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It was the parliamentary term in which the Northern Ireland peace process was finally completed, a time of extraordinary events that few could have imagined even five years earlier. The defining image must be that of the Rev Ian Paisley, the old warhorse of No Surrender Unionism, and Martin McGuinness, the former “Public Enemy No 1” in his role as Provisional IRA commander, laughing uproariously together in the company of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern. And yet there should be no surprise that, this being Northern Ireland, the conclusion of the peace process does not mean the end of the Troubles nor the threat from violent Irish republicanism to the security of the State. A page was turned in the history of Britain’s involvement with Ireland but the story was left far from over.
The backdrop was the usurpation of the Ulster Unionist Party, since the founding of the Northern Ireland state its “ruling party”, by its rivals the Democratic Unionists in the 2005 general election. As disaffection with the outworking of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the dysfunctional power-sharing Executive led by David Trimble, the First Minister, reached new heights among Unionists, a sea change in voting patterns swept away the ancien régime, rewarding the DUP with nine Westminster seats and reducing the UUP to just one, North Down, held by Sylvia Hermon.
Mr Paisley’s party promised an end to “pushover Unionism” and the experiment of sharing power with Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Yet even before the 2005 anointment of the DUP as the new voice of Northern Ireland’s majority community, there were sufficient straws in the wind for Mr Blair’s advisers to form the view that the real endgame in Ulster was to bring together the political extremes, abandoning the centre ground shared by the UUP and the SDLP, to create a new political status quo.
Indeed, Mr Blair’s delayed departure from No 10 had much to do with the Prime Minister’s determination to see his project reaching some definable goal, nearly a decade after the euphoria of the Good Friday Agreement. He courted Mr Paisley assiduously with a near-perfect reading of the psychology of Ulster’s “Dr No”. By now in his 80s and with a terrifying brush with mortality a recent memory, Mr Paisley was conscious that his political career was drawing to a close. He wanted, and was encouraged by Mr Blair in this with lengthy intimate chats about religion, to leave behind a legacy that subverted all the beliefs of his admirers and enemies.
At the same time Mr Blair’s wingman in Ulster, the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, was given the job of playing Bad Cop to the PM’s Good Cop. Mr Hain threatened the DUP with dire warnings that, if it failed to respond to the political progress that Sinn Féin was making, the British and Irish Governments would implement a Plan B – a far deeper green shade of Direct Rule for Northern Ireland bordering on joint sovereignty shared between London and Dublin.
Sinn Féin was suffering some game-changing setbacks. The manner in which Mr Blair had indulged Republican leaders for so long over the Provisional IRA’s failure to decommission its vast arsenal of weaponry no longer impressed Washington, which began to threaten Gerry Adams’s frequent trips to the United States with visa withdrawals. The Provisionals’ murder of Robert McCartney, a working-class Roman Catholic from a strongly Republican Belfast district, in addition to the £26.5 million cash raid from the Northern Bank – at the time the largest robbery in UK criminal history – set an ominous new tone. Sinn Féin was in a corner and only the winding up of its military wing would extricate the party.
With time running out for Mr Blair, the scene was set for a final attempt at resolution with one more round of negotiations at a venue away from the pressures and distractions of Belfast. In October 2006 the parties and British and Irish leaders convened at St Andrews. Even the choice of a Scottish location played to Mr Paisley’s Ulster-Scots roots. The DUP leader was said to be more enthusiastic than some of his party officers on signing a new international treaty between two sovereign governments that Mr Paisley would argue was an improvement on the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
The St Andrews Agreement contained more inducements for Mr Paisley than it did for Mr Adams and Sinn Féin, but the republicans also knew that they had fewer cards to play. Just as with Mr Blair, Sinn Féin’s investment in years of developing a political strategy to achieve Irish unity without resort to violence now depended on the man who had made a career out of wrecking every attempt to reach an accommodation with nationalism. Sinn Féin agreed not only to recognise but to support the forces of law and order in the guise of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, a reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary shorn of its name and emblems, in return for the DUP’s agreement to share power at Stormont. This was the moment when the sacred cow of the legitimacy of the Provisional IRA, a construct of the Irish liberation movement dating back to 1919, was finally dispatched. The following summer the Provos would quietly announce that they had formally ended their campaign to force Britain out of Ireland.
Symbolically this was a significant victory for Mr Paisley and the DUP, but it was still proving to be a hard sell to his grassroots, for so long weaned on the rhetoric of smashing Sinn Féin and republicanism. Mr Paisley demanded and got another Northern Ireland Assembly election, the tenth time that Northern Ireland had been called to the polls since 1998, to test his mandate for going into government with his former sworn enemies.
The March 2007 election rewarded the DUP with 36 seats in the 108-seat Assembly, reinforcing its primacy. The UUP managed only half that number and Sinn Féin also pulled away from the SDLP, taking 28 seats. On May 8, Mr Paisley was formally sworn in as First Minister. “If anyone had told me that I would be standing here today to take this office, I would have been totally unbelieving,” he said. Mr Blair and the Provisional IRA’s ruling Army Council, separated by just a few seats, watched from the Stormont gallery. Mr McGuinness took the oath as Deputy First Minister. Mr Blair left office with his peace project prize.
The “Chuckle Brothers” era was golden but brief, a honeymoon period in which the two former enemies laughed in public at one another’s jokes even though Mr Paisley still refused to shake Mr McGuinness’s hand. The former’s fortunes soon waned. Having been schmoozed by the Establishment he had for so long spurned, even his wife Eileen was now a member of the House of Lords, he was rejected by the very Church he founded. Free Presbyterian elders forced him to stand down as Moderator over his decision to share power with “unreformed terrorists”.
It was the tangled allegations of financial impropriety against his son Ian Jr that provided the excuse to get rid of him (the Stormont Ombudsman later cleared him). Mr Paisley tersely announced that he was retiring, to be replaced as DUP leader and First Minister by Peter Robinson. Mr McGuinness learnt of it from the radio news.
Mr Robinson promised a new era of “business-like” dealings with Sinn Féin: code for less grinning, which was going down badly with the grassroots. The DUP’s foot-dragging over the transfer of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont began to unnerve Sinn Féin, which withdrew its cooperation, effectively rendering the power-sharing Executive mute for many months. In local parlance, the Chuckle Brothers had become the Brothers Grim.
Northern Ireland slid in slow motion towards a new crisis. Sinn Féin privately briefed that its patience was not eternal and that if policing and justice were not devolved by Christmas 2009 they would bring down the institutions whose construction had taken so long to complete.
Then came the most unpredictable of crises for Northern Ireland’s leaders. Gerry Adams was accused of covering up for decades the alleged sexual abuse by his brother Liam of Liam’s daughter. Mr Robinson was revealed as a cuckold, his wife, Iris, MP for Strangford, having had an affair with a teenager. There was more. Iris had raised £50,000 from property developer friends to set her young lover up in business, pocketing a “commission” herself from the cash. Mr Robinson was accused in a BBC investigative documentary of having breached his office’s code of conduct by not having made the authorities aware, a charge that he strongly denied.
The personal and political crises intertwined as Sinn Féin increased the pressure. Gordon Brown, whose interest in Northern Ireland had been minimal until now, was forced to fly with Brian Cowen, his Irish counterpart, to Belfast to hold emergency proximity talks. These failed and after three days the Prime Minister abandoned Hillsborough Castle, leaving Shaun Woodward, his Northern Ireland Secretary, to oversee two weeks of marathon negotiations, during which Mr Robinson temporarily stood down as First Minister.
Eventually the deal was done and sealed by the British and Irish leaders, who returned to unveil a firm date for the transfer of policing and justice powers, a hugely symbolic act for Sinn Fein since it could henceforth argue that the English were no longer running the show.
The extraordinary survival of Mr Robinson and Mr Adams as leaders of their respective parties was much commented upon, with most agreeing that neither could or would have remained in any other part of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. Yet there was one surprise in the general election of 2010. Mr Robinson’s party saw off the challenge from a revived Ulster Unionist Party, now in alliance with the Conservatives, but also the Traditional Unionist Voice power-sharing rejectionists.
Establishing themselves beyond question as the voice of Unionism, talk began once more about a united Unionist party to challenge Sinn Fein’s onward march towards becoming Northern Ireland’s largest party. But Mr Robinson lost his East Belfast seat, which he had held for 31 years, to Naomi Long of the cross-community Alliance party, which designates itself neither Unionist nor nationalist. Across the city in West Belfast Mr Adams increased his share of the vote to 71 per cent.
As the parliamentary term drew to a close it seemed as if the self-denial about the threat of a fresh cycle of terrorism from a new generation of Irish Republican extremists was finally over. The Real IRA, a splinter of the Provisionals, bombed the Army’s Palace Barracks outside Belfast where MI5 has its headquarters.
One phase of the Troubles had drawn to a close, but another was threatening to commence.
Welsh coalition complications (#ulink_6c414635-2151-5cc4-8c06-5affab229815)
Greg Hurst
Editor of the Guide
Britain’s first postwar coalition government involving the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came within a whisker of being forged in Wales, three years before that agreed in Westminster. The two parties struck a deal to become junior partners in a coalition led by Plaid Cymru after the elections to the Welsh Assembly in 2007, only to see it unravel at the eleventh hour.
The collapse of Cardiff’s “rainbow” coalition propelled Plaid into the arms of Labour, the dominant party of Wales, which remained in office to lead a red-green Government that was anathema to many supporters of both.
The biggest beneficiary was Rhodri Morgan, returning as First Minister to secure his place as the man who, more than anyone else, shaped the direction and tone of Welsh devolution. Donnish, quirky, consensual in approach but statist by instinct, Mr Morgan’s achievement was to reach out well beyond Labour’s strongholds in industrial South Wales to foster a sense of national purpose, often while his party did not. To do so, he had to lead, cajole and endure a Welsh Labour Party whose tribal instincts were directly contrary to the principles of pluralism on which Welsh devolution was built.
Unlike Donald Dewar, who led the parallel devolved Executive in Scotland from its creation to earn the mantle of father of the nation, Mr Morgan lost out in Labour’s first election to lead the Welsh Assembly in 1999 after some heavy-handed intervention from Tony Blair in support of his chosen candidate, Alun Michael. Yet this opening battle was subsequently of enormous help to Mr Morgan because it illustrated his willingness to stand up to his party in London and do things his way. That became his approach as First Minister.
From the outset Labour’s Assembly group refused to countenance coalition, despite being short of a majority, leading to the fall of Mr Michael and clearing the way for Mr Morgan to replace him, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats from 2000-03 and subsequently, when Labour won 30 of the 60 Assembly seats in 2003, ruling alone.
Mr Morgan rejected new Labour’s reforms to public services and sought to tackle inequality by extending the State: free bus passes for pensioners, free prescriptions for all, free breakfasts for primary school pupils.
The Assembly itself underwent a profound change in 2006 as the Government of Wales Act gave it law-making powers, known as “assembly measures”, on areas of devolved policy, subject to the agreement of the Welsh Secretary and approval of both Houses of Parliament. It also separated the powers of the executive government from the Assembly.
Mr Morgan announced in 2005 that he would seek re-election to the Assembly in 2007 but, if successful, stand down some time in 2009, mid-way through the Assembly’s term. The Assembly elections in 2007 coincided with a fall in Labour’s popularity across Britain. Although the party in Wales tried to distance itself from Mr Blair, discouraging him from campaign visits, Labour lost four seats in the Assembly, leaving it well short of control.
In the ensuing vacuum, the opposition parties began an extraordinary attempt to oust Labour. Plaid, with a more professional campaign and fresh emblem of a yellow Welsh poppy in place of its traditional green, gained three seats to take its tally to 15. It also diluted its wish for Welsh independence to become a “long-term vision”, making it a more palatable partner, opting instead for community campaigns against closing hospitals and sub-post offices and spending pledges such as a free laptop for every child at school,
Plaid’s leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, opened talks with the Welsh Conservatives, who had also nurtured a more distinctly Welsh identity, urging national status for the Welsh language and a bank holiday on St David’s Day, and with the Liberal Democrats. The three had met regularly, and constuctively, to discuss oposition tactics; they now planned for government.
A week and a half later the three parties had hammered out a 20-page agreement, giving priority to education, renewable energy, a halt to hospital closures and a referendum on full law-making powers to the Assembly. Mr Wyn Jones was to become First Minister with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders, Nick Bourne and Mike German, both as Deputy First Minister. It would have created the first Conservative ministers since 1997 and the first three-party coalition in Britain since Lloyd George was Prime Minister.
Incredibly, it was the party that stood to gain most, the Welsh Lib Dems, with just six Assembly seats, that pulled the plug. Their negotiating team backed the deal, as did their Assembly group, but a vote of their Welsh national executive committee split, nine in favour and nine against, with no provision in the rules for a casting vote. Furious, Plaid opened talks with Labour to agree a One Wales Agreement that confirmed a rethink on hospital closures and put emphasis on affordable housing and better transport links between North and South Wales. Mr Wyn Jones had to settle for the post of Deputy First Minister, with Mr Morgan back in charge.
The latter honoured his pledge to stand down, bowing out in December 2009 after almost a decade as the figurehead of Welsh devolution, declaring that he would spend more time digging his allotment and attending to his hobby of wood-carving. The election to succeed him was spirited but predictable with Carwyn Jones, the favourite of three candidates, emerging as the victor with 52 per cent of the vote. A barrister in criminal and family law, and Assembly Member for Bridgend since its creation, he had a relatively low profile other than during the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001, when he was Minister for Rural Affairs. His most recent post was that of Counsel General and Leader of the House.
The One Wales Agreement left little scope for him to make his mark in policy, other than by his choice of ministers and progress implementing the coalition programme, particularly the unfinished business of a referendum on full law-making powers for the Assembly. Labour’s defeat in the general election of 2010 left Carwyn Jones one added responsibility, as the most senior Labour politician in power in Britain.
All change, the gravy train has hit the buffers (#ulink_6e092aa5-b9e7-5a41-a546-517e32652fe8)
Ben Macintyre
Times columnist
There was the Rump Parliament (1649) and the Long Parliament (1640), the Mad Parliament (1258) and, quite simply, the Bad Parliament (1377). But what to call the 54th Parliament, which seemed so very long, so mad and, in many ways, so very bad? This will be, for ever, the Duck House Parliament. Little did Sir Peter Viggers imagine, when he ordered an obscure and expensive item of furniture for his pond, that he would be creating a grim leitmotif for an era of scandal that inflicted such damage on the institution he had served for 36 years. In a cruel twist, the wretched ducks did not even like their new house, which Sir Peter tried to include in his parliamentary expenses. They refused to live in it.
The Parliament ushered into being by the 2005 election and put out of its misery in April 2010, was one of astonishing turbulence, buffeted by scandal, economic meltdown and political acrimony. All the major parties changed leader: the Liberal Democrats twice. The Speaker was forced out of office for the first time since 1695. At the end of the Parliament, a remarkable 149 MPs stood down, including 100 Labour members and 35 Tories.
Far more important than the changing faces was the transformed relationship between the electors and the elected. Faith in politicians plummeted. After the expenses scandal of 2009, John Bercow, the new Speaker of the House of Commons, declared: “Let me be brutally honest about the scale of what has occurred. I cannot think of a single year in the recent history of Parliament when more damage has been done to it than this year, with the possible exception of when Nazi bombs fell on the chamber in 1941.”
The bomb of the expenses scandal fell from a sky that was already overcast and stormy. The election of 2005 brought some notable newcomers to the House, including Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. When Tony Blair won his third consecutive victory in 2005, with a reduced overall majority of 66, the Afghan war was already four years old and the war in Iraq had been under way for two years. The Parliament started in a truculent mood, which got steadily worse. Mr Blair was accused of misleading Parliament over the war and of ruling in presidential style. Mounting war casualties, the bitter grinding rivalry between Blair and Brown and the Prime Minister’s growing unpopularity gave a sour, fin de siècle flavour of intrigue to the first two years of the Parliament, as it became ever clearer that Mr Blair would not fulfil a promise to serve a full third term.
David Cameron became leader of the Tories in October 2005 after a late surge of support. Sir Menzies Campbell took over leadership of the Liberal Democrats after Charles Kennedy resigned, citing a drink problem. Sir Menzies resigned after 19 months, paving the way for Mr Clegg to win the leadership by a waferthin margin. While the opposition parties forged new leaderships, the Blairites and Brownites traded blows and snide spin. The first attempted coup came in September 2006, when the Brownite parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Tom Watson, signed a letter to Mr Blair asking that he resign to end the uncertainty over his succession. He was told to withdraw the letter or resign his ministerial position. He quit, with another broadside at Mr Blair: “I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country…the only way the party and the Government can renew itself in office is urgently to renew its leadership.”
Mr Blair described Mr Watson’s actions as “disloyal, discourteous and wrong”. The plot thickened when it appeared that Mr Watson had visited Mr Brown’s home in Scotland the day before the memo was sent. Mr Watson claimed that he had merely been dropping off a gift for the Browns’ new baby son, Fraser.
The uncertainty, the rumours, the whiff of conspiracy and allegations of treachery set the tone for the rest of the Parliament: a poisonous legacy that Mr Blair would bequeath to Mr Brown, along with the premiership, in June 2007. Mr Brown’s uncertainty over whether to call an election four months later, and his final decision to wait, compounded the impression, in some quarters, of a vacillating prime minister, untested at the polls and unwilling to throw the dice, holding on to office and motivated by expediency.
In April 2009, it emerged that Damian McBride, Mr Brown’s special adviser and former head of communications at the Treasury, had discussed with the former Labour Party official Derek Draper the setting up of a website to post false and scurrilous rumours about the private lives of senior Tories and their spouses. Mr McBride resigned. Mr Brown was publicly apologetic and privately apoplectic. “Smeargate” left another stain.
This, then, was the unsettled backdrop for the great expenses explosion: creeping political disillusionment and war-weariness, a sense that after coming to power amid widespread euphoria Blair had done little to change parliamentary culture, a souring economy and the looming spectre of recession, and the peculiarly nasty aftertaste of Mr McBride’s Smeargate. A series of smaller scandals paved the way, most notably when it emerged that the Conservative MP Derek Conway had employed his son, a full-time student at the time.
Under the old rules, MPs could claim expenses, including the cost of accommodation, “wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred for the performance of a Member’s parliamentary duties”. A Freedom of Information Act request filed early in 2008, aimed at finding out exactly what MPs were claiming, was challenged by the House of Commons authorities as “unlawfully intrusive”. When, after much legal wrangling, the House agreed to release the details, it did so with obvious reluctance, insisting that “sensitive” information be removed. Even before the touch-paper was lit, the House of Commons adhered firmly to the belief that how MPs chose to spend our money was their business, not ours.
On May 8, 2009 The Daily Telegraph obtained a full, uncensored copy of MPs’ expenses claims dating back to 2004 and began publishing details: first those of the Labour Party, then the Tories, then the Liberal Democrats and finally the smaller parties. The scandal touched every corner of Westminster: ministers, Shadow Cabinet members, backbenchers, MPs and peers. It was, as The Times observed, “a full-blown political crisis”. The ensuing outrage was focused on the abuse of parliamentary expenses relating to second homes: numerous MPs were accused of “flipping”, the term for switching the designation of a second home between a constituency and London property, to ensure maximum expenses. Some MPs were renting out properties while simultaneously claiming for second homes. Home improvements in some cases went far beyond “making good dilapidations”, suggesting that the expenses system was simply being milked as a way to increase property values, and turn a profit.
MPs were able to claim up to £400 a month for food, and many claimed every penny, every month, even when Parliament was not sitting. Items worth less than £250 could be claimed for without producing a receipt. A suspiciously large number of claims came in just under that mark.
The fallout was cataclysmic, and almost instantaneous. The headlines were devastating, revealing not only greed, but small-mindedness. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was found to have claimed for various domestic items, including pornographic films viewed by her husband; the Tory MP Douglas Hogg claimed for the expense of cleaning the moat at his country house; Frank Cook, a Labour backbencher, tried to claim back £5 he had donated at a Battle of Britain memorial service.
And then there was the duck house. The “Stockholm” model, which Sir Peter Viggers bought in 2006 for £1,645, was 5ft high and positioned on a floating island. This was only part of the £30,000 Sir Peter claimed towards gardening at his home, including £500 for manure. He was never actually reimbursed for the duck home, as a Commons official wrote “not allowable” beside the claim. “I paid for it myself and in fact it was never liked by the ducks,” he said.
But it was the thought that counted.
Sir Peter made a statement: “I have made a ridiculous and grave error of judgment. I am ashamed and humiliated and I apologise.” He also announced that he would not be standing at the next election.
The shockwaves crashed through Westminster. It was the detail that inflicted the lasting damage, as much as the sums involved. The Daily Telegraph reported that Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, had been claiming the maximum allowable expenses for three properties, £4,874 on furniture, £899 on a new bed and £913 on a new TV, the second such television in under a year. She volunteered to pay the £13,332 capital gains tax she had avoided on the sale of her second home, and stood down in June.
All parties moved to try to limit the fallout: Mr Brown publicly apologised “on behalf of all politicians”. Mr Cameron described some of the claims as “unethical and wrong” and announced that Shadow Cabinet members would repay all questionable claims. A panel, under the former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, was established to begin the detailed accounting. Eventually each MP involved would be informed whether they would have to repay any expenses. Three Labour MPs and one Conservative peer would finally face criminal prosecution for “false accounting”.
Even more damaging than the accusations, in some cases, was the reaction of MPs to the charges. Some wriggled: Douglas Hogg insisted that the moat in question was more a “broad dyke”. Some dug themselves in deeper: “I have done nothing criminal, that is the most awful thing,” insisted the Tory MP Anthony Steen. “And do you know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral.” Some seemed bizarrely sorry for themselves: Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP, described the detailed media coverage of MPs’ expenses as a sort of torture.
Never has the cultural chasm between voters and their representatives seemed so vast. While most of Britain reeled from rising unemployment and fretted over mortgage payments, here was a world of moated second homes and ride-on lawnmowers, where the ducks were pampered in special houses, and people bragged of living in their own Balmoral. The gulf between the MPs’ sense of entitlement, and public outrage at the perceived pettiness and greed, could not have been wider. Publicly there was much handwringing, by those implicated and those in charge; privately, there was intense fury that the scandal had erupted, and then been left to swirl around unchecked. Many MPs felt hard done by, some with good reason, but there was no doubting the level of public anger over a system that was clearly seen, by far too many politicians, as an adjunct to their salaries, the trappings of an upper-middle-class lifestyle that they believed they deserved. Most seemed more angry than genuinely contrite.
At a time of deep financial uncertainty, the spectacle of MPs feathering their own nests, or duck houses, ignited a firestorm of public fury: two days after the scandal broke, the BBC programme Question Time attracted a viewership of nearly four million, the highest in its 30-year history.
The tale of sackings, de-selections, public apologies, repayment, retirement and, eventually, prosecutions, rumbling on for months, marked a low point in British political history. Some of the abuses were flagrant; some venial and some, frankly, irrelevant or unfair. Many decent, honourable and entirely honest MPs found themselves tarred by the overwhelming public perception that Westminster was rotten to the core. Some got their comeuppance; some watched, with horror, as the disillusionment that had marked the early stages of this Parliament turned to outright condemnation and calls for wholesale political reform.
The most high-profile casualty of all was the Speaker, Michael Martin. A Glasgow-born, hard-grained politician of the old-style Labour school, Mr Martin’s election in 2000 was controversial from the start. Some suspected him of bias.
Mr Martin’s own expenses had long been the subject of scrutiny: he used public money to employ a law firm to fight negative media stories, while his wife spent £4,000 on taxis. Refurbishing the Speaker’s official residence within the Palace of Westminster cost the taxpayer an estimated £1.7 million over seven years.
There was more than a hint of tribalism in Mr Martin’s resistance to the investigation of MPs expenses. His response to the exploding scandal appeared to be more concerned with the way the information had leaked out, than apologising, explaining or making amends.
To an increasing number, both inside and outside Parliament, Mr Martin was a symptom of the disease, a symbol of all that had gone wrong. Mr Clegg spoke for many when he declared that the Speaker had become an obstacle to reform. To his dwindling band of supporters, he was a scapegoat.
No Speaker had been forced out of office since Sir John Trevor was expelled for accepting bribes more than 300 years earlier. On May 19, 2009 the Conservative MP Douglas Carswell tabled a motion of no confidence, which was signed by 22 MPs. Later that day Mr Martin announced that he would resign from his position as Speaker of the House of Commons.
He took ermine in the Lords, becoming Lord Martin of Springburn. His throne in the House was occupied by John Bercow, elected on a promise to clean up Parliament. It subsequently emerged that the new Speaker had spent an additional £20,000 on refurbishing the grace-and-favour flat in the palace, again.
And so the Parliament – the “Rotten Parliament” as some were now calling it – wound down accompanied by a litany of recriminations, the familiar sound of plotting, and one last dollop of scandal.
In the autumn of 2008, Siobhain McDonagh, a junior government whip, who during her time in office had never voted against the Government, spoke of the need to discuss Mr Brown’s position as party leader. She was swiftly sacked.
Then, in the month that Mr Martin stepped down, James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, delivered another blow to Mr Brown’s authority by announcing his resignation. This was not a statement of ambition but, far more threateningly, of principle. “I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less, likely…that would be disastrous for our country. I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.”
As speculation about Mr Brown’s future swirled, his ministers backed him, with potential rivals such as Harriet Harman and David Miliband denying that they were preparing leadership bids. But with each plot, and each denial, his chances of clinging to power in the coming election seemed to recede. The final attempt to unseat him came in January 2010, when the former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and former Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon jointly called for a secret ballot on the future of Mr Brown’s leadership. The plot fizzled. Mr Brown later called the abortive mini-coup “a form of silliness”.
Perhaps the final symbolic motif for this grim Parliament came just before the election was announced, when Mr Hoon, Ms Hewitt and the former minister Stephen Byers were each caught out by undercover journalists posing as lobbyists. The former ministers appeared to be cashing in on their influence. Ms Hewitt explained that, for a fee of £3,000 a day, she could help “a client who needs a particular regulation removed, then we can often package that up”. Mr Hoon was heard saying that he was “looking forward to…something that, frankly, makes money”.
Above all, the crass remarks made by Mr Byers seemed to sum up the previous five years. “I am a bit like a sort of cab for hire,” he explained to the fake lobbyist. “I still get a lot of confidential information because I am still linked to No 10.” His trump card came close to self-parody: “We could have a word with Tony”. Mr Blair was long gone from No 10, but his potential earning power lingered on.
At the start of the 54th Parliament, public confidence in politicians was already crumbling; by the end it was radically eroded. The perception that MPs lined their own pockets at taxpayer expense was widespread in 2005; by 2010 it was universal conventional wisdom. Unfairly, but understandably, Parliament had come to be seen as one large rank of cabs for hire. The tumult, sleaze and political skulduggery left the public jaundiced and angry, and many MPs traumatised and exhausted. Contemplating her own retirement, Ann Widdecombe spoke for many when she remarked: “I find that my uppermost sentiment is one of profound relief.”
Like Oliver Cromwell, surveying the Rump Parliament, the public’s patience had run out: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately…Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” And they went: in addition to the 149 MPs who stood down before the 2010 election, 76 were voted out of office in May of that year. In some ways, both the level of interest in the election, and a result giving no party an overall majority, were also an accurate reflection of the rancour and uncertainty of the five years that preceded it.
The unhappy 54th Parliament was, perhaps, a necessary trauma. Wholesale political reform became inevitable. Closer scrutiny of parliamentary expenses began. The gravy train hit the buffers, making a fantastic mess that will take many years to clear up.
Britain has a new Parliament, a new form of government and a large new crop of MPs. They will make their own mistakes and commit their own sins, but only this can be predicted with absolute certainty: no MP in the 55th Parliament will ever buy a duck house. Ben Macintyre was parliamentary sketch writer for The Times from 2002-04
The work of the House of Commons (#ulink_9ddb0936-303a-51f9-aa34-f79d002d4c89)
The growing powers of the humble backbencher (#ulink_4ebd6b93-b6ce-59f7-a956-bafb291811b8)
Peter Riddell
Chief Political
Commentator
One of the great paradoxes of the House of Commons is that just as its public standing has hardly ever been lower, MPs have seldom been more hard-working or potentially more effective. Procedural changes over the past dozen years have given backbench MPs more chance to play a creative role at Westminster.
The “declinist” view of Parliament has, of course, been reinforced by the expenses scandal (as discussed in an accompanying article). There is nothing new in such complaints. There never was a golden age. Every generation has had protests that the executive is too strong and the legislature too weak but, as the Hansard Society’s Annual Audit of Political Engagement showed in March 2010, while the expenses row did not create a problem of trust, which has existed for many years, it did reinforce public scepticism. Less than two fifths of the public believe Parliament to be one of the two or three national institutions that have most influence on their everyday lives.
The counter view has been put most eloquently by Jack Straw, a former Leader of the Commons and closely involved in constitutional reform during his 13 years in the Cabinet. He argued, in a lecture to the Hansard Society in March 2010, that “the view that Parliament is irrelevant or powerless is complete nonsense”. He acknowledged that the institution was far from perfect, and the balance remained tilted in the Government’s favour, but changes in recent decades had strengthened the legislature. As Mr Straw pointed out, in the three decades from the mid-1940s until the mid-1970s, the executive was all powerful. Backbench MPs seldom rebelled: there were two whole sessions in the 1950s when not a single Conservative backbencher defied the whip and voted against the Government. There were few select committees. Those that did exist were mainly weak, apart from the Public Accounts Committee. Admittedly, many newspapers until the mid-to-late 1980s did carry full reports of what was said on the floor of the Commons, but radio broadcasting did not arrive on a regular and continuous basis until April 1978, and television cameras not until November 1989.
Select Committees
Since the 1970s, a number of far-reaching changes have been introduced, most significantly in 1979 with the creation of 12 broadly departmental select committees. Each big department is monitored by a select committee to examine its policymaking and performance. There have been variations in the number, titles and remit of committees to match changes in the machinery of government, but the principle has remained. This has created wideranging opportunities for MPs to question ministers, civil servants and interested bodies, and has unquestionably broadened the range of public debate. For instance, the opening up of decisions on setting interest rates, both in the mid-1990s and then with the creation of the Monetary Policy Committee in 1997, has meant that the Governor and senior directors of the Bank of England appear before the Treasury committee at least once a quarter.
There has been a similar opening up in other areas of policy. The banking crisis was examined frequently from autumn 2007 onwards by the Treasury Select Committee, when all the main players appeared at often uncomfortable hearings. The Defence Select Committee also pursued allegations that British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were inadequately supplied and supported. The public gathering of evidence and the questioning of ministers has often been more important than the recommendations in the final reports.
There were three waves of reform during the Labour years: when Robin Cook was Leader of the Commons from June 2001 until March 2003; when Jack Straw was Leader from 2006 until 2007; and, finally, in the aftermath of the expenses scandal, when a special committee was set up under the respected Labour MP and political scientist Tony Wright to examine ways of strengthening the influence of the Commons and of backbenchers.
Among the changes have been a strengthening in the role of select committees in 2002 by giving them ten core tasks, including examining annual departmental reports and expenditure plans, aided by the creation of a central Scrutiny Unit to provide expert support in addition to the clerks and advisers to particular committees. But each committee has its own distinctive style, priorities and approach, notably reflecting the personality of the chairman. Additional pay for select committee chairmen was introduced from October 2003, while from 2007 the committees were given the additional role of holding pre-appointment hearings for those chairing a variety of public bodies. This is not, however, a veto power, as was shown when Ed Balls brushed aside the objections of the Childrens, Schools and Families Select Committee to an appointment in his area. In 2009, eight new regional committees were set up, despite the protests from the main opposition parties.
The Prime Minister was, for a long time, above this process, but, since July 2002, he has given evidence for about two and a half hours twice a year to the Liaison Committee, which consists of the chairmen of the main select committees. This enables a wide range of topics to be raised, but at times it can be too wide since neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown, in their very different ways, was ever discomfited during an appearance.
Wright committee
After the expenses scandal there was widespread agreement that the Commons not only needed to sort out this specific issue but also to address wider questions about the role of MPs. This led to the formation of the cross-party Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons, generally known as the Wright committee. This was different from the Modernisation Committee, which had discussed most big changes since 1997 but had become dormant under Harriet Harman’s leadership of the Commons. Whereas the Modernisation Committee had always been chaired by the Leader of the Commons, the Reform committee was chaired by a leading backbencher. Its remit was limited to what were seen as the most pressing problems: appointments to select committees, the arrangement of business in the House and the possibility of direct public initiation of issues in the chamber. The committee’s report, Rebuilding the House, published in November 2009, concentrated on giving backbenchers more control and reducing the role of the party whips in determining the membership of select committees and the non-governmental business of the House.
The reform committee recommended that the chairmen of most select committees should be elected by the House as a whole and other members should be elected within each political party, with the basis of election being decided by each party. The party balance of committees and of the chairmen will continue to reflect the proportion of seats that each party holds in the House. The Speaker will determine what the balance should be between the parties and they will negotiate about which party will provide chairmen for which select committee. Nominations will be sought and candidates will submit manifestos. There may be hustings and elections will then take place.
The intention is that the chairmen and the members should be more independent than in the past, when there had been occasional rows on the floor of the House over attempts by the whips to prevent independent-minded MPs from being re-elected to chair committees. In addition, the size of departmental select committees was limited to 11, in the hope of ensuring greater attendance and higher commitment from MPs.
The most contentious proposal would involve ending the Government’s exclusive hold on the agenda of the Commons. The reform committee proposed that a backbench business committee should be appointed to schedule backbench business and that, in time, a House business committee should be set up to schedule all business before the House. In March 2010, the Commons agreed with these proposals and with the establishment of a House business committee during the course of the following Parliament but the Labour Government and the party whips ensured that no time was available before the dissolution of the House and the election. Even the creation of a backbench business committee would represent a significant shift in the balance of power within Parliament, allowing backbenchers, rather than the party whips, to decide whether to have an increased number of short, topical debates and to give more time for discussion on select committee reports.
Legislation
The Commons scrutiny of legislation has commonly been regarded as one of the least satisfactory aspects of Parliament. The formal procedures are unchanging. A Bill is introduced without discussion, its first reading, then about ten days later it is debated in principle on the floor of the Commons in its second reading. Most Bills then go “upstairs” to be scrutinised line-by-line in what used to be called standing committees and are now known as public Bill committees. (Exceptions are constitutional Bills, the committee stages of which are always taken on the floor of the Commons, and the most controversial parts of the Finance Bill, which are again taken on the floor.)
