Brian Wilson: Up to 250 reasons to spurn Peter Cruddas

The capacity of life to improve upon art never ceases to amaze. If the writers of In The Thick Of It had come up with the character of Peter Cruddas, erstwhile Tory treasurer, they would surely have been accused of going over the top.

Mr Cruddas’s language and demeanour were those of a practised spiv. His offer of “premier league” status to anyone – and he really did seem to mean anyone – who would give the Tories over “a hundred grand maybe up to 250” will surely enter the lexicon of great political quotations.

The Sunday Times deserves congratulations for its sting and its reporters for maintaining their self-control till they were safely out of the building. As Mr Cruddas volunteered Downing Street dinners and policy-shaping influence in return for a satisfactory cheque, there must have been a strong temptation to burst out laughing and cry, “Gotcha!”

• Join Brian Wilson in a webchat tomorrow at 1pm on the Conservative donations

Unsurprisingly, the crudities of Mr Cruddas’s approach to fund-raising have revived all the old questions about cash for access and influence. Perhaps the same attention to such matters should exist in Scotland. If 100-grand grants a phoney Liechtenstein-based entrepreneur “premier league” Tory status, then “Sir Brian” Souter’s largesse to the SNP must qualify him for the World Cup.

Invitation lists will be scanned and conspiracy theories constructed for weeks to come. High-minded platitudes will abound. New rules will be hurried through. Even the most assiduous political trenchermen will be careful of the invitations they accept for fear of ending up on the front pages. Perhaps a High Court judge will be enlisted to confirm the cleansing of the stable.

But really, nothing much will have changed. Entertaining though Cruddas’s performance was, it was primarily a pitch designed to flatter the vulgar end of the donor market. I very much doubt if the mythical company represented by the Sunday Times’ reporters would suddenly have found themselves thrust into the promised hotspots of power and influence.

Politicians, like everyone else, keep the company they are most comfortable with – the like-minded, the trusted friends, their own social networks. Whether or not these people are substantial party donors is immaterial. And you can’t legislate against such informal associations, which are likely to be a lot more influential than dinners at Number 10 or Bute House.

Linking fund-raising to dinners to benefits for the rich in last week’s Budget misses the point. The Tories do not need the benefit of a conspiracy to understand what they exist for and anyone who expects them to legislate according to any other values is seriously deluded. The danger in constructing a conspiracy theory round funding is that we lose sight of the true driver – which is class interest and right-wing ideology.

The mirror image of that is Labour’s financial links to the trade unions and their input into policy. There is nothing to apologise for so long as it is transparent and understood. Labour has always been driven by electoral reality far more than by the union paymasters of Tory demonology. But democracy demands an ideological difference between potential parties of government and the role of organised labour plays a crucial part in underpinning it.

Another fact is that power attracts money, irrespective of ideology. When it seemed possible Labour would rule for ever, unlikely people fell over themselves to buy their way into the inner sanctums. The Tories are now in pole position and their natural supporters have come home, cheques in hand. In Scotland, the SNP is awash with money, very little of it coming from the stipends of the poor.

It is also a mistake to assume that money is the most important currency for buying favours. When we see Rupert Murdoch being fawned upon by Alex Salmond at Bute House, it is not because he is expected to write a cheque to the SNP’s fighting fund. It is the muscle of his publications that is being solicited. Endorsements can be more valuable than cheques.

Take the interesting and topical case of David Murray. In the run-up to the last Holyrood elections, the former Rangers owner declared that while his views had “always been in favour of the Union and still are”, he supported Mr Salmond as “the best choice for Scotland in these difficult times”. A gold-dust endorsement which sent out the message that it was possible for die-hard Unionists to support the SNP.

Now, if Murray had done a Souter and given the Nationalists half a million, questions would surely have been asked over some subsequent utterances and actions by the First Minister and the Scottish Government. But nobody can legislate against an endorsement. In other words, there are more ways of winning the gratitude of any government than by writing cheques to party funds.

Tightening the rules of donations is probably an inevitable outcome of this affair and the best way might be to look to other countries for some existing model that works better than our own. But beware of window-dressing since it certainly won’t be easy to pin down. Set the limit at £25,000 a donation and ten of these from members of the same family will still come to £250,000 and premier league status.

State funding of political parties is not an attractive option. If an organisation cannot garner enough support from its adherents to survive, then why should the taxpayers act as involuntary funders? I suspect that when all these options have been examined, the reforms will be pretty minimal because, whatever its imperfections, the current system just about works while no system is invulnerable against the actions of fools or knaves.

In the 1990s, the word “sleaze” came to be a form of shorthand for every scandal that arose – titles for sale, cash for access, and all the rest of it. As soon as one fire looked like being extinguished, another one flared up. There were some reforms but, as has now been confirmed, not a lot has changed. Cruddas looks more like a figure from the Major era than from the Cameron one.

Ultimately, the integrity of any political system depends on the integrity of the people running it. Episodes like the current one encourage the belief that politics in general is a corrupt business, which I do not believe to be the case. Every party comes to power on the promise of avoiding exactly the kind of scandals into which they are then drawn. And, invariably, the relationship between money and power is at the centre of them.

All parties should be more concerned about safeguarding their own integrity than in throwing stones at others since all have been proven vulnerable to the same pitfalls. The differences in politics should be about ideology and values. But if and when power has been delivered, the challenges for all are the same.

• Brian Wilson is a former Labour MP and minister.