In the rich – but not always happy and glorious – history of our legislature, there’s been an Addled Parliament, a Bad Parliament, a Barebones Parliament, a Mad Parliament and a Merciless Parliament.
Will the current one, which began with the big Tory win in December 2019 and must be dissolved by December 2024, be remembered as the Worst Parliament? Exhibit one for the prosecution is the debauched reign of the moral vacuum called Boris Johnson. He is the only prime minister to be found guilty of committing a criminal offence while at Number 10. Doubly ignominious, he is also the first to have held that great office and been catapulted out of the Commons after being found guilty of serially lying to parliament. Though the charge list begins with the debaucheries of the former prime minister, it does not end there. While most periods have their examples of low behaviour in high places, this one stands out for the profusion of them.
In the past nine months alone, we have seen defenestrations from cabinet of a deputy prime minister, a party chair who had previously been chancellor and a home secretary. This unmagnificent trio is made up of Dominic Raab, Nadhim Zahawi and Suella Braverman. After the latter was forced to quit because she committed a security breach, she wrote: “I have made a mistake; I take responsibility; I resign.” Her supposed remorsefulness lasted less than a week. She was resurrected as home secretary just six days later because Rishi Sunak thought he needed her support to secure the premiership, making ridiculous his pieties about upholding “integrity, professionalism and accountability” in public life. “Sir” Gavin Williamson takes the palm by being ejected from the cabinet not once, not twice, but thrice. Theresa May sacked him as defence secretary because she didn’t believe his denials of responsibility for leaking a discussion inside the National Security Council. Mr Johnson brought him back as education secretary only for him to perform so woefully that he was sacked again. He was recklessly restored to the top table by Mr Sunak only to be forced to quit soon afterwards pursued by complaints of bullying and accusations from a former deputy he employed of “unethical and immoral” methods when he was chief whip.
It is not just cabinet names who have brought our politics into disrepute. The rollcall of shame also includes an alarmingly high number of junior ministers and backbenchers. It is a startling fact that more MPs have been sanctioned by the Commons and/or resigned their seats in disgrace in this parliament than in any other in history. The fallen Tories include Owen Paterson for a lobbying scandal and Neil Parish who quit as an MP after admitting to watching porn in the Commons. Imran Ahmad Khan resigned from parliament after he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. It hasn’t been all Tories. Several Labour MPs have been sanctioned for bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct, and the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier was given a 30-day suspension from the Commons for busting Covid rules. The number of MPs who have been suspended by their respective parties as a result of, or pending, misconduct investigations has at times been larger than all the Lib Dems in the Commons put together. It was a good idea to introduce the Recall of MPs Act, which puts any member penalised with a suspension of 10 or more days in peril of being booted out by their constituents at a special byelection. But this clearly has not been the deterrent against unethical or even illegal behaviour that its authors anticipated.
So is this “the worst parliament in our history”? An answer in the affirmative comes from the Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant in a forthcoming book entitled Code of Conduct. He delivers a lively, forensic, engrossing, sometimes entertaining, often disturbing and always unflinching interrogation of what’s gone wrong with our legislature. Sir Chris is the chairman of the committees on standards and privileges, and his previous works include a masterly biography of parliament. So he knows his way around its pinnacles and its sewers. He also has firsthand experience of how grotesquely some fellow MPs can behave. First elected in 2001, when Labour was in power, he reports: “I remember very clearly in my first few weeks seeing the look on a young female colleague’s face when a drunken cabinet minister lunged at her, hugged her tight and felt her bottom in the division lobby against her will. She looked sickened – and frightened.” He continues: “Things were little better for gay men. Over the years five male MPs have felt my bottom uninvited. One of them, who was not out, did so repeatedly. Another, who is still in the House and still does not accept that he is gay, pushed me against a wall and felt my crotch. Another rubbed himself behind me in the queue to vote.”
There’s scope to quarrel with his verdict that this parliament is the worst of all time. There were plenty of sexual predators, liars, crooks, bullies and other malefactors in previous eras and rogue politicians had a better chance of getting away with it then. If you want to be optimistic, you can argue that the record number of members who have been sanctioned in this parliament is at least in part due to the Commons becoming less tolerant of misconduct and more effective at investigating and punishing it. That said, there’s no disputing Sir Chris’s overarching thesis, which is that there’s something rotten about the state of parliament and it needs fixing. No political era is without scandal. The distinguishing characteristic of this one is that there has been such a deluge of them. A first, vital step is for political parties to radically improve the quality control of their candidate selection processes. This year, Jared O’Mara, the former Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam, was sentenced to four years in prison after abusing his position in parliament to makefraudulent expense claims to fund his consumption of cocaine and alcohol. Charlie Elphicke, the former Conservative MP for Dover, was sentenced to two years after being found guilty of three counts of sexual assault. The parties clearly need to make more strenuous efforts to scrutinise the characters of the people they put up for parliament.
Even with that done, it will be sensible to assume that some bad actors will always make their way into the Palace of Westminster. So another thing we must do is consign to oblivion the “good chap” theory which holds that we don’t need hard and fast rules governing the conduct of politicians because we can presume that they are all decent people who will behave honourably. Even supposing that has ever really been true, that theory has now been tested to destruction. When it comes to the behaviour of politicians, we can hope for the best, but we need to guard against the worst. That means establishing truly robust rules and strict policing of them.
There’s a long list of things to be done. One is to deal with gaping loopholes in the controls on lobbying. The limp-wristed changes proposed by Mr Sunak’s government in the wake of the Greensill scandal are deeply inadequate. We need a lot more transparency about which vested interests are getting privileged access to ministers and for what purposes. Eric Pickles, the former Conservative cabinet minister and chair of one of the watchdogs, is right to demand heavier sanctions on those who flout the rules when former ministers and civil servants land lucrative roles with commercial entities hoping to profit from their insider knowledge and networks. The “independent adviser” who is supposed to invigilate ministerial behaviour will never be properly independent for so long as their ability to investigate rule-breaking is entirely dependent on the say-so of the prime minister. The role needs to be empowered with the right to initiate investigations and determine breaches of the ministerial code.
I agree with Sir Chris when he says that politicians are not all “equally dire” and depicting the lot of them as scumbags threatens to “subvert democracy itself”. The decent types should be alarmed that the rotten ones are poisoning the collective reputation of politicians. Polling suggests that a big majority of the public have become deeply cynical about their elected representatives. MPs as a body desperately need to restore public respect and trust. The voters do not expect parliament to be a communion of saints, but it is extremely toxic for our democracy when they think of it as a cesspit of sin.
Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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