In a relationship: it's complicated
I worked for the House of Commons for 11 years and have many criticisms of how it operates; but as a fallible, redeemable institution I love it with all my heart
There was a time when our greatest politicians would, with varying degrees of readiness, declare their love for the institution of Parliament. Winston Churchill, who never underplayed an emotion if he could help it, told a joint session of the US Congress in 1941 “I am a child of the House of Commons… I owe my advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose servant I am.” It was feeling he had dwelt on before. In 1917, walking round the Palace of Westminster with a fellow MP, he came to the Commons chamber and was moved.
Look at it. This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success and for lack of this Germany’s brilliant efficiency leads her to final destruction. This little room is the shrine of the world’s liberties.
He was not the only prime minister to feel so passionately about the democratically elected part of the legislature. When Stanley Baldwin, who had been premier three times, died in 1947, Anthony Eden, then deputy leader of the opposition, paid tribute to the late prime minister and spoke of his love of the House.
Stanley Baldwin was essentially a House of Commons man. He liked to listen to debate. I remember one habit h had which those who were in the House when he led it will recall. In those days Wednesdays were given over to Private Members' Motions and the second Motion would begin about the time of the dinner hour. To introduce that Motion or to second it was an ordeal for any young Member. I was never sure whether the fact that the then Prime Minister was almost invariably present was an encouragement or a further ordeal, but present he almost always contrived to be. Some, I know, thought he spent too much time in this House, but he considered it a main part of his duty to know the men he led and the men he faced across the Floor of the House.
This affection, respect, even reverence for the Commons is not simply limited to politicians of the Right. Tony Benn (older readers may still think of him as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, which moniker he abandoned in 1972) spent three years after he inherited his father’s peerage fighting in the courts for his right to remain the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East, resulting in the Peerage Act 1963. The legislation allowed him (and others) to disclaim his title and with it his automatic membership of the House of Lords, and that August, he was returned yet again as an MP. And he loved the chamber to which he came again.
In 1987, a plan was hatched to show within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster an episode of a BBC documentary The Secret Society, concerning a planned secret intelligence satellite system proposed by the Ministry of Defence. The prime minister and the attorney general sought an injunction to stop the screening, but the High Court dismissed the application on grounds of parliamentary privilege. The speaker, Bernard Weatherill, banned any such screening within the Palace pending a report by the Committee of Privileges, but many Members were outraged that he should have followed the government line. Benn rose to explain why it was so important that the rights of the House were upheld.
I should like to make a final comment as an old Member of the House. We all take children and visitors round the House. I do and have done for many years. We tell them that we keep Black Rod out. We tell them about the Outlawries Bill, we tell them that the House decides on its own business before it gives attention to the Gracious Speech. We tell them about the Army and Air Force (Annual) Act and the order to prevent a standing Army being maintained and we tell them about the five Members. Those are not meaningless rituals. They are reminders of monumental struggles to build democracy against tyranny.
Benn, although a radical, was a romantic too, and for him the Commons was part of a sanctified lineage which extended back through the suffragettes, the Chartists, the dissenters of the Commonwealth and the Parliamentarians of the Civil War. However imperfectly, the House of Commons was exactly what it purported to be, the representation of the common people, standing in counterpoise to executive power.
It is not a sentiment so much expressed today. From time to time, Members, often on their retirement or death, will be described as “great parliamentarians” or that klaxon-sounding formulation “a true House of Commons man”. I can tell you from experience, with a regretful heart, that it is often code, sometimes for “never given ministerial office”, “unpromotable” or, I fear, “a terrible bore”. Love for the institution, let alone the fabric, of the House of Commons often comes accompanied by conservatism in its most mulish form, suspicion of change of any kind, and a heavy dose of pomposity. We will all be able to think of examples.
It may be invidious to name individuals, but, what the hell, I must make special mention of Lord Cormack, who was a Member for 40 years, for Cannock, then South West Staffordshire and finally for South Staffordshire. I will make very clear that I don’t think there is an ounce of malice in Lord Cormack, and he was by all accounts a diligent constituency Member as well as a faithful servant of the House. But he could—still can—be windy and overblown, and his greatest excesses were on show when he offered himself for the position of speaker of the House in 2009. He began with heavily worn humility.
I am very privileged to be able to stand before my colleagues and to offer my services based on 39 years this very week in this House of Commons—an institution that I deeply and passionately love and which, for the remaining few years of my parliamentary life, as I too would wish to retire at a similar time to my hon. Friend [Sir Michael Lord], I wish to serve.
Moving on, to a generous and indulgent audience of his colleagues, he related the reverence in which the Commons was held by legislatures around the world, especially in those countries denied democracy by the crushing hand of Soviet domination. But Cormack lacks, I think it is fair to say, the light touch, and began to overreach himself. Recalling, as Benn had done in 1987, the actions of Speaker Lenthall when Charles I came to the House to arrest the five Members, he waxed historical.
I never forget the most immortal words that ever issued from the Chamber of the House of Commons, by Mr. Speaker Lenthall on that January day in 1642—
At this point the mischievous Paul Keetch (LD, Hereford) could not contain himself and shouted “You were there!” Cormack made the mistake of responding to the joke, thereby obliging the Hansard reporters to include it, and ploughed on undeterred.
Yes, I was there. Speaker Lenthall said, “I have neither eyes to see, nor mouth to speak but as this House shall direct me, whose servant I am.” An inconspicuous man, a man who rose to the occasion and who underlines in those famous words both the duty and the limitations of the Speaker, because so many things can only be done as this House directs.
I don’t doubt for a millisecond that Cormack’s love of the House, and his affection for the Lords where he now sits, is absolutely genuine. But by the end of his time in the Commons, he was a faintly ridiculous figure, a caricature of self-regard and consciousness of the importance of his surroundings and his position. Some came to refer to him as “Sir Patrick Parliament”. Nor did he help himself. I actually agree with him on many things, especially on the traditions and dignity of the House and of its Members, but by 2010 he had no ear for the pompous and overwrought, which I hope I retain at least a little. When he announced that he would retire from the Commons at the 2010 general election, he spoke of some of the things he regretted, telling a journalist
But also, there has been a move away from many of the traditions. I was bought up with a House of Commons where courtesy and formality were the hallmarks. I think they will be of less importance in the future… The long hours, which used to fly by, have become more of a burden. I have become more conscious of the fact that they are long hours and after the next election, if we have a hung Parliament or a very small majority, the demands will be even greater.
In many ways he was right. There are many things which have gone wrong with the chamber in recent years, and I am certainly on the more traditional side when it comes to how the House should appear and behave. But those who love the institution are now all too easily cast as latter-day Cormacks, fuddy-duddies who will brook no innovation and think our best days are behind us, and I am not, at least not fully, like that.
Let me offer some examples as proof of my good faith. In 2007, the Commons voted to allow the use of hand-held electronic devices in the chamber for carrying out work such as reading and writing emails. In 2011, the rules were broadened to allow iPads and other tablets and devices up to—a charmingly quaint comparator—the size of a sheet of A4 paper. They are to be used discreetly and should not interfere with the proceedings of the House. And I’m all for it. As devices became both smaller and more connected, it was more and more obstructive to prevent Members from carrying out any kind of “paper-based” work while in the chamber. The House ran the risk of its practices falling seriously behind available technology and the way the world outside worked, so this was a sensible measure. When I was one of the serjeant at arms, I regularly took my iPad into the chamber: I was in there for 90 minutes or two hours at a stretch, and the duties of the serjeant in his seat are, shall we say, light, so it was an opportunity to keep up with my “day job” (being a serjeant was an additional responsibility).
Traditionalists will claim that MPs should be listening to the business, whether questions, statements or debates, and using a hand-device is a rude distraction. I think we need to live in the real world. Quite apart from the impracticality of cutting Members off from their offices and staff while they are in the chamber, the truth is that even the best debates have longueurs during which MPs might attend discreetly to something else, and perhaps use multitasking skills to keep at least some attention on the general flow of debate. The key here is discretion. Members should always remain polite when in the chamber: to steal from Erskine May, good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary proceedings. And that applies across the board. MPs should not insult each other with genuine malice—a bit of knockabout name-calling is fine within reason—and they should in all ways treat their colleagues with respect.
I was also wholly supportive of the incredible work that House staff did to allow hybrid and remote sittings of the House and its committees during the pandemic. Some Members were pained by the idea of proceedings including those not physically in the hallowed chamber, or one of its committee rooms, and it certainly changed the dynamic among Members and between MPs and witnesses. But it was an example of the officials of the House seizing a problem with swift and sure judgement, reacting wisely and efficiently, and allowing as much of the business of the House to proceed as was possible given the nationwide lockdown restrictions. It was not a process utterly without challenges, hurdles and missteps, but on the whole it was done brilliantly, and all members of the House service involved deserve huge congratulations.
While traditionalists can sometimes give those who love the House a bad name, conversely it can be an easy badge of progressive attitudes to criticise and ridicule the way the House works and the supposed unsuitability of the buildings on the Parliamentary Estate for their modern purpose. I regret this but it is, because a cheap and easy blow, a popular one. John Bercow, the speaker who loved to trumpet his modernising credentials, was fond of a sideswipe or two. He had made his broad views clear upon his election as speaker in 2009, and the House needed a new broom after the expenses scandal and the hopeless latter days of Michael Martin’s speakership. He did many things which were good. But he became a monster, a ravening ego who saw the Commons as a platform for the projection of his own outsized personality. (If you want my full case against Speaker Bercow, it was published in The Critic in October 2021.)
Bercow was fond of saying when he came to office that the House of Commons had a shooting range but no crêche. It was a glib observation: rather than argue the perfectly logical case for setting up childcare facilities, which are now fully operational, he yoked it with the existence of the shooting gallery deliberately to ridicule the existing arrangements and congratulate himself for his practicality and impatience with traditions. (Someone, perhaps several people, of whom I may have been one, suggested co-locating a nursery with the existing shooting range: the point is, it was not a swap, one for the other, and the nursery did not take over a physical space previously occupied by the rifle and pistol shooters. There was no connection whatever.)
Another popular jibe at the whole nature of Parliament is that it is “like Hogwarts”. It would be churlish to point out that Hogwarts scenes were actually filmed in Oxford at the Divinity School, Duke Humfrey’s Library, the cloisters of New College and various parts of Christ Church, my own college, the great hall of which inspired the design for that of Hogwarts. It would be doubly churlish to point out that these are all largely mediaeval or early modern buildings while Westminster, with a few fire-surviving exceptions, is a glorious exposition of mid-Victorian homage to the Perpendicular style of English architecture. So churlish that I seem to have done it. Whoops.
The Hogwarts brigade are trying to make several points. The first is that the building is large, difficult to navigate and, in the words of Craig Williams (Con, Montgomeryshire) “a rat warren”. Well. There are certainly a lot of corridors (between two and three miles) and over 1,000 rooms, and remembering your way around is a challenge for any visitor to the estate. But it is a big building and there are 12,000 passholders, not to mention thousands of visitors each day, so I’m not sure that the palace is uniquely maze-like. Anyone who has been inside the Pentagon, or the Palace of Europe, or NATO Headquarters will not have found navigation an easy business.
But the Hogwarts tag has other deeper meanings, less charitable and more denigrating. “Like boarding school” is one accusation (usually made by those who didn’t go to boarding school, and no, I didn’t either), as is the resemblance to a gentlemen’s club. The implication is that it is hierarchical, unfriendly, hidebound and oppressive. It is a complete misunderstanding of the Commons, certainly at least as MPs are concerned. I have never seen staff on the Parliamentary Estate be knowingly rude to Members—why would you insult or offend those who run the place?—and most are extremely helpful. Certainly I was scrupulously polite to Members, because they’d earned the right of courtesy by being elected. I’ve also observed generally that MPs are friendly and helpful to each other: party differences aside, they know that they are in this together and have more in common than that which separates them.
Is the building perfect? Of course not. It was designed in the middle of the 19th century and houses a legislature in the early 21st century. Both houses have spilled out into several other buildings on the estate, which has made a huge difference, and the restoration and renewal which is still being debated within Parliament is desperately needed. (I really can’t emphasise this enough. I know the costs seem astronomical, and they are very high, but this can’t be botched or dodged. In my early years I was involved in an early project examining what needed updating and it is a massive and urgent job. Seriously.)
But the building is part of the point. Ours is a relatively traditional parliament—of course it is, it has an unbroken existence back to the 13th century—and the Palace of Westminster reinforces that. Good. It’s an iconic building, and if walking in to that as your place of work every morning doesn’t give you some sense of responsibility, seriousness but also good fortune, then something’s wrong. It’s an easy sensation to forget when it’s your quotidian existence, but I always tried to remind myself how mad and brilliant it was that this, the House of Commons, the Commons of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled, as the formula has it, was where I worked. I’ve seen a lot of legislatures around the world over the years, and nowhere, absolutely nowhere, quite touches Westminster.
I sometimes say I’m a critical friend of the Commons. But that’s not quite the right phrase. It’s more like a messy, long-standing, off-and-on, tempestuous romantic relationship. We each know the other’s faults, and we can be stinging in our criticisms when the blood is up. We know each other inside out, and have seen each other at our best and worst. In the end, it may be that we can’t be together for extended periods of time. But the relationship is founded on passionate, reckless, unending, unyielding love. The House can thrill me: the slow tread of the Speaker’s Procession, the quickfire banter of MPs zipping through the order paper on a busy day, the sparks which fly in a well-attended, well-informed debate. It can also send me into deep depression and despair, when MPs do something stupid, or remarks are flat-footed, or a division goes a way I don’t want. But that’s all part of the game. J’adore.