Angus MacNeil's family croft (as Scots call a small farm) on the island of Barra is about as far as it is possible to get from London and still be in Britain. It isn't even on the mainland side of Outer Hebrides, but looks over a sandy beach to the Atlantic. Barra's hills so effectively shield the croft that his parents couldn't get a TV signal to bring the chatter and bellows from Edinburgh and London to his family home until he was 10.
When I spoke to him, his sheep were playing on his conscience. Some time before the end of the month, he must shear them. Frankly, the job should have been done weeks ago -- it's hot and the sheep are getting very woolly. He put it off for two reasons. Shearing is "slow, back-breaking, tedious work," and in any case, he's got his hands full trying to bring down the prime minister.
MacNeil, who to the best of his knowledge is the only crofter ever to sit in the House of Commons, is the Scottish Nationalist party (SNP) member of parliament (MP) who initiated the police investigation into the sale of honors which may yet end the Blair years. I'm trying hard to avoid a cliche about an honest man being carried over the sea from the outer isles on a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to confront the decadent metropolis.
But there is no escaping it unless I use another one about the boy and the emperor's new clothes. For MacNeil, who is 35 and won Na h-Eileanan an Iar (formerly the Western Isles) for the SNP only last year, has caused havoc by asking a very good and very simple question: "Isn't it illegal to sell honors?"
As a Scottish nationalist, he felt more keenly than most the suspicion of central government, the London media and the City that is the dominant national mood. I sense that the clubbable nature of Westminster, where the British Parliament is located, started to turn him when he got there, as it has turned so many outsiders before. He says he had beers with politicians he had only read about and found to his surprise that even "Ian Paisley [the Northern Ireland Protestant leader] was quite a gregarious character."
What got him "fizzing," to use his favorite word, was their nonchalance. When he told MPs from other parties that donors to the SNP weren't recommended for honors, they looked at him with incredulity. We would never be able to raise enough money if we did that, they countered. (What they said is true, by the way, and means that the state funding of political parties is inevitable once this scandal has done its work.)
The unclubbable Minister for Europe Geoff Hoon pushed him over the edge in March. Chai Patel, the founder of the Priory rehabilitation clinics which help wealthy people tackle problems like depression and addiction, had just revealed he had loaned Labour ?1.5 million (US$2.75 million) and been offered a peerage, membership of the House of Lords, which includes not just a title but also speaking and voting rights in the upper house, a few weeks later.
The leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, asked Hoon about the "groundswell of support for a debate on the marketplace for honors" he alleged the government had established.
"Is it not the case that 80 pence out of every ?1 of individual donations to the Labour party comes from people who are subsequently ennobled or knighted by the government?" he thundered.
Hoon gave a typically New Labour answer. On the one hand, he rightly pointed out that Labour had introduced safeguards the Tories refused to contemplate in their 18 years in power. But he also dripped with condescension when he sneered at Salmond: "Clearly, my political antennae are not as well attuned as the honorable gentleman's. I have not detected a great groundswell."
In other words, the government could do what it wanted and get away with it because an indifferent public wouldn't hold it to account.
Fizzing with rage once again, MacNeil went to the Commons Library and discovered that the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 is a refreshingly straightforward piece of legislation. It says you can't buy them, you can't sell them and if you do either you can go to prison.
He complained to the London Metropolitan Police and had his first stroke of luck. For the first time in living memory, the police decided to investigate accusations of political corruption. As MacNeil is the complainant, they brief him on their progress. He is impressed by the seriousness of purpose the detectives are bringing to an inquiry they could never have imagined undertaking, and their determination to be "thorough."
The second stroke of luck is that the pressure of the unexpected police attention is forcing open cracks. The revelation by the curry tycoon Sir Gulam Noon last week, that a senior Labour figure told him not to tell the Lord's vetting committee about the ?250,000 he had lent the party, is what every detective hopes for: the first sign that witnesses are turning on each other.
We don't yet know if MacNeil will have a third stroke of luck and see the affair he began lead back to 10 Downing Street. However, we do know that Prime Minister Tony Blair has been fantastically unwise. Instead of keeping party funding at a safe distance by leaving it with the party machine, he has made it the responsibility of his personal envoys.
I don't know what is going to happen next, but my guess is that MacNeil's sheep are just going to have to wait.
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