Watching the parliamentary year dribble towards the Christmas recess this week, three glaring reasons for Britain’s political malaise shone out as a dark December afternoon unfolded. One is that too many MPs have the wrong priorities. Another is that too many lack the right competence. The third is that too many simply behave badly. All of these are connected.
Priorities first. On Tuesday, the House of Commons debated something important. The Post Office (Horizon system) Compensation bill goes some way to compensate victims of the Post Office’s 16-year wrongful prosecution of more than 700 post office operators over false accounting. The case is a national scandal. But get this. There are 650 MPs at Westminster. At no time did I count more than 17 MPs in the chamber to debate it.
MPs should spend less time on constituency work and more time on governing and holding ministers to account. They should be the parliamentarians they are, not the glorified local advice bureaux they have become. It was not always thus. The postwar Tory minister Iain Macleod never held a surgery or employed a constituency secretary in his entire career. That may be impossible today, but MPs badly need to raise their game on the national stage. The media need to help them.
Competence next. Also on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak had his end-of-year session in front of the liaison committee of Commons select committee chairs. By any normal logic, this too is an important event. Watch the session, though, and you learn almost nothing at all about the big issues of the day – Gaza, Rwanda, the economy. Except, perhaps, that the committee chairs are not talented inquisitors and that Sunak has developed a line in condescending snottiness towards those who question him.
Not enough MPs are up to the jobs of governing and challenging. Backbench talents have always varied, of course. But Kemi Badenoch’s demolition of Labour’s Kate Osborne at a select committee last week illustrates the difference between a politician who is on her game and one who is not.
And when do you last remember a memorable Commons speech? Yes, Keir Starmer was brilliant at eviscerating Boris Johnson over Partygate. Yes, Guy Opperman’s tribute to the late Jack Dromey was lovely. But there should be more to the Commons chamber than the grotesquery of prime minister’s questions. Don’t romanticise the chamber, but it ought to be the place to grab the nation’s attention, and currently it is not.
Last, behaviour. On Tuesday again, North Northamptonshire council announced that the recall petition against Peter Bone, the Conservative MP for Wellingborough, had been successful. In October, parliament’s independent expert panel found Bone guilty of a pattern of bullying behaviour and of indecently exposing himself to a Westminster staffer. He was suspended for six weeks, a punishment that triggered a recall petition and now a byelection.
This will be the 20th byelection of this parliament. But it will be the 12th since 2019 to be caused by an MP’s bad behaviour of one kind or another, and the tenth of the last 12 to come into this same category. The bad behaviour takes many forms. It ranges from sexual misconduct and bullying, to corruption, lockdown rule breaking and, in Nadine Dorries’s case, to a hissy-fit about not getting a peerage.
The important thing is that this is something new. There has always been unacceptable behaviour by MPs. The past was possibly worse. Today, though, it is harder to get away with. The cash-for-questions scandal in the 1990s and the parliamentary expenses revelations in 2009 have helped tighten the net. New parliamentary bodies, like the panel that judged Bone, have increased the sanctions. Too many MPs have failed to adjust. While parliament has tried to put its house in better order, the reputation of MPs continues to decline.
Part of that is Johnson’s fault. But not all of it. Johnson was the first prime minister to have been found guilty of a criminal offence. But he was not the first prime minister to give dubious peerages to donors. It was David Cameron who rewarded Michelle Mone. Too few of the inhabitants of No 10 remember the wise words of Stanley Baldwin a century ago that “a man who made a million quick ought to be not in the Lords but in gaol”.
The problem that Britain faces is general, not particular. No one should try to deceive themselves about this, MPs most of all. A week ago, the Ipsos polling organisation published its annual “veracity index”. The index measures the public’s trust in a list of professions. As usual, nurses come top, with 88% “generally trusted to tell the truth”. Others who scored well include airline pilots, librarians, engineers, doctors and teachers. Lawyers, civil servants and the ordinary person in the street have majority trust too.
Politicians, by contrast, are generally trusted by a mere 9% of the public. Yes, you read that figure correctly. In this country just one in 11 people trust politicians. To put it another way, 10 out of 11 don’t. Politicians are the least trusted profession in Britain. This year’s figure is the lowest ever. Government ministers are scarcely any better, on 10%. Journalists, on 21%, well below estate agents, bankers and landlords, have no cause for complacency either.
Rarely has this country had more need of a new generation of national political leaders – in all parties – with the right sense of priorities, the right ability to lead and the necessary probity to be trusted. If the public does not believe what it is told and does not trust the politicians, confidence in parliament and government to solve problems that matter will not just remain low: it may even be destroyed altogether.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
