Steve Richards: The perverse orthodoxy that says our politicians are always up to no good

It is as if the political storm never erupted. My shelves creak with apocalyptic cuttings about the cash-for-honours investigation. The reports predict with a confident relish that there would be dramatic charges. Also still fresh in my mind are images of the BBC's coverage on the day Tony Blair was first questioned by police; the sweaty excitement of some presenters and correspondents, the casual declarations that this was a day of doom for Blair. The assessment and tone were more misleading than any phone-in fix exposed last week.

And now there is a near-silence. No charges were made and that, apparently, is the end of the matter.

Near-silence is an inappropriate response to an inquiry that hovered over the final months of Blair's premiership. I do not believe for one moment that the investigation hastened Blair's departure. His party had decided that he had to go for plenty of other reasons. But do not forget those cuttings and the excitement at the BBC. The investigation dominated the news agenda for months, at times threatening to paralyse the elected government and to make British politics as a whole seem more corrupt than it really is.

In order to justify such predictable consequences, a police inquiry should begin on fairly solid ground. Instead, the verdict from the Crown Prosecution Service suggests that the police were on shaky terrain from the beginning.

So far, little attention has been paid to the details of the judgement from the Crown Prosecution Service. Much of the verdict relates to the relevant legislation, the evasively framed laws that the police clung to as they went about their inquiry. Here is the pivotal section from the CPS: "If one person makes an offer in the hope or expectation of being granted an honour, or in the belief that it might put him/her in a more favourable position when nominations are being considered, that does not of itself constitute an offence."

The CPS is equally clear about the other side of the equation: " Conversely, if one person grants an honour to another in recognition (in effect, as a reward for) the fact that that other has made a gift, that does not in itself constitute an offence."

In other words, it is not automatically a crime for a leader to reward a donor or for a donor to give money in the hope of an honour. Perhaps it should be. That is another issue. Metropolitan Police Assistant Commander John Yates was dealing with the law as it currently stands.

In order for charges to be pressed, the police had to provide direct evidence of an agreement that a gift was made directly in exchange for an honour and that no other factors played a part in the reward. The verdict of the CPS is unequivocal: "There is no direct evidence of any such agreement between any two people who were the subjects of this investigation. " So all the reports about killer documents were wrong.

This was obvious when the police interviewed Blair without placing him under caution last December. Ultimately, Blair was the leader who had the powers of patronage. If Yates had definitive evidence about Lord Levy or anyone else, the police would have had to question Blair under caution. They did not do so.

Did Assistant Commander Yates read the notoriously woolly legislation in detail before embarking on this investigation? Did he understand the high level of proof required in what were artfully constructed laws mischievously cited by an SNP MP who thought he would get a headline for a day or two?

The CPS made another point that deserves more attention: "There is furthermore substantial and reliable evidence that there were proper reasons for the inclusion of all those whose names appeared on the 2005 working peers list, or drafts of that list: that each was a credible candidate for a peerage, irrespective of any financial assistance that they had given or might give to the Labour party."

So there we have it. There was no definitive evidence from Yates and his team. In contrast, there was substantial evidence that the individuals were made peers for credible reasons. Again, there are many causes for concern. I support an elected House of Lords where such powers of patronage would disappear, but that is irrelevant in a context where Yates was seeking to prove criminality.

In relation to the taking of commercial loans, the CPS verdict again deserves more attention than it has attracted so far. It reports that Labour made the loans only after the party had taken legal advice and that again there was no definitive evidence of illegality.

Subsequently, Yates sought to prove there had been a cover-up. Again, parts of the media got to know about this twist in the investigation. But here is the CPS: "In relation to any events which might have been interpreted as acts tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice, we are satisfied that the weight of evidence does not support that suggestion."

You bet they must have been satisfied. Remember the media pressure to reach the opposite conclusion. The CPS must have feared an onslaught such as the one that erupted over Lord Hutton when he reached a verdict the media did not want. Still, the CPS could not ignore the evidence and therefore reached the conclusion it did. Anyone who read the relevant legislation and noted that Blair had not been interviewed under caution would have reached a similar judgement long ago.

So why did the investigation start in the first place and go on for so long? I suspect part of the answer comes from the response of Glen Smyth of the Police Federation, who could not contain his fuming anger on Channel 4News last Friday. Speaking in defence of Yates, Smyth argued that if allegations were made against Mugabe in Zimbabwe, we would expect the police to follow them up. He made Yates appear like a noble freedom fighter. Perhaps on one level, some of those close to the inquiry accept the perverse orthodoxy that politicians are up to no good from Zimbabwe to Westminster. Off they went, cheered on by parts of the media, on what they took to be a heroic trail that would lead nowhere.

From the beginning, this should have been a political story about the funding of parties. Unless voters would prefer a dictatorship, parties must be funded. So far, no leader has dared to ask taxpayers to pay up and therefore they are all caught in the nightmare of seeking funds elsewhere. Moral judgements should be made on how they deal with the dilemma, but this was never about criminality.

The media loses interest and the political victims are too scared to speak out in case it has the perverse consequence of deifying their tormentors. But the CPS verdict is so clear that it is now Yates who has questions to answer.

s.richards@independent.co.uk

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