The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? by David Hine & Gillian Peele

Author:David Hine & Gillian Peele [Hine, David & Peele, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784992675
Google: w9DfyAEACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T13:16:06+00:00

The Ministerial Code after 2010

Controversy did not abate after the 2010 general election, even though Sir Philip Mawer made a strong case in his second and last annual report that a great deal of work during his tenure had gone into formalising the arrangements for recording ministers’ interests, publishing and updating them twice yearly and developing procedures for investigation.19 Instead two new ministerial controversies – the first concerning Defence Secretary Liam Fox, and the second the Culture Media and Sport Minister, Jeremy Hunt – raised further issues of both principle and operation affecting the Independent Adviser’s role.

The first issue concerned whether a controversy gets referred to the Independent Adviser at all, since neither the Fox nor the Hunt cases was so referred. The prime minister chose instead to hold confidential inquiries by respectively the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Secretary. The Independent Adviser’s role in providing transparency, and in avoiding a clash of interests and loyalties with permanent secretaries, was therefore ignored. However, the cases also underlined another aspect of investigation. Had the Independent Adviser been deployed, it might well have taken too much time in a fast-moving political context. The Malik case had already demonstrated that procedures could be cumbersome.20 Malik had had to step down, which would have been particularly difficult in Fox’s case (and Fox did indeed resign).21 Admittedly, in both the Fox and the Hunt cases, the case for independent investigation was strengthened by the fact that both appeared to involve an element of concealment of interests by the minister. However, in neither case was the concealment a matter of financial interests. In the Fox case, it was an unexplained personal closeness to an individual who purported to be the minister’s special adviser when he in fact was not, and who therefore was brought inappropriately close to the work of the Ministry of Defence in ways that probably broke other aspects of the Ministerial Code. In the case of Jeremy Hunt, the issue was an inappropriate closeness to an external commercial interest: both in terms of personal contact, and strong stated pre-existing support (apparently on public-interest grounds) for a policy that was also in the interests of News Corp. The argument, in short, was that Hunt had pre-judged an issue on which he was called to judge impartially as minister.

The controversial aspect of the Hunt case was essentially whether expressing a view on policy, as Hunt had clearly done to the prime minister, necessarily created an unresolved conflict of interest – a question made more poignant by the circumstantial evidence as events proceeded that both Mr Hunt and his special adviser seemed to enjoy warm and close relationships with News Corp. The issue was not resolved by the fact that the minister did not, in the end, need to sit in quasi-judicial judgement (the controversies engulfing News Corp in the United Kingdom having led to its abandoning the bid). The question was whether the minister had a conflict of interest, not whether he eventually acted on it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.