The jailing of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce reflects our inability to punish political figures for their public failings
Liars, hypocrites, the louses of parliament, the mighty fallen. Strip-search them in jail. Humiliate their families. Stick a lens up their noses. We know where they live. Let them wallow in their heinous crime. The reaction to the Huhne-Pryce conviction has been sickening. It has nothing to do with speeding or lying about speeding, hardly rare offences. It manifests something quite different: a public craving for revenge on those in any sort of power. They can get off scot-free most of the time, but sometimes the mob sees its chance and pounces. Judges, wigs and gowns flapping; camera crews and reporters in full cry; police and penal pundits – all descend as a ravenous horde and tear the victims limb from limb. It is killing without blood.
No proportionate justice would commit Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce to jail. They did what thousands do, switched points and lied. No one died. No one was hurt. No one lost money. All they did was get caught through their own foolishness. They will not repeat their crime and pose no threat to society that requires incarceration. I am told that elsewhere in Europe such a case would be seen by a magistrate for half an hour, with a fine and a licence suspension.
Going over the speed limit is rightly an offence, but it is not reckless or dangerous driving. An estimated 10 million drivers, based on a survey conducted by Churchill insurers, say they would consider switching points to avoid a partner losing a licence. Reports from the AA and others suggest over half a million such "crimes" already. A law with so little public consent is a bad law and needs changing.
Sending people to prison for "seeking to pervert the course of justice" is equally bizarre. Everyone who bears false witness in court is trying to pervert justice, either by lying or by "suppressing a truth, suggesting a lie". Do we add that offence on to the original one if the defendant is found guilty?
Perverting the course of justice has become a middle-class offence, used to catch celebrities such as Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Huhne and Pryce, where an initial lie has got out of hand. They may have lost their fortunes, their careers, their reputations, often their families, but this is considered "insufficient punishment" to satiate judicial grandeur and the jail-addiction of British public opinion. Judges must send "people like us" pointlessly to prison to prove they do not send only the poor pointlessly to prison.
The glee that greeted the Huhne-Pryce sentences reflects an extraordinary retributive vengeance on the part of the public, or at least its spokesmen and women in the press. The trial was staged with all the publicity-craving, privacy-intruding, salacious detail that British justice can muster when it has a juicy case on its hands. Absolutely anything goes.
In this case it was not the crime that mattered, and only in part the salacious manner of its revelation. It was the possibility of draconian punishment. Once upon a time the mob would have flocked to the pillory or the gallows. Things not being what they were, it must make do with the tabloid front pages. Had Huhne and Pryce been merely fined, there would have been a howl of disappointment. The desire was to see the gilded couple pass beneath the grim jailhouse door and hear it clang shut behind them.
The coverage was drooling. Huhne would have "the jeering catcalls of fellow inmates ringing in his ears". Pryce would face "vulgar abuse and physical attack" if she put on airs. They would be strip-searched, drug-tested and literacy-tested. The heart-rending texts within the Huhne family, which should never have been revealed in court, were reprinted over and again. The details of family breakdown, the futile search for revenge, the money, the celebrity, the price both parties had already paid, all this was reprised. Mr Justice Sweeney, finding himself in charge of this miserable case, had to justify it with sonorous phrases such as "controlling, manipulative, devious", "stellar careers … fallen from a great height", and "this most serious and flagrant offence".
The truth is that we have so few ways of making power answer for its misdeeds that we grab hold of any stick that will do. There is virtually no accountability for incompetence in office beyond the ballot.
In Iceland the prime minister was hauled before the courts. In Britain there is no committee or tribunal to charge Huhne with his time at the energy department. He left power stations unbuilt and energy supply at risk, while pursuing an obsession with giving rich landowners millions of pounds of other people's money to erect senseless wind turbines. Let him answer for that.
As for Pryce, she may be sound on Greece and the eurozone, but as joint head of the government economic service from 2007-10 she should account for the direst years in postwar economic policy. If ever her profession were to stand trial for its role in the credit crunch, she is surely one person who should be in the dock.
Of course, no such things will happen. But since we cannot charge such people for things that affect us, we must charge them for things that do not. The ministerial lies that cascade daily over the dispatch box are left as lies. The human lives that are wrecked by unnecessary recessions and pointless wars are dismissed as just too bad. We can rant at our politicians in fury, but there is nothing we can do beyond silently vote them out after five years.
So we attack the powerful for their private failings, and pretend these reflect on their public duties. We hound their marriages and their finances. We jail them for cheating on expenses, since we cannot jail them for cheating on the country. If they swear at policemen we stake out their homes and shout abuse through their windows.
I am sure Mr Justice Sweeney is no different. He would love to get his orotund tongue round the tax dodgers, Libor riggers, planning fiddlers and energy swindlers. But he cannot, so he too must resort to damning a couple of bit players in the great game who fell foul of a speed trap.
We are back in the middle ages. We subject rulers to trial by combat and ordeal. We force them to "carry the hot iron" or "swallow the blessed morsel". We make them pass tests of purity and honesty we would never pass ourselves. When they fail, we crucify them. The reason is banal. It is that we cannot get at them any other way.
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