Labour "Guinness Four" moment?

...or maybe that should be "New Labour Years: Clause Four to Guinness Four"...

I remember it quite well; as a blue button on the floor of the Stock Exchange in early 1986, though my stock-jobbing firm did not deal in brewery stocks the partners were taking a great interest in the Guinness-Distillers takeover as their future sugar daddy, merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, were in the thick of it as corporate financiers to Guinness. Then (and maybe now for all I care) the "Takeover Panel" was a committee of senior city figures who acted as a sort of a referee to enforce rules on firms and advisers involved in take-overs of listed firms.

One night it was announced by the Bank of England, via the Takeover Panel, that Morgan Grenfell would have to stop buying its client's shares to prop up the market price since they were approaching the point where more than a quarter of the bank's capital would be tied up in one client. Everyone was eager, therefore, to see what Roger Seelig's team of corporate finance experts at Morgan Grenfell was going to do about this little inconvenience. So when the bell went and the old fashioned ticker screen on the wall of the exchange flashed "Guiness-Distillers: Takeover Panel Announcement" I was despatched to the take over panel notice board to get the gist of the announcement for my bosses. I reported back, amidst some excitement rippling around the stock exchange floor, that Morgan Grenfell had announced that they had formed a concert party of buyers who would be indemnified against any losses they might incur through buying and holding Guinness shares during the period of the take-over. It so sticks in my mind that that may even be very nearly verbatim nearly twenty-two years later!

"Huzzah! What a jolly good wheeze. What a simply splendid and ingenious way of side-stepping those nasty capital adequacy rules!" was the general cry. And remember, this announcement, as every announcement must during a takeover, had had to have been seen and approved of by that committee of senior city folk, the Takeover Panel. So few, if any, had any inkling that this fantastic bit of corporate gamesmanship would lead to the trial and conviction of most of its main players, the breaking of more than a few high-flying city professionals' careers, and wholesale changes to the compliance regulations in force in the City of London.

Why does this come to mind now? Well the latest row over party financing sounds quite similar. Today the Independent on Sunday reports that the Labour donor, David Abrahams, discussed his method of giving, through intermediaries, with the soon to be fundraiser in chief Jon Mendelsohn, who thought, like those city red-braces twenty years before, that it sounded like a "good idea".

The big difference between the two is that the Guinness Four were breaking an uncodified rule, that it was not cricket to manipulate the market to the benefit of one set of shareholders over another in secret - and I for one think that they should not have been tried let alone convicted on an issue where, so far as I am aware, everyone on the floor of the Stock Exchange that morning was congratulating Roger Seelig's team at Morgan Grenfell for the ingenuity that had lately made them the most envied takeover advisers on the London scene. The Labour Party, however, appear to have been playing fast and loose with laws they themselves only wrote a few years before to stop this sort of thing happening.

We're not talking the quaint unwritten rules of the old boys' club at the Takeover Panel here. We're talking law of the land stuff. And we're not talking about a few thousand shareholders and a few billion pounds worth of the international drinks business, the stakes in political funding are one's very ability to challenge for the right to control nearly half of the nation's income, the £500bn or so public expenditure budget as well as the right to create laws for the rest of us to abide by. I hear far too many people involved in politics call it a "game". The prizes in this particular game are life and death to some, war or peace to others, quality of life to all citizens. It's far too important to leave to careerists and hangers-on.

So, whilst it might be tempting for some in the political establishment to say "there but for the grace of God go I" and to tut-tut in public about Labour knowing that everyone's doing it in private, it has to stop here. Someone somewhere has to be convicted of these breaches this time. And do time, or get a friendly doctor to diagnose them with a reversible previously incurable condition to get the sentence reduced. Mud sticks. And while the last pile of poo, cash for honours, produced some pretty watery slurry that could not be made to stick long enough for a prosecution, everyone pretty well assumes there was some truth to the allegations. These ones seem much clearer. The political establishment must not be allowed to wriggle out of this one this time, or protect its own. And it should change British politics in the process.

Nobody, especially at the level of government we're talking about here, is indispensable. A large part of my disillusion with the parliamentary system over the past decade has been fueled by the hubris that oozed from Tony Blair that he was quite simply the only person out of the other 60,000,000 of us who could possibly run the country. I have news for the four thousand or so politicians and their hangers on at Westminster - not one of you is indispensable. And if you do anything that brings the whole sacred notion of democracy into disrepute, you should certainly not be protected from the consequences, whatever your position.