Even distinguished former foreign secretaries such as Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind might be forgiven for having forgotten the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. It is a notable document, and not only because it determined that California would be part of the US, rather than a province of Mexico. Its signing triggered one of the lobbying industry’s earliest controversies — telling, perhaps, in the week two parliamentarians were caught in an undercover sting offering to help fictitious corporate interests in return for cash.
Nicholas Trist was America’s lead negotiator on the 19th century treaty, and he believed he had not been properly recompensed for his services — which do, in retrospect, seem to have been considerable. After a 20-year campaign, he hired a Boston lawyer, Linus Child, to lobby Congress on his behalf. Child’s efforts bore fruit. His son told Trist: “I find that my father has spoken to . . . members of the House. Every vote tells, and a simple request to a member may secure his vote, he not caring anything about it.” Congress eventually agreed to pay Trist $15,000, then a considerable sum.
Trist, a hard bargainer, refused to pay the contingency fee he had agreed. The case went to the Supreme Court, which dismissed Child’s claim. A contract to lobby government, it said, was contrary to public policy and hence, like an agreement to sell sex, unenforceable in the courts. Paid lobbying, said Mr Justice Swayne, was “pernicious in its character”. But this was only the beginning of his denunciation. “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests,” he thundered, right-minded men “would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption and the employment as infamous”.