haughty – largely Anglo-Saxon – denunciations of corruption in a slightly different light. While some corruption is indeed about greedy individuals, much of it reflects something quite different. It is a solution people find to negotiating a dysfunctional system. What comes first, the dysfunction or the corruption, is a question that is worth asking more often than it is.

It is especially worth asking in relation to the former Soviet bloc. A song routinely sung about the lack of investment especially in Russia and Ukraine is that these countries must get to grips with corruption first. This message disregards two realities, however. The first is how much progress that Russia, especially, has made towards reducing day-to-day bribery – partly thanks to the automation of some processes (tax and driving licences) and the privatisation of others (elite schools and hospitals).

The second is how much corruption reflected, and still reflects, the dysfunctionality of government. It was only with the election of Volodymyr Zelensky (the comedy actor, remember) 18 months ago that the special anti-corruption court, which was demanded by Ukraine’s western donors, actually came into being. And Ukrainians who object to it have a point when they ask why there should be a separate court for such cases; in the west, they argue, the law is the law and corruption is tried in a single judicial system. To an extent, corruption as something distinct is in the eye of the beholder.

Streamlining, transparency and accountability could, therefore, be more effective than vociferous anti-corruption campaigns often initiated by outsiders. And this would apply as much to countries inside the EU – notably Romania and Bulgaria, which still bear the scars of their particular past – as to those, such as Ukraine, that are outside.

Closer to home, it is customary to contrast southern and northern Europeans. It is true that there is a gulf between, say, Italy and Germany. But Italy is not as corrupt as it once was, and one – of course, not the only – reason why the mafia and its various clans gained so much sway was the absence of effective law enforcement, creating a vicious circle.

Germany’s hands, though, are not quite as clean as its reputation would suggest. Volkswagen’s cooking of its diesel vehicles’ eco-credentials is one example. Another is the number of politicians and others taken to task for plagiarising their advanced degrees. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned as defence minister in 2011, is perhaps the highest-profile culprit, but others have fallen since, and the current head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was investigated but exonerated. 

This might suggest not just that Germans consider a higher degree an asset in Germany for advancement in certain careers, but that it is one for which shortcuts can be found. In other words, higher education and the paths into politics do not always work as they should.

And so to the UK, which prides itself on its incorruptibility to the point where David Cameron held a much-trumpeted international anti-corruption summit in 2016. However, it is worth recalling that it was not until 2010 that the UK had a fully fledged anti-bribery law. I must also admit to a certain sympathy for the current government, when faced by a potentially lethal shortage of medical basics as the pandemic struck in spring. 

When a former head of the Committee on Standards in Public Life suggested that the Civil Service Commission was the ideal body to find people and monitor appointments, I allowed myself a slight smile: the pandemic would have been past history by the time the CSC had completed its work.

But the way in which lucrative contracts have been distributed exposes precisely one of the ways in which our own system fails to work – and how people find very British, old-boy and old-girl network ways around its particular dysfunction. A system so set in its ways, with ponderous safeguards at every step, finds it hard to respond to an emergency, so alternatives – conventional and unconventional – are found. The appointments of Baroness Harding, Kate Bingham and Mike Coupe, to roles in the “test and trace” system, are currently subject to legal challenge, but the government’s case is that these were not public appointments. Of such bypasses and ambiguities is corruption potentially made, except we tend not to recognise it as such.

In fact, corruption is an area where the UK’s self-image and other people’s image of us are, at times, severely at odds. Our electoral system is exceptionally clean – except that a judge described the conduct of a local election in 2005 as something that “would disgrace a banana republic”. Our justice system is incorruptible – except that I covered a court case where a court clerk took bribes to keep points off the driving licences of dozens of young people who would otherwise have been banned. And how would you rate all those enablers, including lawyers, who help dubious billionaires launder their reputations, buy passports, and hide their assets?

Only three years ago, Roberto Saviano, Italy’s premier writer on mafia matters, described the UK as “without doubt the most corrupt country in the world, not in terms of politics or police, but in terms of money laundering”, on the basis of findings by the non-governmental organisation Transparency International. Corruption in the UK, he said, was no less corruption for being less visible than elsewhere.

Perhaps now that the pandemic is casting a light on potentially questionable appointments and contracts, as well as other UK shortcomings, such as our poor standards of public health, we will start to take another look at our supposed incorruptibility. 

All honest countries are alike, it might be said, but each corrupt country is corrupt in its own way.