Politics after Maria Miller: resigned to business as usual

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/09/politics-maria-miller-resigned-business-usual

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She wasn't the worst exploiter of expenses, and was cleared of some of the things she had been accused of. But Maria Miller pushed rules that were already rotten, and later resisted the probes tasked with putting things straight. More fatefully still, she offered an "apology" which conveyed no contrition. Married to a solicitor, the woman who was culture secretary until yesterday managed the crisis with the narrowest focus on what was possible within the law, with no thought about what could be presented to the public.

The Miller missteps might have been survivable had they concerned anything other than parliamentary expenses, the issue that stirred the whole country into a flaming rage five years ago, yet one which has faded more rapidly from the minds of many MPs than from the minds of those they represent. Although a cabinet minister, Mrs Miller had risen without trace, and had no experience of the full glare of the spotlight, when the press pack and at least some of its readers are up in arms. With a career to defend, her own air of insouciance was less remarkable than that of all those who left her in dangling discomfort for so long. MPs of all parties on the standards committee believed that it would wash to override the verdict of an independent commissioner, and reduce the repayment required from Mrs Miller by around 90%. The Labour party, which has had more than its share of expenses problems, was so slow to call on the culture secretary to step down that Ed Miliband, on Wednesday, was unable to hit home at prime minister's questions, on what should have been an easy day. And then there was David Cameron himself, who, as the row about the semi-apology deepened, suggested that enough was enough, and "people should leave it at that".

It was a striking misjudgment from a man who made such ruthless capital out of the original expenses crisis. In 2009, Mr Cameron sensed that the mood required him to make a very public sacrifice of knights of the shire, like Sir Peter Viggers (who – unsuccessfully – passed on the receipt for his duck island), without worrying too much about how seriously (or not) the technical rules had been breached. But even as Mr Cameron pledged himself to A New Politics at this mercurial time, the old power games continued under the surface. George Osborne's remortgage, which popped up as a comparator in the commissioner's report on Mrs Miller, was played down rather than hammed up, as indeed was the reported "flipping" of home designations of another core Cameron ally, Michael Gove.

Four years on, the education secretary recalls the rage and perhaps his own brush with disaster. He yesterday gave a shrewdly pitched interview, which effectively acknowledged that "raw" public feelings about expenses doomed the culture secretary. The contrast with the more bullish PM was stark, even though this leader, who has always had a knack for clinging on to his officers, had just lost a very public battle for one of them. Fresh from losing his minister, he went to the Commons defiant, and told the house that it was "a good and honest parliament, with good and hard-working people in it".

Mr Cameron's claim is probably true: few at Westminster are chiefly driven by venal motives. In a world where "Well, I'm not a politician…" wins an easy Question Time cheer, there is certain admirable chutzpah in having come out and said it. After four years as prime minister, he calculates he can no longer play the insurgent. That might seem reasonable if Mrs Miller's tale – about a committee of MPs looking after one of their own – had not just revealed how unreformed Westminster remains. By making it his role to defend parliament as it is, rather than to pretend he is going to change it, Mr Cameron is gambling that no new scandal about sleaze or string-pulling will dog any more of his ministers soon. Should he be proven wrong about that, he could begin to look less like the defender of the faith in parliament as a whole and more like the shop steward of a hated Westminster club.