'In the name of God, go'
The mood in Britain is unlike anything I have experienced. The electorate is enraged by the conduct of its representatives. Some members of parliament daren't show their face, a former Labour foreign secretary has been booed by a television audience, and a Conservative member has had a brick heaved through her office window. It is all about expenses, fraudulent claims, tax evasion, making private fortunes by looting the public purse. Worse still, much of it has been legitimate, within what MPs are calling "the system," and that is what is provoking the revulsion and rage.
It turns out that the Blair-Brown Labour government could not bring itself to raise salaries for MPs, but instead set up "the system" of allowances that were privileged and kept secret. An MP could claim thousands of pounds more or less on his own say-so, with shaky receipts for dubious expenditure, and the result is that some have built property portfolios worth a million pounds or more. Some of the claimants were already rich in their own right, others used to be poor. All but a handful have been shamelessly greedy, and brought disgrace upon themselves and Westminster. The spectacle of them pretending that "the system" is to blame, or that they made accounting mistakes and are offering now to return ill-gotten gains has added elements of farce.
Supervising this milking of "the system" was Michael Martin, the Speaker. In the early days of Tony Blair, this man was press-ganged into a job for which he was unfit. An old hardline socialist and trade-union man, he saw himself as defender of entitlements rather than liberty and proper government. He put in outrageous claims for himself and his wife. He did his very best to suppress information about the embezzling and spivery going on under him, in the classic manner of a trade unionist getting whatever he could for his comrades. Someone leaked the facts and figures to the Daily Telegraph, which has been publishing them for the past fortnight. Demonstrating folly and arrogance, Speaker Martin tried to cover up, seeking to set the police on whoever leaked rather than on malefactors. He has personally insulted the handful of MPs who had the courage to criticize him. The Telegraph exposes MPs who have claimed a range of things from porn videos, bath plugs, and dog food up to horse manure, building work to eliminate dry rot from a home, and clearing the moat of a stately manor house. The revelations have been appalling. People ordinarily do not live like this.
Yesterday a motion of no-confidence in the speaker came before the house. A number of MPs called for his resignation. One of them likened the moment to the debate in 1940 when Leo Amery borrowed Cromwell's rebuke to parliamentarians, "In the name of God, go," and so got rid of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Speaker Martin gave an evidently insincere apology, fluffed his words, couldn't read his statement, and had to refer to his clerk about procedure. The media of course had a field day.
Today Speaker Martin resigned in a speech lasting half a minute and without apology, forced out as he should have been long ago. The last speaker to suffer this indignity was Sir John Trevor, in 1695, for taking bribes. Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew the outline of the MPs' misdemeanours if not the details, and if the speaker implicates him the scandal may not stop at this point. The Mother of Parliaments has had to endure a lot in its history, but previous rogues like Charles James Fox or Horatio Bottomley at least had a certain style. This lot are just tawdry.
David Pryce-Jones on National Review Online (19 May 2009)
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