Avoiding sleaze in ancient Rome, a lesson for Labour?

Mr Starmer's high handed reaction to the many sleaze scandals point to a concerning disconnection of the realities of British working life in 2024. Even the Ancient Romans understood the optics here.

Not a day goes by without another Labour politician being exposed for some latest freebie - from luxury apartments in Manhattan and Covent Garden to Taylor Swift Tickets. From The Prime Minister to the young MP who has just won the seat I live in in rural Northumberland, there is a culture in the Labour Party that such freebies can be accepted.

There’s already been some indicators that the Labour Front Bench at least, are far removed from the realities of modern Britain outside of their Westminster/Trade Union/Activist/Human Rights Lawyer bubble. Given the lack of real world experience in this cadre of Ministers, you would think that they would be especially sensitive to public and professional opinion. But time and time again we see policies presented which seem to have had little or no analysis around public reaction. Pensioners’ Fuel Allowance aside, a good example of this is the Home Working Policy being presented by Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds. He boldly declared that Home Working increases productivity and when it was pointed out by opposition MPs that this may not be the case he brushed them aside as being ‘dinosaurs’. Quite what qualifies Mr Reynolds to make such bold statements when his CV is essentially: school, university, Council Worker, MP Assistant, MP is beyond me. He has no experience of running a business or working in any sort of commercial or large organisation in a managerial capacity so why is he Business Secretary?

Now as you know I am an HR professional and Home Working has been increasingly common since COVID. Now it may or may not increase productivity, I have seen cases where it massively increased it as well as ones where it has been an unmitigated disaster. There are unresolved questions: for example the impact it has on junior employees who need to be in the workplace to learn their trade and who often have domestic arrangements wholly unsuited to Home Working. The point is, that we just don’t know either way, it is complex and nuanced and needs a lot more study. Yet Mr Reynolds feels confident enough to declare that it is the only solution and that anyone opposing it is a dinosaur. 

The way in which the policy was formulated, the timing of it and the hubristic and unjustified manner concerns have been dismissed all point to a Government who will push through what it considers essential policies without any meaningful engagement or discussion with industry. 

Perhaps this is why, when criticised for the optics of accepting freebies and gifts, Starmer and his MPs have been so quickly to cite the rules. The problem is that even if something is within the rules doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do. Gordon Brown famously ran up personal debt when in Downing Street because he refused any donations or gifts to help with the costs of entertaining, despite this being in the rules, because he instinctively understood the optics. Our current Prime Minister shows no such political nous, and the manner with which he has brushed aside reasonable points around the optics here, shows a man who is utterly convinced that he is right and that you don’t have a right to question him.

Is it an indicator of how out of touch the Parliamentary Labour Party is to the realities of professional Britain in 2024 - you see the thing is that for the last 15 years at least, the culture of corporate hospitality and gifts has pretty much universally changed from one of laissez faire to one where you do not accept it. You especially do not accept it if you work within the public sector or supply to the public sector. My last corporate job was for a company that supplied extensive services to the NHS, we were not allowed to accept anything beyond a cup of coffee and had strict rules around everything else including industry dinners etc, even if something was ‘within the rules’ the general advice was to default on polite refusal rather than acceptance. 

To many of us in the world of the modern workplace it is Labour who seem to be out of touch here. It is like they haven’t got the memo, that this is no longer acceptable, that you don’t do it. Never mind the fact that if you are going to go after your opponents over questionable moral decisions, you must be more than squeaky clean yourself. No one, especially voters and especially long suffering hard working British voters who are looking in horror at how Granny is going to get through what looks like a harsh winter, likes a hypocrite. 

But another thing: one of this is new. The mos maiorum was an unwritten code from which the ancient Romans derived their societal codes. At the heart of this was the tradition that Rome's success had been down to the self discipline and modesty, bordering on austerity, of its founders and heroes.

I'm getting a bit weary of comparing 21st C Western democracies to the last years of the Roman Republic but the parallels are too flippin obvious to anyone who's even watched HBO's 'Rome' let alone actually studied it in any detail.

Late Republican Rome was notable because as it tore itself apart, powerful politicians appeared to have abandoned the ideals and principles of service to the Roman State for self aggrandisement and individual power. Pompey, Caesar, Lucullus, Crassus - all fabulously wealthy and jockeying for power. All of them liked to gaslight the Roman mob that they were adherents to the mos maiorum. Some were better at this than others, Caesar would famously eat the same barley gruel and bacon diet of his legionaries and make a point of sharing their hardships on campaign.

Back home in Rome there was a single politician who took the idea of mos maiorum to extremes. This was the philosopher and politician Cato the Younger.

Cato and his family lived 'ostentatious public antiquarianism' in following the principles of the mos maiorum. He was raised as a wealthy aristocrat but lacked the military genius of a Caesar, Lucullus or Pompey and the obscene wealth of Crassus.

He leveraged his greatest asset, his Great Grandfather's (Cato the Elder)reputation as a traditionalist. So Cato the Younger adopted an archaic form of dress, wearing a coarse homespun toga - spun by his loyal traditional and dutiful wife who was never seen without her drop spindle - she made all the family clothes just like an early Roman matron. He refused to protect his skin from the coarse wool by not wearing a tunic underneath it - branding this almost universal and practical clothing as effete and 'Greek'. He walked barefoot, he had his hair cut based on the statues of Roman dignitaries who lived hundreds of years before him and he refused to ride long distances by horse or carriage, he instead walked.

Cato was remarkably successful in countering, albeit never matching the power of his rivals through this tactic. He appealed to citizens who were thoroughly fed up of the greed for riches and power of those rivals.

And yes, although he came to a sticky end, involved in the assassination of Caesar and joining the subsequent losing side in the civil war that followed, his choices as a champion of the Senate and the principles of Rome over even his own personal comfort, left him with no choice but to resist the dictatorship of Caesar.

As I mentioned in the OP - Gordon Brown famously ran up personal debt funding hospitality at Number 10 out of his own pocket. For Brown, whose politics, for the record, I am broadly unsympathetic, is a man of principle and principles are to be admired even in one's opponents.

Cato was always able to fall back on his own squeaky clean image of a man who dedicated the minutiae of his life to the service of an ideal, as he sat in the Senate scratching his raw wool rashes in the Roman summer. This made him a fearsome opponent around whom the conservatives in the Senate coalesced and whom the power players courted, understanding the value and power of a Cato endorsement.

Perhaps our current political leaders should have read a bit more ancient history before embarking on their careers - they might have been able to avoid such inept own goals!

Either way, it is not looking like this scandal is going to go away anytime soon.