Webchat: Brian Wilson on Conservative donations

Column extract:

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!”

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.