Who will clean up Parliament?

Who will be the one to clean-up politics in the wake of the MPs expenses scandal? David Cameron? Gordon Brown? Or perhaps new Speaker John Bercow? Here's today's Journal column.

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So was it a petty act of revenge by Labour MPs who know they are going to lose their seats and want to leave as poisoned a legacy as they can for David Cameron and the Tories?

Or was it a long-overdue attempt to provide a fresh start for a House of Commons tarnished almost beyond redemption by the MPs’ expenses scandal?

If the truth be told, the election of one-time Thatcherite radical John Bercow as the 157th Commons Speaker this week was probably a bit of both.

While some of the MPs who voted for him on Monday undoubtedly did so to make life uncomfortable for the Tories, who by and large detest their former colleague, others genuinely saw him as the candidate best-placed to provide a “clean break” with recent events.

Okay, so I wanted Sir Alan Beith to win, and I thought Margaret Beckett would win, but it is clear the former Foreign Secretary suffered from a backlash in the final days against what were seen as government attempts to install her.

As one sketch-writer who wrote a delightful account of the election using horseracing metaphors put it: “Mrs Beckett was deemed to have made excessive use of the whips.”

I was right about one thing, and that was that the election would be determined by whether Labour MPs decided to swing en bloc behind a single candidate

In the end they did, but that candidate was not Mrs Beckett, but Mr Bercow, who at 46 becomes the youngest Speaker since the 19th century and the first person of the Jewish faith to hold the post.

Already the new Speaker has made his mark. Indeed, anyone watching his first Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday might have concluded that he, not Gordon Brown or Mr Cameron, was the real star of the show.

Ticking off braying MPs for making too much noise during the weekly half-hour joust, he told them: “The public doesn't like it and neither do I."

On another occasion, he told the Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant to calm down as "it is not good for your health".

And he cut short a rambling question by the Labour backbencher Patrick Hall on housing, telling him he had “got the gist” of what he was saying.

I suspect Mr Bercow is right in thinking that the public will be generally sympathetic to his attempts to bring what he calls “an atmosphere of calm, reasoned debate” to the parliamentary bear-pit.

But he is walking a difficult tightrope. Just as spin doctors are not supposed to become the story, neither are House of Commons Speakers.

Although it is understandable that he wanted to make a splash with his first PMQs, he will need to learn to fade into the background if he is to avoid becoming a political football like Michael Martin.

To paraphrase Dr W.G. Grace, if he starts to believe that the public have come to watch him umpiring rather than the MPs performing, then his days in the Chair will be numbered.

The central conundrum facing Mr Bercow is ultimately the one that did for Mr Martin – is the Speaker merely the servant of the House, or should he or she in some way seek to be its master?

The truth is that Mr Bercow will somehow have to be both – seeking to nudge the House in the direction of reform, while ultimately reflecting its wishes.

Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Brown, at least, do not have that dilemma. Each of them is seeking to persuade the public that he is the man to “clean up politics” in the wake of the expenses scandal.

Sadly for the Prime Minister, it is a contest which currently he is decisively losing.

From the start of the expenses row, Mr Cameron has led the way in taking action against his own recalcitrant MPs, and this week he ordered them to pay back another £125,000 to the taxpayer.

The Tory leader seems to be preparing the ground for a large-scale clearout which could see up to half of the current crop of Conservative MPs stand down at the election.

In a speech this week, he also sought to link the need for reform with the need for people to regain power over their own lives, highlighting the drift towards the “surveillance state” under Labour.

Mr Brown has concentrated more on wider constitutional reforms, but has been predictably outflanked on this score by Mr Clegg, who has the advantage of leading a party that genuinely believes in it.

In a speech this week, the Prime Minister said voters wanted to see his government clean-up politics, help people through the recession, and – wait for it – “put forward our vision.”

But the fact that Mr Brown is still talking about setting out his “vision” two years after coming to power is surely emblematic of the failure of his administration.

Nowhere has this failure been more acute than in the field of restoring trust in politics, which was supposed to be the big theme of his premiership in the wake of the loans for lordships scandal and the general moral decay of the Blair years.

If cleaning-up Parliament had been part of Mr Brown’s confounded “vision” in the first place, Parliament would probably not be in the mess it is in now.

Could it be Prime Minister Bercow one day?

At the risk of giving the Tories another bout of apoplexy, there are some interesting historical precedents surrounding the election of very young House of Commons Speakers in terms of what happened in their subsequent careers.

The year 1789 is chiefly remembered for being the year of the French Revolution. But it was also the year the Commons elected two thirty-something Speakers who both went on to occupy Number 10 Downing Street.

The first of these was William Grenville, who was elected Speaker at the ripe old age of 30 and held the office only very briefly before quitting to become Home Secretary.

In his place was elected the 32-year-old Henry Addington, who remained in the Chair until 1801 when he suddenly found himself elevated to the Premiership in place of his childhood friend Pitt the Younger, who declared that Addington was the only successor he could countenance.

In the meantime, Grenville had gone into opposition, along with his close ally Charles James Fox. But in 1806, he was summoned by King George III to head up what was termed the Ministry of All Talents, though unfortunately for him, it only lasted a year.

Even further back, in 1715, one Spencer Compton was elected to the Commons chair at the age of 42 - four years younger than John Bercow is now. He served as Speaker for 12 years until 1727, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as the 1st Earl of Wilmington. In 1742, he succeeded Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister.

Bercow has said he will do nine years in the Chair, effectively two full Parliaments plus the toe-end of this one. That will make him 55 when he stands down - younger than Gordon Brown was when he became Prime Minister in 2007.

The only remaining question is: If Bercow did decide to pursue a post-Speakership career, would it be as a Tory or a Labour MP?

Good luck Speaker Bercow, you will need it

Okay, so I wanted Alan Beith to win, and I thought Margaret Beckett would win, but on reflection I'm glad John Bercow has won, such was the degree of mindless hostility shown to him by the Tory Party and its apologists in the national press over recent days.

Quentin Letts is without doubt one of our most gifted writers and humourists, and some of his criticisms of the man he christened "Gorbals Mick" were justified, but his recent piece on why Bercow shouldn't succeed Michael Martin was the quite the most vicious and unpleasant outpouring of journalistic bile I have read in many a long day.

It makes me wonder what slight, real or imagined, could have led Quentin to pen such a vitriolic piece? The effect of it, on me at any rate, was actually to induce sympathy for poor Bercow - not an emotion I am accustomed to feeling towards Tory politicians.

As to the well-known right-wing blogger who cheered on the Stop Bercow campaign from the sidelines - I won't bother to link to him - his own dislike of the man was clearly down to good old-fashioned religious intolerance. Bercow does support Rangers after all.

I did wonder if there might have been a bit of religious intolerance of another sort going on in what has been a rather unedifying episode for the Tory benches. But we have to take at face value David Cameron's generous tribute to the fact that Bercow is the first Speaker of the Jewish faith.

In terms of the bigger picture, the Commons now has a Speaker with a very clear mandate for reform. It's a good result for the progressive forces in British politics, a bad one for those who somehow wanted to use this election not to advance the reform process, but to stall it.

Who will win the race for the Speakership?

By all rights it should be Sir Alan Beith, but it probably won't be. Here's today's Journal column.

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It is often the case with politicians that nothing so becomes them in their conduct of an office as the leaving of it, and this week, House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin proved he was no exception.

For nine years, he has presided uneasily over a Chamber which elected him to the post for quite the wrong reasons in the first place, and has had good cause to regret that choice moreorless ever since.

The errors of judgement have been legion, from his early refusal to call MPs who had failed to vote for him in 2000, to the ill-starred attempt to block freedom of information requests over MPs’ expenses last year.

Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the doughty old Glaswegian, especially over the manner of his dismissal by MPs seeking a convenient scapegoat for their own moral failures.

It was inevitable that the outgoing Speaker would allude to that in his valedictory speech on Thursday, lamenting the lack of leadership shown by the main party leaders in failing to reform the expenses system sooner.

Predictable too were the treacly tributes paid to Mr Martin by the very people who brought him down – not least Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg who praised his “great authority.”

Some will call it hypocrisy, but in reality it’s just the way of the world. Just as we don’t speak ill of the dead, so in politics people tend not to speak ill of the political living dead.

Since his resignation last month, much of the anger and hostility that had built up against Mr Martin has dissipated, as it invariably does in politics. One day soon, no doubt, they will praise Gordon Brown for his “great leadership” too.

So who should replace him in Monday’s election? Well, there are ten candidates – seven Tories, two Labour members, and a lone Liberal Democrat in the shape of our very own Berwick MP, Sir Alan Beith.

The Tories are a fascinatingly varied bunch, ranging from a candidate in John Bercow who is a Labour MP in all but name, to one in Sir Patrick Cormack who is the epitome of the old ‘knights of the shires’ who used to dominate the Tory benches.

In between, they have the “bicycling baronet,” Sir George Young, two serving deputy speakers in Sir Alan Haselhurst and Sir Michael Lord, and the backbench maverick Richard Shepherd – all four of them making their second attempts on the job.

Finally, there is the Tories’ “interim candidate”- former Home Office minister Anne Widdecombe, whose intention to use the ten months between now and the general election to clean up Parliament is surely beyond even her formidable talents.

On the Labour side, there are two wildly contrasting contenders – the 37-year-old former junior minister Parmjit Dhanda, and the vastly experienced former Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett.

Two weeks ago, Mrs Beckett was begging Mr Brown in vain to make her a full member of the Cabinet once again, yet her subsequent emergence as a serious runner for the Speakership shows once more just what a political survivor she is.

Mr Dhanda, bidding to become the first ethnic minority Speaker, has fought an equally remarkable campaign, attracting highly positive reviews for someone so relatively inexperienced.

Finally there is Sir Alan, also running for the second time and the man with surely the hardest task in the race, in that he will need to attract most of his support from MPs of a different party to win.

So who should get the job? Well, a lot depends on whether MPs take a high-minded view of the needs of Parliament, or whether, like the last Speakership election, it becomes dominated by faction-fighting and tactical considerations.

In the wake of the expenses scandal all the contenders, in one way or another, are running as “pro-reform” candidates, but only one of them can point to a consistent record of being pro-reform over the course of four decades.

As he put it in his manifesto: “Public anger has created both a need and an opportunity for wider constitutional change, which is something to which I have been committed throughout my political life.”

There is little doubt in my mind that if MPs want a parliamentary reformer who really means it, they should elect Sir Alan Beith on Monday.

But will he get it? I have to say I think it’s unlikely, based on the fact that for all the talk of putting Parliament first, the two big parties still have a tendency to vote tribally in these sorts of situations.

At one point, Labour MPs looked set to try to impose Mr Bercow, who is disliked on his own benches, in revenge for the Tories’ role in bringing down their shop steward, Mr Martin.

There has been less of such talk in recent days, but the desire to dish the opposition is always a factor in politics and even though it is the Tories’ “turn” to provide the Speaker, both their leading candidates have been tainted by the expenses row.

Sir Alan Haselhurst was found to have charged his £12,000 gardening bill to the taxpayer, while Sir George Young claimed the maximum £127,000 in second home allowances over past two years.

If the next Speaker is to be a Conservative, Sir George still appears to be the one most capable of winning cross-party support, but one factor that cannot be ignored is that Labour still has by far the largest number of MPs.

If those MPs decide to swing behind one candidate en bloc, as they did with Mr Martin in 2000, that candidate is going to be very hard to beat.

My judgement therefore is that the next Speaker will be the candidate who can secure the most support from Labour MPs, while at the same time attracting a significant number of votes from the other parties.

On that basis, I am going to stick my neck out and say that the likeliest winner of the race to be the 157th Speaker of the House of Commons is Mrs Margaret Beckett.

The big, unanswered questions

Who will be the next Speaker? Will there be an October election? And will we get proportional representation? Just some of the many unanswered questions that have arisen from the MPs expenses scandal. Here's today's Journal column.

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For most of the past two years, the biggest unanswered question in politics has been whether Gordon Brown will survive to lead Labour into the next election, and it is a question that is still awaiting an answer.

But seldom can any week in politics have thrown up as many unanswered questions as the last one, a week which has seen the first defenestration of a House of Commons Speaker for 300 years and talk of a “quiet revolution” in our political system.

Several careers besides those of Michael Martin have already ended. Several more are hanging by a thread. And the pressure for a wholesale electoral clear-out of the "Duck Island Parliament" is growing.

We now know the true, appalling extent of the scandal over MPs' expenses. What we can still only guess at at this stage is its longer-term impact.

First, there are the small-to-middling questions, mainly concerning individuals. How many more MPs will be forced to stand down at the next election? Who will lose their jobs in the next reshuffle? Who will be the next Speaker?

Then there are the slightly broader questions. How will the public’s anger at the behaviour of the political classes feed through into voting habits? Will the “incumbency factor” that has always favoured sitting MP go into reverse? And will the next election herald a new wave of independents?

Then of course there is the question of when that election will finally be held, and whether Mr Brown will pay the political price for failing to reform the system until it was too late.

Finally, perhaps the most far-reaching question of all. Will the expenses scandal ultimately result in an historic reshaping of our parliamentary democracy, or alternatively bring about its final demise?

In terms of the questions around the futures of individual MPs, the North-East is as good a place as any to start.

Will Tyne Bridge MP David Clelland, controversially reselected in preference to neighbouring MP Sharon Hodgson, now fund himself deselected after claiming for the cost of buying out his partner’s £45,000 stake in his London flat, despite his very full and frank explanations of the reasons behind the move?

Will Durham North’s Kevan Jones and other “squeaky clean” MPs who voluntarily laid bare their expense claims be rewarded for their candour, or will they find themselves tar-brushed along with their sleazier counterparts?

And will Sir Alan Beith crown a notable career of public service by achieving his ambition of the Speakership - or will the fact that both he and his wife, Baroness Maddock, claimed second home allowances on the same property ultimately count against him?

On that last point, I have to say it would give me great pleasure to see the long-serving Berwick MP in the Speaker’s chair, although if he were not standing down from Parliament, Sunderland South’s Chris Mullin would be an equally admirable choice.

If the truth be told, the North-East should have had the Speakership last time round. The region had three candidates in Mr Beith, David Clark, and John McWilliam, all of whom would have done a better job than Michael Martin – though some would argue that is not saying much.

Ultimately Mr Martin fell not because of shaky grasp of Commons procedure or even last week's ill-judged attacks on backbench MPs, but because his continual attempts to block the freedom of information request over MPs expenses caused this whole debacle.

Just imagine for a moment that Dr Clark had got the job. Would he have fought the provisions of the freedom of information legislation that he himself pioneered? Of course not, and our Parliament would now be much the better for it.

But enough of the ancient history. What on earth will happen to the House of Commons now?

One oft-heard prediction this week is that we will end up with a chamber full of Esther Rantzens, Martin Bells and toast of the Gurkhas Joanna Lumley, and it's certainly one possibility.

We are living through such an extraordinary period of “anti-politics” that there could even be a return to the situation that existed before the rise of the party system in the 19th century – the “golden age of the independent House of Commons man” as one historian called it.

But while celebrity politicians may well play a part, I think the next election is just as likely to throw up more “local heroes” like Dr Richard Taylor, who defeated an unpopular Labour MP over hospital closures and is now himself even being mentioned as a possible Speaker.

Should that election now take place sooner than spring 2010? Well, there has to be a very strong argument for saying that, just as the Speaker who resisted reform for so long has had to go, so too should the Prime Minister who failed to grasp the nettle.

When a Parliament has lost moral authority to the extent that this one has, a clear-out becomes almost a democratic necessity, and Cromwell’s words to the Rump Parliament – “In the name of God, go!” - once more have a certain resonance.

Against that, there is a case for allowing passions to cool. In the words of one commentator: "If an election were called next week, Britain might well end up with a Parliament for the next five years that is defined entirely by its views on claiming for bath plugs, rather than on how to get the country out of the worst recession in 70 years."

Mr Brown will no doubt still try to hang on until next May, but in my view an autumn 2009 election has become significantly more likely in recent days.

As far as the longer-term implications of the scandal are concerned, there is already talk of radical constitutional reforms including an elected second chamber, fixed-term Parliaments, more powerful select committees, and even proportional representation.

I'll believe it when I see it....but if a consensus does emerge that radical parliamentary reform is the way out of this mess, it stands to reason that the party that will most benefit will be the one that has consistently advocated such reform for the past 40 years.

The Liberal Democrats have long been the recipients of the "anti-politics" vote, and on this issue as well as that of the Gurkhas, their leader Nick Clegg has looked over the past fortnight like a man whose time has come.

Sir Alan Beith is not the only Lib Dem for whom this crisis may prove an historic opportunity.

Will Labour MPs back Bercow?

Now that Michael Martin has finally gone, after what were surely two of the most ill-judged Commons performances of modern times last Monday and again yesterday, the question turns inevitably to the identity of his successor.

The key strategic questions for MPs will be what kind of Speaker they want to follow Gorbals Mick, and whether anyone currently tainted by the expenses scandal should be ruled out. To my mind, there are three options:

1. A "reforming Speaker" who will help draw a line under the expenses scandal and present a new, modern face to the electorate. In this event, the standout candidates from each of the main parties would be Tony Wright, John Bercow and Vince Cable. Cable, who still sees himself as David Cameron's first Chancellor, has already ruled himself out, which could allow fellow Lib Dem Sir Alan Beith to come into his own.

2. A "safe pair of hands" who can unite the House and pour balm on the current turmoil. In this event the overwhelmingly most likely choices are either Sir Alan Haselhurst or Sir Menzies Campbell, but both are vulnerable to criticism over their own expense claims.

3. An "interim Speaker" who will mind the shop until the next election, after which more far-reaching choice can be made. This would have to be someone who has already announced they are standing down, so Ann Widdecombe or Chris Mullin are the likeliest options if this route is followed.

One rumour currently sweeping Westminster is that Labour MPs are getting behind John Bercow, which could constitute sweet revenge as Bercow is not wildly popular in the Tory Party. By contrast, a lot of Tory MPs - and bloggers - are keen on Frank Field, who has about as many fans in the PLP as Joey Barton has in the Newcastle dressing room.

At this rate, the Speakership election on 22 June could bring (another) whole new meaning to the term "flipping."