A Week in Politics

But then, what do I know? I’m not the Housing Minister. And in a few short days, that’ll be something that Senator Terry Le Main and I have in common.

In the stakes of being over, finished and done, the Senator’s tenure in charge of the Housing department is right up there with disco, spacehoppers and the 1984 London Marathon.

Even without the added spice that he did all this lobbying and leaning on behalf of a millionaire property developer mate – and note that his denial of their friendship concedes that he’d known him for some years – the fact remains that he took time out of his schedule to do write all of those letters instead of, well, I dunno, maybe sorting out those flaws in the Housing Law? Isn’t that the sort of thing that you might think he’d be better off spending a bit of time doing?

The hideous, inescapable truth of this story is that a whole bunch of people who aren’t involved in Island politics, don’t know much about it and don’t really care – like some that I spoke to over the weekend – will have looked at Saturday’s front-page story and gone ‘Yep, figures’ and walked away with their preconceptions about the kind of people who sit in the States completely and totally fulfilled.

What Senator Le Main has done is almost certainly not an offence against the law, but is almost certainly an offence against the code of conduct for ministers and States Members.

On that basis alone, it’s hard to see how any States Member is going to vote against a motion of no confidence in Senator Le Main, especially when they’re going to have to justify that vote to the electorate in 18 months’ time.

Because procedural requirements require the Chief Minister to give a minister a chance to explain himself to his colleagues on the Council of Ministers, it’s more than likely that the vote to give Senator Le Main the boot – if he doesn’t just go himself – will come from a backbencher, not the council itself.

And that’s just one more way that this story sucks for Senator Terry Le Sueur.

It was him, after all, who put Senator Le Main up for the role of Housing Minister – whose ‘give me more time to finish this job’ speech worked fine until you remembered that he’d been basically doing it for eight years already – saying that he was his pick, his number one choice out of all States Members for the position.

Bear in mind that Senator Le Main offered up his maintenance budgets to previous spending cuts several years ago, leaving a backlog in social housing repairs that had to be bailed out by the economic stimulus package that was created to fight the recession. Bear in mind also that it was less than a year ago – nine years into his tenure at the Housing department – that the law was changed to require landlords to give tenants written notice to leave their accommodation and require formal residency agreements. Bear in mind that there still isn’t any protection for rental deposits. And finally, remember the damning Whitehead report that described the Housing department as ‘not fit for purpose’, adding that it was underfunded and should be broken up.

And it’s worth remembering also that Senator Le Main hardly rode into his position on a wave of popular acclaim – he beat Senator Alan Breckon by 27 votes to 25, the tightest margin yet in a ministerial election.

Senator Le Sueur’s response to all of this – circulated the morning that the story broke – was that his Housing Minister had ‘agreed to stand aside’ temporarily until an inquiry had been carried out. That goes a little way short of saying he’s suspended, but amounts to the same thing. You might be forgiven for thinking that a certain suspended police chief and certain formerly suspended hospital consultant might have a few words to say about the length of that suspension, but so it goes.

This inquiry has got one question to answer: did Senator Le Main write the letters that the Crown Advocate in the Venton prosecution said that he wrote? That’s the ball game. If he did, he’s got to make way – presumably for Senator Breckon, or his assistant minister, Deputy Sean Power.

And in fairness to him, Senator Le Main has acknowledged this, saying that if they inquiry decides that he was at fault, he’ll go happily.

Getting bogged down in the question of ‘was the developer a friend of the minister?’ is neither here nor there, and can be left over for another day and a Privileges and Procedures Committee code of conduct inquiry.