When failures conspire

This comment appears in The Times tomorrow.

LAST WEEK The Guardian raised the prospect — “if a suitably wholesome figure can be found to follow Martin Bell’s 1997 example” — of a celebrity antiwar candidate standing against Tony Blair in his Sedgefield constituency at the general election. The idea comes from a Westminster grouping called Impeach Blair, which, having got nowhere in its aim of indicting the Prime Minister for alleged misdemeanours over Iraq, now seeks electoral retribution. “It’s not such a crazy notion as it might appear,” added The Guardian’s political editor under the headline “Who could fill the white suit?”

No, not crazy: merely an affront to representative democracy that coarsens the political culture and misunderstands its supposed precedent.

Martin Bell’s campaign in Tatton had a limited aim: the sitting MP, Neil Hamilton, had misused public office for personal gain, yet was insulated from political cost by the size of his majority. Mr Bell’s campaign was a ramshackle affair inspired by local disquiet, not national machination; the only outsiders involved in its political direction comprised the candidate’s publisher, cameraman, daughter and nephew (me).

The impeachment campaign is, by contrast, a contrivance of failed politicians. Its parliamentary supporters include such household names as Elfyn Llwyd, Pete Wishart, Richard Taylor and Edward Garnier; Jenny Tonge, who was sacked from the Liberal Democrat front bench for crass remarks about Palestinian terrorism; and the unsinkable Boris Johnson.

Yet the campaign is also outrider for an Opposition that increasingly breaches the conventions of normal political partisanship. The Conservatives, finding their complaints of prime ministerial perfidy unsubstantiated in the Hutton and Butler inquiries, have carried on regardless by calling the PM a liar. The Liberal Democrats have attempted to circumvent politics altogether by calling for an inquiry into the reasons we went to war in Iraq — as if legitimate differences on how to interpret the international order after 9/11 could be resolved by judicial fiat.

Such personalised embitterment has no parallel in earlier campaigns against political malpractice, being itself an instance of the contempt for constitutional processes that it attributes to Tony Blair. However garbed, an independent candidate in Sedgefield will not be independent, and will deserve to lose.