How rotten is our democracy? Chris Bryant knows better than most what the answer should be to this. The chair of the House of Commons standards committee gave an impassioned speech about the importance of integrity when MPs were debating whether to suspend Owen Paterson for breaking lobbying rules back in November 2021 – but he has long been concerned about the standing of parliament. In fact, as he reminds us in his new book, Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How to Do It, “the first motion I tabled as an MP in 2001 called for parliamentary reform”. This book is mostly concerned with how standards have disintegrated significantly since then, especially in the past three years of Conservative psychodrama. It is also one of those books that end up being called “part memoir, part manifesto”, as Bryant reflects on his time as an MP while also setting out his prescriptions to heal politics.
Bryant is an obsessive parliamentary pedant – the Westminster equivalent of those people who wear T-shirts declaring: “I’m judging your bad grammar.” In his first, considerably longer, book, Parliament: The Biography, he wasted no time in correcting urban myths about the Palace of Westminster, writing with the bouncy satisfaction of someone who knows they know more than the reader that “the red lines in the carpet of the House of Commons are not two sword lengths apart and are a Victorian innovation”. But he also illustrates his points in this book using the Sugababes and RuPaul’s Drag Race – as well as the sort of biblical references you would expect from a former curate. At times, he goes into more detail than a reader who is concerned about good politics might care for, including on how a man of the cloth might become an MP.
