The culture of entrapment

 

I am rather late to the party on this one, but I have been thinking about the "Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw scandal" quite a lot since I watched the Channel 4 Dispatches programme last week, and there was a good article on it by John Naughton in the Observer this week.

I guess I should confess that I was pretty gripped by the programme, and no doubt like most of the watchers took a terrible (and not wholly worthy) pleasure in seeing the fat cats caught out. It was gripping viewing, watching how these guys were going to step in the shit next.

But there was also something a bit dirty and polluting about it.

I know that you might say that this was a great example of the third estate holding those in power to account. If these guys can't behave properly or be policed by Westminster itself, then may be we should let some clever investigative journalists do the job instead.

But I still can't help feeling that I want the electorate to oust elected politicians not a joint sting operation by a tv company and a newspaper.

And then there is the nature of the sting operation itself.

The point surely is that this was not an operation to hire an MP or ex-MP to be a consultant for a Chinese company. It was presumably an exercise in entrapment with the aim of getting these guys to say roughly what they did. It was a bit like a phone call scam -- when their aim in NOT to mend your computer which has a puzzling but as yet undiagnosed fault, but to get you to part with your bank card details.

So the point is for me, what happened in the bits of the encounters that we did not see? I haven't been able to find any information on that. For example, both guys seemed very anxious to boast about the influence they had (whether in the EU or among ambassadors or whatever). Maybe they are just natural braggers. But I couldn't help wondering if they had been set up for that in the sections of the encounter not broadcast. Were they, for example, set up to be competitive? Was the influence of other people, who had supposedly already been talked to, trailed for them to outbid ("we have spoken to someone who could help us with the heads of all the trade missions..".."oh well I could get you in with every ambassador.."). It doesn't excuse it, far from it, but it does rather differently contextualise it.

I guess that I have always taught students that fragmentary sources and excerptions make dangerously difficult evidence. It would be nice to see the out-takes.