A fair decision by a man to trust

A decade ago a district auditor surcharged and disqualified Ted Knight, the Labour, nay socialist, leader of Lambeth. Did Knight, eventually bankrupted, complain about the auditor's personality? Did he even moan about the system, beyond having a ritual go at the iniquities of capitalism? No, Ted Knight - nasty piece of political work as he was - took it (excuse the phrase) like a man. And no Tory ministers and councillors were to be heard crying the injustice of it all, standing up in Commons and town hall chambers to say Red Ted was wrongly accused. Not a bit of it.

Shirley Porter is different. She has more money. She, by all accounts, could pay the audit bill and still have change for a supermarket trolley. She has also been striving to portray the system as unfair. John Major and the Tory hierarchy are singing the same song - the auditor's judgment is somehow provisional or even illegitimate - and are backing up a woman who came to be an alternative female symbol of Thatcherism.

The Central Office line is that she remains innocent until found guilty. Until then she is a fine upstanding citizen, etc. But such a conclusion can only be based on a misunderstanding of how the auditor works. He had a choice. He could have gone to the courts for a declaration of illegality: he would then be the prosecutor. His preferred method was to use his own quasi-judicial powers and, on the facts and law before him, to make a finding. Which he has done. These councillors and officers are guilty.

Of course the judgment by the District Auditor, John Magill, may yet be rejected by the courts. The appeal process has a long way to go. He may eventually be proved wrong in his conclusion that Lady Porter and her political colleagues, along with certain Westminster officers, were "recklessly indifferent" to the existence of a wider sense of appropriate conduct by councillors when they chopped up the borough's housing to suit party calculations. But to question the auditor's professionalism and deny the legal force of his judgment is an unacceptable attempt to reject the system when it turns against you - a system, incidentally, created by the Conservatives.

The way the District Auditor works is not novel or outlandish. It is the same now as when Ian Pickwell, auditor for north London, went to court to convict Camden Council of illegality (Camden's offence was to pay over the odds to settle a manual workers' strike; the auditor lost in the High Court). All that has changed since then is that audit investigations have got more protracted, more expensive and more legalistic. The auditor has been accompanied by solicitors and barristers at every turn.

The point is that he has done what the law requires and made a judgment based on a scrupulous (and voluminous) review of the facts. It took him nearly six years. He gave the accused councillors and officers a hearing - something Ted Knight et al never got. His early work was quietly monitored by no less than the then controller of the Audit Commission, now the exalted deputy governor of the Bank of England, Howard Davies.

The other week I happened to sit opposite Mr Magill at a dinner given by the president of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. Grey men: this was their annual congregation. In Mr Magill's greyness (he is a senior partner with Deloitte & Touche) lies his trustworthiness. This is no hothead, no radical, no underminer of the British constitution. He is a chartered accountant. The Conservatives, a party that chartered accountants might once have unthinkingly voted for, once wore as a badge of pride their respect for the law and the professions. The District Auditor is a professional. He deserves all our respect as an impartial sifter of fact and judge - subject always to correction by the courts. His judgment stands. And it is damning.

David Walker is co-author of 'The Times Guide to the New British State'. As the BBC's urban affairs correspondent, he reported in depth on the Westminster case.