Boris Johnson’s hypocrisy in handing a peerage to Peter Cruddas is outrageous

The prime minister went ahead with a peerage for the Conservative donor, against the advice of the independent commission, exposing his double standard, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson was critical of the honours system in a Daily Telegraph column he wrote in 2006  (PA)

A batch of new life peerages was announced the day before Christmas Eve, which was also the day before the EU trade deal was done. It was a very good day to release anything Boris Johnson wanted to bury. 

One thing he particularly wanted to bury was a peerage for Peter Cruddas, a Conservative Party donor and former co-treasurer. What was surprising about this was that the House of Lords appointments commission, which is “responsible for the vetting for propriety” of nominations, had recommended against Cruddas’s elevation to parliament. 

The commission doesn’t give its reasons in public, but it may have had something to do with the finding of the appeal court five years ago that Cruddas had in effect said to journalists posing as potential donors that “if they donated large sums to the Conservative Party, they would have an opportunity to influence government policy and to gain unfair commercial advantage through confidential meetings with the prime minister”. The court said this was “unacceptable, inappropriate and wrong”. 

Anyway, the commission said it didn’t think Cruddas should be made a peer, just as it has recently opposed peerages for Tom Watson, the Labour former deputy leader, and Karie Murphy, former head of Jeremy Corbyn’s office. 

In the past, the commission’s decision has been final, but in this case the prime minister overruled it, saying he saw it as a “clear and rare exception”, and pointed out that the commission’s role is “advisory”. 

People have their views of the House of Lords, but what makes this case truly exceptional is Johnson’s double standard. In 2006, when the police investigated Tony Blair for the alleged sale of peerages, Johnson used his column in The Daily Telegraph to call for the arrest of the prime minister. “As far as I am concerned, the whole lot of them deserve to have their collars felt,” he wrote. Lord Levy, Blair’s fundraiser, had just been arrested, and Johnson thought it “perfectly illustrates the decay of the government and the putrefaction of the honours system”. 

Blair’s conduct was cynical and tawdry, but what Johnson has now done is worse. Labour raised a lot of money from donors who Blair then nominated for peerages. There was never any evidence that honours had been promised in return for money; nor were the police likely to find any. The decision to launch an investigation on the basis of a letter from a Scottish National Party MP was bizarre. In any case, Blair’s peerages had been blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission – “advice” that the prime minister of the day respected.

If Boris Johnson were writing for The Daily Telegraph today, he should be calling for the current prime minister and “the arch-toadies of the regime” to face the consequences.  

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator