STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE SHE DID?

The case of Baroness Scotland and the Tongan housekeeper – one for Poirot, surely – is the absolute type of the pickles into which the government seems to find itself pitching almost on a daily basis. Whatever the eventual upshot, it looks like a lose-lose situation.

The bones of it are these: Lady Scotland is the Attorney General, the first woman ever to hold the office and only the second black woman (after Valerie Amos) to have a seat in the cabinet. She was a junior minister, though not in the Justice Department, when legislation was passed making employers liable for employing illegal immigrants. It emerged last week that she had hired a woman whose visa had long expired. A fine of £5,000 – half the maximum the law allows – has been imposed.

This is a sorry situation. Patricia Scotland is clearly a diligent and honourable minister and in every way an ornament to a government short on style and grace. But she is a law officer. Like Caesar’s wife, she must be above suspicion. The test of her probity is harsher than one imposed on you or me. Her somewhat callow dismissal of the offence as equivalent to neglecting to pay the congestion charge does not stand much scrutiny: for that offence, the standard penalty charge is £120. On the other hand, this remark, much quoted in the press, does not actually appear in the Sky News video of its interview with her, the alleged source of the comparison.

Scotch mist (from BBC News website)

No doubt guided from Number 10, Scotland has rolled with the punch and palmed off the inevitable opposition and press cries for her head. This has been the method adopted in just about every case where a minister’s judgment, honesty or loyalty has been called into question and in the majority of such cases the minister has after all gone, just later rather than sooner. It’s the least good option. Saying you’ll stay, along with Gordon Brown saying you have his complete confidence, only pays dividends if two things happen: the shemozzle completely dies away and is forgotten and no bad smell, however faint and indefinable, attaches to you. The best course, but the least often taken, is to resign at once and work diligently from the backbenches to restore your reputation. Peter Hain might have pulled that off if he hadn’t taken so long to resign but some taint still attached to him and, since he rejoined the cabinet, he has been put in to bat for the government far less frequently than heretofore. Charles Clarke might have been back in government by now (not that he deserved to be in office in the first place, in my view) if he could have kept his bloody trap shut.

Now Patricia Scotland has been put in a (surely) untenable position by the resignation of a parliamentary private secretary in her department. Stephen Hesford told the BBC that “you shouldn’t be in a position where the office that you hold could be called into account for something that you’ve done or that you could possibly embarrass the government”. He may not put it very cogently but he’s certainly right. There can be little doubt that he is not alone in his view on the Labour benches.

If Scotland clings on now, she will take a long time to rebuild her authority. If she resigns now, she will look indecisive and weak. Moreover, Number 10’s guidance once again proves to have jumped the wrong way. For here is the nub of this particular embarrassment: one of the senior law officers in the land has discovered to her heavy cost that a piece of legislation brought in by this government is extremely difficult to observe, even by one so close to the matter of legality.

The status, rights and obligations of economic migrants and other seekers of “a better life” in the UK remain unclear and impossible to police. That is precisely because the government – like all its predecessors – has failed to address the matter root and branch. New Labour has now had twelve years to put this right so the phrase “like its predecessors” excuses nothing. Nor indeed, for all its pious talk on the matter, has New Labour done anything meaningful to assist career women who also have families, which is why Patricia Scotland found herself employing a housekeeper in the first place and why such responsibilities always seem to devolve to working women rather than working men.