Resistance to reform? Changing the House of Commons
There is a belief that our elected chamber is inherently against change, but I'm not so sure evidence and experience bears that out
I start with two necessary observations. The first is that I was a clerk in the House of Commons for 11 years, working on select committees, advising MPs on legislation and procedure, assisting outward delegations to international bodies and, for a time, running the private office of the three deputy speakers. So I had, to use that gruesome phrase, “skin in the game”, but at the same time that means my views are shaped by a certain perspective and culture.
The second observation, which would not come as a surprise to those who know me, is that I am in broad terms a traditionalist. That is an imperfect and incomplete description, as I sometimes surprise people with opinions that are almost radical, but in general I appreciate heritage and history, I don’t view change as inherently virtuous, and I like pomp and ceremony, which is especially relevant in the context of Parliament. Indeed, for some years, one of my jobs was as an associate serjeant at arms, which involved wearing not only 18th century court dress (tailcoat, waistcoat, knee breeches and stocking) but also carrying a sword. And I loved it.
In any event, I wanted to examine the proposition which I often heard when I worked in the Commons and which is still very much current, that Parliament is a place addicted to tradition and inherently, stubbornly resistant to change. I don’t think it’s true, or at least, not sufficiently completely true to be a useful statement.
It is undeniable that tradition and heritage are prominent in Parliament. The Palace of Westminster itself is, after all, an old building; though not as old as it might appear, having been largely rebuilt between 1840 and 1876 after the catastrophic fire of 1834. But it was rebuilt by Sir Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin is a self-consciously retrospective style, the Gothic Revival which the Victorians loved so much (see also Tower Bridge, St Pancras Station or Manchester Town Hall). This was very much deliberate: other designs were submitted, including neo-classical and even more explicitly ecclesiastical styles.
Tradition survives inside the building, too, in all kinds of forms. In the Members’ Cloakroom, each MP is provided with a small pink loop of ribbon, allegedly on which they may hang their swords, as such weapons have long been prohibited in the chamber itself. (This, incidentally, gives the lie to one of the false traditions: tour guides will tell you that the red lines on the carpet of the House of Commons are “two sword-lengths’ apart”, to prevent MPs attacking each other: but the chamber was only restored in 1950, while the prohibition on swords is older than records stretch back, and there were no lines in the older iterations of the chamber.)
Procedure is also in some ways informed by tradition. Many observers are struck and puzzled by the practice of MPs referring to their colleagues while in the chamber in the third person, and by their constituency rather than name (“the honourable Member for Harwich and North Essex”, for example). This stems from the long-established fact that MPs address their speeches to the Speaker (or one of the deputies), and therefore do not speak directly to each other. Although this can be confusing to outsiders, and is sometimes forgotten by Members (the SNP are particularly guilty of addressing ministers as “you”), the argument goes that such remove takes some of the heat and emotion out of debate, and avoids finger-jabbing and personal attacks.
It is an argument to which I subscribe, as it happens. That is not to say that tempers cannot flare in the chamber; they do, and while the Speaker is responsible for ruling on “parliamentary language” and can demand that MPs withdraw particularly egregious or objectionable phrases, politicians do get upset, do lose their tempers and do say things which, in other circumstances, they might regret.
(A parenthetical note on unparliamentary language: unlike some legislatures, the House of Commons does not have a list of prohibited terms, and the judgement is purely a matter for the chair. Erskine May, the handbook of parliamentary procedure, intones gravely that “Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language. Parliamentary language is never more desirable than when a Member is canvassing the opinions and conduct of his opponents in debate.” But the problem is demonstrated by Speaker Weatherill in 1990, when the Labour MP Tony Banks referred to the Conservative Member for Hayes and Harlington as “living proof that a pig’s bladder on a stick can be elected to Parliament.” Weatherill can be heard to sigh wearily as the chamber erupted in outcry, and eventually ruled “I know it’s not unparliamentary, but it’s just not very nice.”)
The Blair government of 1997 rode a wave of change and reform. And Parliament was not exempted from this revolutionary impulse. A month after the election, the government created a Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons, its purpose being to “consider how the practices and procedures of the House should be modernised, and to make recommendations thereon.” It was closely tied to the executive, and was chaired by the Leader of the House, at first Ann Taylor. Whether or not one thinks the Commons needed to change, the committee had a distinct agenda: after all, “modernisation” is generally used to mean “change with which I agree”.
ModCom, as it quickly became known, was a powerful force. It did not operate by taking evidence but worked to absorb and distill the legion of ideas already current to change the House. While it couched its aims in high-minded terms—better scrutiny of legislation, greater accessibility and transparency, promoting diversity in membership of the House—it was, like any Westminster institution, aware of the political context. The new government had a lot of ambition, some of which, especially devolution and House of Lords reform, fell under the heading of “constitutional” and would therefore excite the especial interest of some Members.
The committee moved quickly and presented its first collection of changes in July 1997. There were a lot of measures which were not revolutionary, but overall there was a distinct tone to the reforms. The idea of “programming” government Bills—laying down a clear and exact timetable for their different stages of consideration—superseded the ad hoc use of allocation of time motions, otherwise known as “the guillotine”. It was sold as providing transparency and certainty, but there was awareness even then that this was potentially a weapon for more brutal time management by the government whips, allowing inconvenient debate and disruption to be shut down.
Some changes were uncomplicatedly beneficial. Better and fuller explanatory notes for Bills were called for, and have over the past 25 years done a great deal to demystify the necessarily complex and technical language in which legislation is written. These ENs have sometimes varied in quality (for a year I was responsible for having them printed and distributed), and sometimes they have been published hastily in a form which is not quite final. But they have made the policy thinking behind legislation much easier to understand and accessible to anyone who is interested, not simply to MPs and specialist observers who can decipher the language.
ModCom ploughed on with its reforming agenda. In 1998, it changed the House’s sitting hours to try to make more allowances for MPs’ personal lives, for example by bringing forward the business of the day on Thursdays and thereby allowing an earlier finish for MPs to go home (the House only sits on Fridays for private Members’ Bills). Late sittings became much rarer, continuing a pre-1997 trend: already the idea of testing Members’ endurance by sitting into the small hours if necessary was coming to be a long-service medal, prized by older Members but regarded by newer MPs with wonder and horror. (I will not name the Labour cabinet minister who responded to a complaint about the late hour of a division from a colleague with the dismissive “Fucking part-timer.”)
I joined the House in the autumn of 2005, after Labour’s third successive election victory, and it was quickly apparent from colleagues that much had changed since the pre-1997 “old days”. Admittedly, ModCom had used political momentum and a large government majority to drive through a wide range of changes which were not always as altruistic as they appeared. But for all that the Opposition might chafe at the rigours of programming, the idea of a “parallel chamber” to consider uncontentious business—which became the misleadingly named Westminster Hall, sitting in the Grand Committee Room—was eventually welcomed. The government had at first set its face against the consideration of business there, fearing the task of further management, but once it became a benign talking shop, Members' came to appreciate the new opportunities to raise issues and engage with ministers.
The point of all of this anecdotage is that, while ModCom was backed by a large majority in the House, the Commons was not especially resistant to change. In many cases, Members either perceived the benefits or came to do so. A large proportion of new MPs in the House after May 1997 meant that there was a smaller lobby of MPs attached to “the old ways”, and, if anything, the House was perhaps somewhat impatient for change, too willing to gloss over objections or problems.
In 2009, the House of Commons came to face one of the greatest challenges to its reputation, authority and ability to act as a trusted legislative body. I had recently moved to the Public Bill Office—which deals with the passage of legislation and amendments to Bills—and so had pretty much a ringside seat to what is now simply described as “the expenses scandal”. Here is not the place for a blow-by-blow account of that dreadful time. But I will say that, once the Daily Telegraph began leaking documents from the Fees Office in May 2009, a catastrophic tsunami overwhelmed the House, shattering completely its reputation and reinforcing the always-lurking suspicion among the public that politicians are generally corrupt and self-interested.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that characterisation of MPs is true. In general, I always found them basically well-intentioned, hoping to do some good for the public and not notably drawn to egregious graft. That said, a culture had developed of generosity in the expenses régime, often sold to MPs by their whips as compensation for modest increases in basic pay, and there was less scrutiny than there should have been. All in all the arrangements were lax, lazy and light-touch, with only a few MPs guilty of worse than that (five Members would eventually be jailed for their misdeeds, which only a few years before would have been unthinkable), but the public was right to be appalled.
The House as a corporate entity responded very badly. The initial reaction was defensiveness, and one heard many Members complaining that the media coverage was unfair, their claims were not as simple as the way they were being presented, and that everyone was being tarred with the brush of the worst offenders. All of that may have been true in part, and as a junior official I simply kept my counsel and nodded vaguely when I encountered such a rant. But the attitude utterly missed the point, which was a presentational one: MPs had been caught ripping off the public, and had a narrow window in which to make amends.
It did not help that the House of Commons administration was headed at this point by Michael Martin as speaker. Martin had replaced Betty Boothroyd in 2000 after a brief three years as one of her deputies, but his origins were as a right-wing Labour MP with a strong trades union background. When he was elected speaker in 2000, he had not been the front runner. It was the Conservatives’ “turn” (though that was not always decisive), and the government and opposition front benches favoured Sir George Young, the mild-mannered Old Etonian baronet who had been in John Major’s last cabinet. Sir George had much to recommend him. He had an instinctive feel for the mood of the House, as he would go on to demonstrate as Leader of the House and then Government Chief Whip under David Cameron. But Labour backbenchers distrusted his recent front-bench service and sensed a stitch-up. So it was that Martin prevailed, beating 11 other candidates of varying plausibility to reach the Speaker’s Chair.
I was not in the House when Martin was elected, but I don’t think that anyone thought that, by exchanging Boothroyd for Martin, the House was trading up. He was reflexively hostile to criticism and particularly sensitive to what he perceived as snobbery, owing to his relatively humble Glasgow origins. Quentin Letts, then sketchwriter for the Daily Telegraph, dubbed him “Gorbals Mick”, and it was not meant with affection: the name enraged the Speaker, who argued—accurately but missing the point—that he was from Anderston, across the Clyde, and represented Springburn.
His sensitivity was further demonstrated in 2001, when the Speaker forced his diary secretary, Charlotte Every, out of his office and to another post in the House. It was alleged that he had described her as a “typical Sloane Ranger” and found her too “posh”. I know Charlotte, and no-one would ever mistake her for a child of the inner cities, but she is fundamentally benign and very talented: it spoke very poorly of Speaker Martin that he was so offended by her presence.
The most significant limitation of Speaker Martin—insofar as I could see from my distant vantage point—was that he was not very intellectually agile and this, when combined with sense of inferiority, made his very difficult to advise. By the time the expenses scandal arose in 2009, he seemed to see his role as speaker as analogous to a shop steward for MPs, and felt he should stand up for their rights and defend their privileges. It was a disastrous perspective and would inevitably make the situation worse.
This became a terrible concatenation of events. The House was under extreme pressure from the media and, by extension, the public, and needed to respond with sensitivity and agility. The communications support available to the Speaker and the House Service was in those days modest—it is still not extensive and could usefully be grown considerably to allow the House to become proactive in shaping its media image—and lacked clear and wise direction. Speaker Martin, perhaps taking his cue from many of “his” Members, clearly didn’t “get it”, didn’t understand the enormity of the threat the House was facing or the depth of public scorn and contempt.
The pressure manifested itself in ways large and small. Over the course of that year, if you took a taxi to or from the Palace of Westminster, you could expect a dryly humorous “Is that on expenses?” or some similar joke from the driver. One of my PBO colleagues, his sense of humour bone-dry at the best of times, said casually that he used to be proud of working in the House, but now told people that he played the piano in a brothel. He was joking, but only just.
A final exacerbating factor was that Speaker Martin’s relationship with the Clerk of the House, Dr Malcolm Jack, was deteriorating at pace. Malcolm is an elegant and intellectual figure, philosophically minded and the author of several books on Enlightenment history. He had been a surprise choice as the speaker’s main adviser and chief executive of the House Service in 2006, and I had been universally told that the Clerk Assistant, Douglas Millar, would take over. Many thought Malcolm lacked ambition and was perhaps too refined and unworldly a figure: yet he had been chosen.
Malcolm did not seem an obviously good fit with the defensive Glaswegian speaker, but they had seemed to rub along without event. The House of Commons is a hothouse of gossip, and I don’t remember any tales of discord between the two in Malcolm’s first couple of years. By 2009, however, perhaps bowing under the pressure of the expenses scandal, something had gone wrong and the two were clearly not getting along.
This mattered because Malcolm, a cerebrally accomplished man with a sharp mind, was the principal source of advice for a speaker who was not really up to the storm he was weathering. Indeed, the storm was getting worse, and Speaker Martin’s own position and authority were beginning to be challenged. Many MPs now perceived the speaker as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
I remember finally understanding all of these moving parts while watching the live feed of the chamber which all offices in the Commons have access to. On 19 May, Douglas Carswell, the eccentric Conservative MP for Harwich who would later defect to UKIP, tabled a motion of no confidence in the speaker. It was signed by 22 other Members, but there was a strong feeling that this was the tip of the iceberg. Two days before, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had called for the speaker to go.
Carswell wanted a vote on his motion, and demanded it in the chamber. Speaker Martin at first maintained that the motion was an Early Day Motion (which are almost never voted in), whereas in fact it was set down in the remaining orders on the Order Paper. The technical difference doesn’t matter here: the point is Martin was confused, out of his depth and increasingly defensive. With enormous reluctance, as MPs from all sides barracked him, he consulted Malcolm as clerk. It was as clear as day to anyone who knew the milieu that the two could barely stand to speak to each other. Malcolm gave a correct but not particularly helpful explanation, which didn’t help the speaker at all. As an official, it was painful scene to watch.
All of this is relevant because Speaker Martin announced later that day that he would resign as of 21 June. It was like watching the prolonged death of a hunted whale—except that whales have a dignity which the speaker had never mustered—but the striking of the fatal blow was cathartic. There would be a new speaker, and the candidate would be chosen in full knowledge of the scale of the institutional and reputational challenge the House faced.
A detailed description of the election of the speaker in June 2009 is for another place. There were 10 candidates, again of varying plausibility, and again Sir George Young was regarded as a front-runner. He was now much more distant from his frontbench career and had burnished his parliamentary credentials by chairing the Standards and Privileges Committee since 2001. But there was considerable support too for Sir Alan Haselhurst, Chairman of Ways and Means and senior deputy speaker since 1997, a publicly stern and schoolmasterish figure but widely respected and obviously able.
The wild card was John Bercow. First elected to the House in 1997, he had originally been a right-wing gadfly, noisy and aggressive, but he had gradually tacked leftwards, leaving the shadow cabinet in 2004. In 2008, he had carried out a review of services for children with special needs at the behest of the (Labour) government, and there were persistent rumours that he might defect. He was formidably able in a lot of ways: he has a phenomenal memory for names, faces and dates, and he understood the procedures of the House with a depth and deftness unusual in MPs. He as generally warm and genial, polite to and appreciative of House staff. That was, to say the least, destined to change.
I have been very critical of Bercow since I left the House (for example in The Critic). I remain of the view that, while he was able and competent, he came to distrust and belittle his officials, he was an unrepentant serial bully (as demonstrated by the House’s Independent Expert Panel on conduct) and by the end of his tenure he was allowing his political views to inform his judgement as an impartial chair of the Commons. I dare say I am do not stand high in his affections either. But there we are.
For all of that, I will happily attest that he was elected in 2009 as a man who seemed to have a clear grasp of the reforms needed to save the House of Commons. He was a self-consciously radical and divisive figure: his election came with virtually no support from his own notional party, the Conservatives, and the sense was that the Labour Party, conscious they could soon be out of office, was gifting to a future Conservative government a speaker it was known to hate. (If anyone reading is sceptical and thinks that MPs cannot possibly be so petty, please believe me: that was a strong motivating factor. Some enmities are implacable.)
Bercow reassured Members on election that he was not the sort to participate in a witch-hunt: “The majority of this House are decent upright people who have come to this House because they want to improve the lot of their fellow citizens of this country,” he told them. But he had promised change. Of course the expenses régime would be overhauled and made more transparent—that was a given—but he also identified himself as the champion of the House as a whole, and of backbenchers against the executive. They would get more powers, and he would curb the government’s tendency to announce policy in the media before statements were made to the House.
Most of this did indeed come to pass. The chairmanships of select committees were decided by election by the whole House after 2010, rather than determined behind closed doors by the whips, more urgent questions were granted to allow both the opposition front bench and backbenchers on all sides to hold the government to immediate account and Speaker Bercow demonstrated his disdain for tradition by spurning the traditional court dress and gown in favour of a plain black gown over a lounge suit.
His Achilles heel was his monstrous egotism. Where he had to say one word he would say ten. Points of order—supposedly MPs raising procedural issues for elucidation or solution by the chair—became dragged-out affairs dominated by Bercow’s orotund and self-congratulatory tones. And many began to argue that urgent questions were being granted too easily, often not at all “urgent” but an opportunity for the speaker to get to his feet and show off his democratic credentials.
The reforming spirit was also partly misleading and disingenuous. One of the reasons that Bercow was able to achieve a great deal with considerable speed was that, during the dying days of Michael Martin’s speakership, a draft reform agenda of some 75 points had been prepared by the Clerk of Legislation, Robert Rogers (later Clerk Assistant and then Clerk of the House). This was a perfect example of Commons officials reacting swiftly and ably to a political storm and preparing possible solutions. And Bercow seized it with both hands: Rogers estimated that 40% of his plan was enacted.
This is piquantly ironic because Robert would become Clerk of the House in 2011, and over his three-year tenure would become Bercow’s whipping boy and traditionalist piñata, mischaracterised as an ultra-conservative and a roadblock to radical reform. Bercow would be found to have bullied Robert in an appalling and unacceptable way over the years.
There are several things I want to say at this point. I regard Robert as a friend, and when he was Clerk of Legislation he was my boss in the Public Bill Office. In that capacity, he was supportive, generous and helpful. Robert served in the House for 42 years, and is an extremely bright and intellectual man with a broad range of gifts. (I remain convinced that Clerk of Legislation is the most intellectually taxing post in the House Service.)
There is no doubt that Robert is sympathetic to outward tradition. Like many senior clerks I’ve known, he felt comfortable in his court dress and often wore it when it was not, perhaps, absolutely essential: but had I ever risen high enough to need it I would have done the same. The combination of his rather Edwardian beard and his very polished speaking voice make him seem slightly old-fashioned, but it is much fairer to say that he is very good at distinguishing harmful and picturesque tradition from practices which hold the House back. (Anyone who wants to learn more should watch his excellent TEDx talk, How Can The New Live With The Old? It is a masterclass in performance and content.)
It is, I think, time to reach a conclusion. What I am trying to say is that the House of Commons, hedged about by heritage as it is, is not inherently hostile to change. Traditions have been discarded at MPs’ behest over the past 20 years or so, and the professional servants of the House—the clerks sometimes regarded as a backward-looking priestly caste—have proved not only receptive to implementing change but at times very much its authors.
(I have not touched on the current speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. I was his private secretary for two years, and came to know him well. I rate him very highly: he is a good, honest man who takes his public duties very seriously, he is kind and generous to staff, he is conscious of the honour of being first Chairman of Ways and Means then Speaker of the House, and he has a very sensitive nose for the mood of the House—he can judge very carefully what the House as an organism wants and will do his best within the rules to facilitate that. I have every faith in him as speaker and was very pleased when he was elected in 2019.)
I sense that there is more change ahead. The damage done to public esteem by the expenses scandal will, I am sorry to say, never be repaired. That sounds melodramatic but I mean it quite seriously: I do not think that MPs will ever shake off the taint of dishonesty and graft which they collectively acquired. That grieves me, because I am firm in my belief that most MPs are straightforward and honest, and most want to do a good job. Of course they are marked by personal ambition, but that is part of the job description. If you did not believe that you had a vital and unique contribution to make to public life, you would never seek election to the House of Commons, with all the disruptions and rough-and-tumble that entails.
All of that being said, I do not claim that some institutional or procedural reforms of the House of Commons can on their own raise the reputation of Parliament into the sunlight of public approval. No one thing can do that. I am certain, however, that if we are ever to polish the image of our politics to any great extent, it will not be achieved without changes in Parliament. It is very definitely in the category of necessary but not sufficient.
Think, though, of the prize. We have a new prime minister and, barring unforeseen circumstances, she has around two years before the next general election. After the expenses scandal, after Brexit, after the constitutional bumps of the Johnson administration, there is a task to be done in restoring public confidence in our institutions and those who operate them. All I am saying, in this small but prolix way, is that it can be done, and is not doomed by the nature of the Commons.