Gerald Warner: Fiddler on the hoof MacShane is unfit for Privy Council

IT WAS all a fascist plot. The downfall of gallant anti-fascist freedom fighter Denis MacShane has removed the last protection Britain enjoyed against the rise of a Fourth Reich.

If you doubt that, consider the alarming claim by ­lawyer Mark Stephens, friend and defender of MacShane, on BBC Radio 4’s World At One last Friday: “The most important thing here is that if people who are anti-fascist, people who have fought against semitism [sic], then in those sort of circumstances – in those circumstances – people will be deterred from doing that in the future, they will become targets.”

So, if you waken up tomorrow to find the Waffen SS goose-stepping down your street you will know who to blame: the Chamberlain-style appeasers on the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges who hounded MacShane out of public life. If you are tempted to think, just because Mark Stephens’ previous high-profile initiative was as ­adviser to Richard Dawkins on arresting the Pope during his visit to Britain, that he has a taste for quixotic causes, then consider the admonitory words of MacShane himself: “I am shocked and saddened that the BNP has won its three-year campaign to destroy my political career as a Labour MP despite a full police investigation which decided not to proceed.”

Clearly, it was the BNP wot won it. It must have a majority on the Parliamentary Standards Committee, even if those fifth columnists pose as Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats. So subterranean is this BNP presence, its only overt manifestation is the two letters sent by Michael Barnbrook, at that time a BNP spokesman though no longer now a party member, to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, one enclosing a cutting from the Sunday newspaper that had published MacShane’s expenses scam, the other quoting the evidence from the parliament website under “allowances by Members”. It was the British press, not the British National Party, that exposed MacShane’s creative accounting.

As for the bunch of old women on the Parliamentary Standards Committee and their claim that “this is the gravest case which has come to us for adjudication, rather than being dealt with under the criminal law” – for goodness’ sake, can we please keep things in proportion? All we are talking about here is a claim of £12,900 based on 19 invoices from the European Policy Institute’s general ­manager – who turns out to have been MacShane signing with a nom-de-plume – and £6,467 for eight computers. Anti-fascism does not come cheap. This must all have been inadvertent, since Denis MacShane is renowned for his puritanical attitude towards expenses, as evidenced by his campaign against UKIP leader ­Nigel Farage in 2009 over his expenses as an MEP, though it may be that, as an ardent Europhile, MacShane takes a sterner line in defending French taxpayers’ interests than British.

Where does this go now? On page three of the report by the Committee on Standards and Privileges it states: “The evidence gathered in the course of the Commissioner’s inquiry was not shared with the police. It had been gathered for another purpose, under different conditions from those applying in criminal investigations. It was and remains subject to Parliamentary privilege, as does this Report.” If that implies that the evidence in the report could not be used by police in renewed investigations, the House of Commons is skating on very thin ice indeed with regard to public opinion. Already the Conservative MP Philip ­Davies has asked the Metropolitan Police to reopen their inquiry. The conduct of the police in their previous investigation of MacShane, which they dropped, leaves them with many questions to answer.

Meanwhile, there is an immediate issue relating to this latest expenses scandal. The Right Honourable Denis MacShane is so styled, however inappropriately, as a member of the Privy Council. He must be stripped of that unmerited distinction. By what conceivable moral legerdemain could an individual deemed unfit to sit in parliament be thought suitable to serve as a member of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council? We have heard much ill-thought-out clamour for the knighthood to be removed from the late Jimmy Savile – an impossible and absurd rewriting of history, since he is dead.

MacShane, however, is very much alive and an obvious candidate for expulsion from the Privy Council. Last year Elliot Morley, the disgraced MP who had abused the expenses system, was removed from the Privy Council. Morley served a prison sentence (one quarter of the nominal term) which made expulsion inevitable. Regardless of whether MacShane incurs criminal proceedings, nobody unfit for the Commons should be retained as a Privy Counsellor. Forfeiture of this honour by MacShane is the least the British taxpayer has a right to expect.