It must be a while ago now since Chris Bryant has had to write a sermon. But the former curate turned Labour MP, middle-ranking minister and latterly chair of the parliamentary committee that helps determine the fate of MPs who have sinned, doesn’t seem to have lost the knack. His account of what is rotten in the state of politics is neither lofty – if anything Bryant goes out of his way to confess to what he sees as his own failings, including a tendency to be “impulsive, sanctimonious and pompous” – nor overmoralising, but remains gently steadfast in the belief that parliament in general and this one in particular has lost its way. Code of Conduct is an attempt to guide it back to something like the straight and narrow.
He is, of course, entering a crowded literary field. Almost half the publishing industry seems to have had a shot now at detailing how the Boris Johnson era descended into such squalor; the lies, the chaos, the unedifying scrabble around for someone else to pay for his interior designers, and the willingness to overlook all manner of dubious behaviour in his ministers and aides. Even more ink has been spilt on the way Brexit has twisted politics out of shape, with its litany of false promises setting up leave voters for inevitable disillusionment. The queasy charade that is the modern honours system or the culture of abuse and threats that puts good people off standing for parliament are equally well-worn subjects, and in that sense Bryant is comparatively late to the party. But he brings with him more than two decades’ experience as a parliamentarian, a nonpartisan approach that helps him look beyond the failings of individuals to the system itself, and a raft of often small but practical suggestions for cleaning out the stables.
The resulting book is short and dense with examples, to the point where occasionally it feels like a rather lively select committee report. But it offers a useful guide for any incoming Labour government to follow – even if he won’t necessarily be thanked by some of the MPs dropped in it along the way.
Bryant is particularly strong on tackling parliament’s dismal record of sexual harassment, bullying and generally treating often very young researchers in ways that would get you hauled before HR in the average workplace. As an openly gay MP, he writes, he has himself been groped by five male MPs over the years: one, “who is still in the House and still does not accept that he is gay”, pushed him against a wall and felt his crotch. He knows others who faced similar assaults but none of them felt able to report it. “We did nothing. We never complained.”
At least now victims have somewhere to turn – the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme was set up in 2018 after a string of #MeToo-style revelations – but as the author notes, it has not gone far enough to change the culture. The book advocates proper HR training for MPs, some of whom will never have directly employed anyone before, and an end to MPs hiring family members (on the grounds that it’s very difficult to complain to the office manager about a lecherous boss if that office manager happens to be married to him). MPs who get through suspiciously large numbers of staff, meanwhile, should get extra support and monitoring. The Palace of Westminster might be a special place, Bryant writes, but “it is not so special or unique that it cannot enter the modern era in its working practices”.
He’s also good at explaining why some reforms that sound wildly appealing – banning all MPs from having second jobs, say, or ripping up the collective responsibility that sometimes makes ministers lie through their teeth in public about the merits of a policy they’ve bitterly but unsuccessfully resisted in private – aren’t as easy as they look. Would you really stop backbenchers who were previously doctors or farmers keeping a potentially useful foot in the real world? Parroting a party line, meanwhile, may be enraging but it’s also an unavoidable consequence of politics being a team sport; MPs are usually elected not on their personal merits but on the colour of their rosette, and they’re duty bound to deliver whatever was in their party platform.
It’s perhaps a shame that Bryant doesn’t extend this approach to explaining why one of his own favoured projects, introducing an elected House of Lords, seems so obviously the democratic thing to do but somehow never quite comes to pass. (As Tony Blair discovered, the trouble with Lords reform is that the Lords fight back, with knock-on consequences for parliamentary business of more urgent interest to the public.) Constitutional changes are never quite high enough on anyone’s priority list, compared with fixing the economy or bailing out the NHS. But if the grim past few years haven’t offered a compelling argument as to why they should be, this book does its best to fill in the gaps.
• Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament _ and How to Do It by Chris Bryant is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
