With the partial exception of Chapter 3, where we surveyed the ethical landscape of British politics up until the 2010 general election, our primary focus throughout this book has been citizens’ subjective views of political ethics and politicians’ conduct. We have otherwise avoided engaging with debates about actual standards of conduct in British political life and institutional arrangements for ensuring high standards. We have also avoided engaging with the enormously important topic of how such standards and arrangements affect and are affected by subjective evaluations of political ethics, and what has been done and what might be done to improve the moral standing of politicians in the public’s eye. In this chapter we turn our attention to such matters.

Our starting point is the failure of recent official attempts to bolster wider public confidence in the integrity of national-level politics. As we saw in Chapter 3, the introduction of various codes of conduct and regulators since the mid-1990s has helped to institutionalise a preoccupation with ethics throughout public life. No generation of British politicians has ever been subject to such extensive and formalised ethics regulation. And yet, politicians are no more trusted than they were before. If anything, public confidence in the integrity of British political institutions and processes has declined.