Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Should Donald Trump be arrested? An awful lot of people seem to hear that question as: “Do you like Donald Trump?” For his supporters, the very suggestion is proof that he is again being persecuted by Leftist state agencies.
For his opponents, Trump’s guilt is manifest, and the precise offence for which he goes down – paying off porn stars, removing documents from the White House, inciting a coup attempt, whatever – is a technicality.
My own view is that Trump is unfit for office. More than seven years ago, I described him on this site as “a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, thin-skinned, bullying, mendacious, meretricious, mountainous berk”.
But even if were a man of exemplary wisdom and integrity, his insistence in advance of both the 2016 and 2020 elections that that the only way he could lose would be through fraud should rule him out of serious consideration.
I am also – and I realise this puts me in a small sliver of the Venn diagram – of the view that there are no grounds on which to prosecute him.
The authorities may know more than they have let on. But, on the basis of what we have seen so far, the various cases (porn star, documents and 6 January) look weak.
We should be on our guard against lawfare, malicious prosecutions, and political arrests. American politicians are generally not imprisoned or exiled when they lose office. This is one of the things that distinguishes the United States from, say, Belarus.
The default setting for most human beings – indeed, the oldest ethic in a species that evolved in hunter-gatherer kin-groups – is “my tribe good, your tribe bad”. Replacing that ethic with the notion that laws must apply generally and equally requires a great deal of work.
Many Trump supporters now amplifying his claim that he is the victim of a “corrupt deep state” were happy to chant “lock her up!” at his rallies. No doubt they will have convinced themselves that the two cases are completely different; people demanding asymmetric justice always do.
Don’t imagine that Britain is immune from this tendency. We, too, are generally more interested in outcome than in process.
To pluck an example more or less at random, look at how people lined up over Gary Lineker. Nine times out of ten, free speech champions found ways to claim that this was different because the BBC was a public institution and something-or-other. Conversely, those who are normally the first to tell us that free speech has limits were posing as so many Lilburnes and Miltons.
To move people beyond their first instinct – “it’s different when my side does it” – requires, above all, education. People need to be taught a number of things that do not come naturally, such as how to listen sympathetically to opponents and how to revise our opinion in the light of new circumstances.
They need to be taught, for no previous society thought it, that all human beings are alike in dignity, responsible for their own actions, and equal before the law, and that no one gets a special pass because they belong to a particular caste or sect.
Yet in an age of identity politics, this is happening less and less. We sacralise certain groups, and damn others and, in doing so, we encourage tribalism at every level.
Britain, like the United States, was a country where it was recently unthinkable that a politician could be disqualified from office by other politicians. But listen to those clamouring for Boris Johnson to be excluded from Parliament.
Do they seem interested in the details of whether he lied to MPs? Of course not: they start from the proposition that he is a crook and infer his guilt from that proposition.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Johnson should come back as prime minister. I didn’t want him to resign, but he did. As I occasionally have to tell my six-year-old when we play chess, you can’t take moves back when you change your mind.
But the idea that he deliberately misled Parliament is nonsense. He claimed at the Despatch Box that he had been advised that the rules had been followed; and, as the committee has now heard from several sources, he was indeed so advised.
Let me put it at its most basic. Not disqualifying opponents on pseudo-legal grounds is a basic test of a free society.
This is perhaps clearer when we look at countries where we are not invested in one team or the other. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s Opposition, has been barred from Parliament for calling someone on the other side a thief. Imran Khan, the leader of Pakistan’s Opposition, faces the same manoeuvre: a ban following politically motivated charges.
Supporters of the two governments would no doubt claim that these were decisions for the courts, and that all the constitutional proprieties have been observed. This may be technically true. Most authoritarian regimes, from Bonaparte’s onwards, have maintained some outward constitutional forms.
But most of us can see that both India and Pakistan would be freer and fuller democracies if these actions had not gone ahead. Precisely the same is true of the United States and Britain.