Time Rice has said that to write a great pop lyric you need to “fall in love with cliché”. Shahid Malik MP, who is one of the smartest and most personable of the younger New Labour generation (full disclosure: I know his brother, who is a brilliant computer scientist and an IT entrepreneur), has had a go at repudiating accusations about his parlimentary expenses. He says his allowance claims were “a million percent within the rules”.
If that is a deliberate attempt to package in a soundbite the suggestion (1) that he is intensely distressed to have been traduced, with the hidden message (2) that he is insufficiently numerate to have been conscious that the figures might look a bit odd, then it is an impressive subordination of cliché to the political purpose of asserting his honesty. It comes across as demotic and with the right tone of shock at being singled out. As long as Mr Malik is not subsequently proved to have done anything seriously wrong, he will be one of the winners out of this political crisis.
It is a weird world. A political career can be built on or destroyed by a few words. And the words need not be obviously rhetorical. It is all the smarter if they are not.
Update: [& typo corrected above.] He’s “stepped down” as a minister while suggestions that he has broken the ministerial code are investigated. That too strikes me as a smart damage-limitation move. Some commentators seem to assume I am defending him. I am not. I don’t have any opinion on the allegations. I’m admiring his chutzpah and musing on how subtle the game of media democracy is.
Inshallah!
How can anyone say that every penny of the maximum allowance for three straight years was justified?
Malik does not appear to know right from wrong.
Hard to agree really.
Given that he is about the hundredth such crook to go on TV and say “but everything I did was within the rules”, it’s getting a bit tedious.
I saw him this morning on the Beeb, and my reaction was “Oh go away and boil your head”.
Nobody comes well out of this.
I see he has “stepped down”. Another one bites the dust.
A post that is very easy to disagree with.
Malik’s brother’s skills, abilities, Nobel Prize-winning quality support for Harlequins and his cake-baking achievements, are all irrelevant, and surely that is obvious.
‘A million per cent’ is a silly comment that makes Malik look thicker than a footballer.
And Tom Paine on his blog has blown the ‘within the rules’ defence out of the water.
This whole expenses story has demonstrated that NOBODY can be trusted with power, and that’s one of the reasons that government power needs to be severely limited.
The real dodgyness is that he rents his ‘family home’ in a converted farmhouse for less than 100 pounds a week, the same guy provides his constiuency office. A quick search on the internet shows that even a horrible mid terrace can’t be rented for that much in WF13
I wonder if Guy is as easily impressed by Malik’s voting record as he is by the use of facile phrases like “a million per cent within the rules”.
The interesting thing is that the political class turned on the banking community with ferocity the wake of the the financial crisis. The idea that the incentive structure and regulatory framework might have been flawed got short shrift from them. No no,no it was a morality play and all about greedy bankers. In the same way ‘excessive’ bonuses that were perfectly legal and paid out by entirely private firms were nevertheless condemned by many of our political elite as a moral outrage.
But eyewatering expenses by politicians are apparently an different matter because suddenly technically legal=morally acceptable.
So which is it? I don’t understand how the pols can have it both ways.
Incentives either matter or they don’t
Morality either transcends legality or it doesn’t
John K;
he’s only stepping down as a minister. shouldnt he be run out of the constituency too?
Jay, just an aside
how much did the bankers cost us though? and they still got away with it!
repugnant though it is, MPs have cost us FA in comparison
Kevyn Bodman,
The whole point of my post is that looking “thicker than a footballer” is a very sought after quality in a politician, and I doubt Malik is thick, therefore I guess he is faking it very effectively. (The hardcore of New Labour MPs are, by the way, obsessed with football, both as an adopted tribal marker, symbolically disavowing their middle-class backgrounds and offering a screen to hide cultural leanings behind, and as a metaphor for their style of possession-and-aggression politics.)
DB,
I know how MPs vote on the topics that interest me. But I’m not so naive about the political process as to think that the tally on They Work For You tells a coherent story about their beliefs, positions or skills.
To the extent that I’m aware of Malik’s political positions (which are not the same as his beliefs – he’s a professional politician, and I have no idea what his beliefs are), I don’t agree with any of them. That doesn’t stop me being impressed with his skill.
Hitler and Stalin were pretty fucking skillful too. There is nothing admirable about being a successful operator in the political market.
These people work tirelessly, and deliberately, and without a moment’s hesitation, to ruin the lives of ordinary people. Never forget that.
I think that the damage limitation exercises that these people are indulging in are making them look worse. I am not quite sure what exactly they can do given the situation that they now find themselves in but the public displays of squirming aren’t helping.
I think he is toast, on the face of it he has broken ministerial code by not disclosing his financial arrangement with his cheap as chips landlord, nothing much to do with expenses.
The only thing that I might possibly approve about Malik would be his skill at dancing the Tyburn jig.
Guy
Which part of corrupt and hypocrtite confuses you ?
He should have hired Max Clifford, you only made it worse.
Guy
Which part of corrupt , greedy and hypocrite confuses you ?.He should have hired Max Clifford.You only made it worse, without doing youself much good either.
I agree. It is one thing to say “My expense claims were completely correct, those bastard moles were stopping me doing my job as an MP and needed killing”, we might not agree, but at least it’s a logical position. But to say that one’s claims were perfectly right and fair, but that one is nonetheless paying the money back makes no sense. Did the moles die in vain?
“Did the moles die in vain?”
LOL!
No shit. It seems some of the commenters just react to trigger words and fill in the rest themselves.
Is this the same Shahid Malik speaking here?
Shahid Malik muslim labour MP(a terrorist in a suit)!
“How much did the bankers cost us”.
——————-
Actually, it was the Federal Reserve. The way they were pumping out money, and inflating real estate prices, any banker who didn’t write every loan he possibly could was either:
1) Crazy
2) A student of Austrian Economics
Hopefully, some of our unscathed bankers are the latter.