Whither the principle of ministerial responsibility?

May 7, 2007

"I resign. I did my job badly. I take responsibility for my shortcomings."

I only have it in quotes out of a mad hope that one day someone might actually say such a thing. But they won't.

As of this writing (I include this qualifying phrase because my middle name is Pollyanna), I await the resignation of the following:

• Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor for his professed ignorance that prisoners handed over to Afghan forces by Canadians were being tortured.
• Gen. Rick Hillier for his rush to sign the handover agreement in the first place.
• U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez for politically wringing-out federal attorneys and then forgetting about it while under oath.
• World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz for twisting bank rules to pay the one woman on the planet willing to sleep with him.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for defying his nation's contempt (a banner in a huge demonstration reads "You failed, go home") over the Lebanon disaster.
• Former CIA director George Tenet, who won't even give back his Medal of Freedom for puffing up a war that he knew at the time was based on false intelligence.

The list goes on.

BF lie skewers BP chief

Lord Browne, the chairman of British Petroleum, didn’t quit last week because he was found out to be gay, he quit because he was caught perjuring himself in court during a financial quarrel with a buff young Canadian boyfriend. The judge seemed willing to recommend charges (both Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer were jailed over perjury) unless Browne paid the price of losing his job. So Browne resigned.

The Financial Times of London — a newspaper that even Noam Chomsky suggests is the best paper in the world because it reports unpopular stories that others won’t touch because money, not democracy, rides on such news. Soft angles don’t much interest financial journalists — wrote that Browne should have quit long before the sex scandal came to light. The financial press said he should have bowed out after the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 people, injured 180 and cost BP at least US$2 billion. He should have quit after pipeline corrosion in Alaska last year caused huge losses. These were the result of Browne’s cost-cutting on safety and maintenance.

But Browne only resigned when faced with personal harm. The harm he did to his company and other humans? Not germane to his corporate governance ethic.

Path of most resistance

Nora Ephron wrote in the Huffington Post last week that she could not remember anyone resigning over a point of principle since Attorney General Elliot Richardson quit 33 years ago rather than fire a prosecutor at Nixon's request.

I admire Ephron, but it saddens me to see how the myth of American exceptionalism infects even their cleverest citizens. In 1982, after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington quit over the failure of the Foreign Office to foresee the event. So there.

Still, I take her point. People stopped quitting. They hung in there. They stayed if they thought they could get away with it, weathered the storm, and embraced the passive tense, as in the eternal "mistakes were made."

And, amazingly, from the Bonfire of the Vanities 1980s through the late '80s era of mass layoffs (to raise stock prices and CEOs' salaries) to the current era of the hedge fund, neither politicians nor businessmen quit because they were incompetent or venal, or, dare I say it, sufficiently rich.

Nobody resigned over anything, ever.

Why should this be?

Part of the reason is narcissism. As voters grew more despairing and therefore less likely to vote, politicians felt less accountable. Why? Because they were less accountable.

It's godly at the top

An American politician (I can't remember who) said: Once you ride in your first motorcade, with regular traffic blocked, motorcycles speeding beside you, a whole city shut down for you, you're never the same.

Is it coincidence that as salaries for egomaniacal CEO became grotesque and they began flying in private jets, they lost even the opportunity for a peek at normal people — and for example how they fly, i.e., like cattle? I am Icarus, they think. I fly close to the sun. I am a god. I shall charge it to the company … which is me.

In the movie Little Miss Sunshine the little girl's father bankrupts his family to promote a self-help book/PowerPoint deal called Refuse to Lose. As in Oprah's favourite book The Secret, the path to success is wanting to win. Self-doubt, castigation and common sense are mere weakness.

All the men listed above might as well be reciting "I refuse to lose." George W. Bush, "the commander guy" as he now calls himself, literally vetoes disagreement. Bill O'Reilly uses derogatory names every 6.8 seconds during his Fox News editorials. Alberto Gonzalez presents himself as man so distracted by the rigours of National Meth Awareness Day that he didn't recall crucial meetings he personally attended.

Imagine disproving John Kenneth Galbraith's law that "anyone who says he won't resign four times, will." There's something psychotic about it.

Calcium deficient?

Winners never quit and quitters never win. It's the American homily that has done more damage to that country than Horatio Alger's ridiculous fantasies. Which would be fine if this dim notion of self-infatuation and vainglory hadn't rapidly travelled worldwide like a modern virus.

You knew I'd turn to Winston Churchill for an explanation of this phenomenon, if only to compare his 1931 performance — an assessment of the dodgy Ramsay MacDonald — to what we hear in our own Commons now.

"I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as 'The Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder … sitting on the Treasury Bench."

And that's what they are, a collection of boneless wonders. What an awful thing to be. What a sorry thing to see.