Why the Government Can Afford to Spend Political Capital on Owen Paterson

It might seem like an unusual set of decisions for a government to take. After Owen Paterson MP (CON, North Shropshire) was caught taking a bribe from Randox - a “health and technology” company according to its website - in order to influence public policy to the company’s benefit, the government, rather than let him lie in the bed very much of his own making, instead forced a vote to reform the standards commission so that Paterson would not be punished. Normally, “MP takes bribe and is caught” is a news story that is over in a matter of a few days, and happens more regularly than would perhaps be desirable in a functional democracy, and it’s frequency does cause consideration for the number of MPs who have done this and have not yet been caught. In this case, the government’s insistence that Paterson should not merely accept his original (astonishingly lenient) punishment of a 30 day suspension from the House of Commons has caused the story to linger for a while - and if there was ever a government that did not want questions of corruption to linger for a while, it is this one. Thus we are here, a week on, as Labour draw closer in near-daily opinion polls, as the government has burned through the remainder of this year’s political capital, and maybe more capital even than that, and as government MP after government MP gets caught in a web of their own making, constructed from their own undeclared interests and second jobs. One question remains - why?

The short answer is because this government has no plan. Quite literally, none. Most of the policies in the Conservative manifesto on which Boris Johnson was elected in a 2019 landslide are either to do with Brexit so have already occurred, have been abandoned, were not possible, or things that the government never intended to do anyway. We only need to look back at major policy announcements to see this - nearly all of them have been a reaction to something that has happened in the news. A good government carries forward a mix of policies drawing from both its own agenda and a reaction to the world as it changes - we do not have a good government. So, in light of a lack of policies, the government seems to feel that they might as well spend their formerly unusually abundant political capital on enriching themselves - that is, after all, what most of them went into politics to do.

What is political capital? Essentially it is the government’s ability to carry out actions that are unpopular. The more popular a government is, the more political capital it has. This can be seen perhaps most clearly through the lens of Tony Blair’s second term. A 2001 landslide gave him a substantial amount of political capital, and it was followed up with a series of unpopular policies, including the fox hunting ban and the Iraq War. Those two examples in particular highlight another important principle - whether or not a policy is popular has close to nothing to do with whether or not it is good. Blair’s expenditure of political capital was obvious in the subsequent election in 2005, where he still won, but with a reduced majority (perhaps showing that he knew when to stop). The 2005 election could have gone a different way if Blair had continued to enact more unpopular policies, as he would have spent more political capital.

Back to the present day, Boris has no policies. This is a claim that is rarely levied at him, and much more at his opposition, because when Boris is asked what his policies are he says “GET BREXIT DONE”, which has been said so often that everyone, even those not particularly inclined to take an interest in politics, can recite it as a mantra not dissimilar to a school hall hymn. Meanwhile Labour will say a policy once, it will appear in the Guardian’s politics section, then never be heard from again. Ultimately, this means that, technically at least, Labour have hundreds of policies, but, following the “doing” of Brexit, the Conservatives would appear to have none. So, with no policies, unpopular or otherwise, to spend political capital on, No. 10 believed that they could expend political capital to take the hit of protecting Owen Paterson in the way that they did. This is a decision they might live to regret - particularly given that they did a partial U-turn anyway, and then Paterson resigned.

Maybe that 30 day suspension would not have been so bad after all.