THERE’S one phenomenon I’ve yet to see in 30 years of journalism: an ex-politician who’s poor.

I’ve met plenty of former soldiers and police officers, academics and shopkeepers, teachers, scientists, writers, spies and actors who’ve drifted into hard times once their careers end.

But I’ve never met a former MP or MSP down on their luck. Even the ones who end up in jail somehow manage to keep the nice car, nice house, nice holidays, and find a nice gig on the board of some unscrupulous company once the prison uniform comes off. They’re like rubber balls – always rebounding.

Largely that’s because Holyrood and the House of Commons are like universities back in the good old days of the full grant. We pay politicians handsomely to go to parliament, where they learn all sorts of handy skills that prove very lucrative for life after office: how to navigate public contracts, deal with civil servants, avoid scrutiny, who to suck up to, which palms to grease and with what particular unction.

When their careers end – in ignominy and failure as most invariably do – politicians know they’re a strong commodity to peddle to the highest bidder. So even if they’ve seen the inside of a jail, there’s always some shyster who’ll realise an ex-politician is a valuable asset for the payroll.

Therein lies the formula for the lobbying industry and its relationship with former politicians: we pay politicians’ salaries so they can skill up and flog their newfound talents to the highest bidder once they’ve left office, and their new paymasters can then rip off the taxpayer and exploit our democracy. A nice little earner if you can get it for all concerned – ordinary folk excluded obviously.

You can tell that politics is a business in which politicians write the rules. We’re schmucks letting them get away with it. For proof of our collective schmuckhood, we once again, for the umpteenth time, find ourselves in the middle of a lobbying scandal: this time the Greensill affair.

It’s a vile swamp. Former Prime Minister David Cameron became an adviser for the finance firm Greensill after he left office. He was reportedly given share options worth tens of millions. Cameron contacted ministers, included chancellor Rishi Sunak, trying to get Greensill the largest possible allocation of government-backed loans under the Covid corporate financing facility. Cameron also took company boss Lex Greensill to private drinks with health secretary Matt Hancock. Lex Greensill previously had a role as ‘senior advisor’ to Cameron when he was PM – a role in which Greensill was reportedly allowed to pitch financial projects across Whitehall.

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The scandal has thrown up all sorts of unpleasant truths, including the fact that civil servants are allowed to work for private industry while in office. Bill Crothers, former head of Whitehall procurement, became an adviser to Greensill while still employed by the civil service. John Manzoni, chief executive of the civil service, was allowed to keep a £100k a year job as a non-executive director of the company SABMiller.

The stink isn’t confined to Westminster. Fergus Ewing, SNP rural economy secretary, had an unrecorded dinner with Lex Greensill, and steel billionaire Sanjeev Gupta. We’re told there were no officials with Ewing, no notes were taken. The government claims to have no emails, texts or phone records about happened. Deals struck between the SNP government, Gupta and Greensill exposed taxpayers to hundreds of millions of pounds of debt after Greensill collapsed. The ministerial code states that officials should be present for any discussions relating to government business, with facts recorded. Nicola Sturgeon claims that dinners which Fergus Ewing attended are “very different” from David Cameron’s antics and the SNP said that "attempts to make mischief around this issue are utterly baseless”.

Inevitably, there’s going to be a Greensill inquiry – there always is when one of these scandals erupts. But don’t expect anything to change. It never does. After all, if we’d learned anything from previous scandals, Greensill wouldn’t have happened. Nigel Boardman, appointed by Boris Johnson to run the inquiry, is on the board of a private bank with close ties to the Tory party and a number of former civil servants in its ranks.

We can, however, nip all this in the bud immediately, and end the scandal of political lobbying once and for all. The one simple way to stop this gross exploitation of the public is to ban anyone who’s ever held political office from lobbying on behalf of business interests for life. So if you’ve served one single day as an elected representative, you’re barred from lobbying your former colleagues on behalf of any corporate interest. No more Sir Nick Clegg working as Facebook’s lobbyist, for instance. We could go as far as banning politicians from all lobbying, but some has decent intent. It would be draconian to prevent lobbying for a charity, for instance – as long as that lobbying is done openly and without profit.

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There’s some other changes we also need to clean up public life. The definition of what lobbying is needs to be clarified in Scotland to ensure that all forms of communication are covered, and that politicians can’t wriggle out of scrutiny by playing semantics around what a ‘meeting’ actually means. At the moment that’s not clear, and lobbyists have been exploiting loopholes which require only ‘visual interactions’ to be registered. Phone calls and emails don’t have to be registered. Lobbying rules should also extend to civil servants – they’re not covered by the register.

So is change likely? The omens don’t look good. The SNP has a host of former big wigs working as lobbyists so I wouldn’t set any store in the party suddenly finding its moral conscience. The Tories basically invented the revolving door between lobbying and public life. When it comes to Labour, the MSP who led the charge in Holyrood against lobbying scandals, Neil Findlay, appeared to court companies to hire him as a lobbyist in advance of him standing down at this election.

However, change is down to us. If we don’t order the politicians – whose salaries we pay – to legislate for the public standards we expect, then we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves when the next Greensill scandal inevitably happens.

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