The Times Guide to the House of Commons

In the pantheon of retiring MPs, I must make special mention of Sir Nicholas Winterton, Tory MP for Macclesfield since 1971. He and his wife, Ann, were known as Mr and Mrs Expenses. Sir Nicholas was wildly opinionated, red-faced and rambunctious (last year he slapped the bottom of the Labour MP Natasha Engel in the Commons tea room). But his retirement cannot pass without remembering his supremely ill-judged remarks about why he needed to travel first class: “If I was in standard class, I would not do work because people would be looking over your shoulder the entire time, there would be noise, there would be distraction. They are a totally different type of people: they have a different outlook on life. They may be reading a book but I doubt whether they are undertaking serious work or study.”

So goodbye, Sir Nicholas, see you in economy. I will actually miss the rather gentle manner of Sir Peter Viggers, an MP for 36 years, who is now spending more time with his ducks, who never even liked their cute little house. Andrew MacKay, who with his wife, Julie Kirkbride, was another Mr and Mrs Expenses, was amazingly orange. His seat in the Commons, on the aisle, first bench back, will always have a tangerine hue for me. John Gummer, who seems to have been around for ever, is gone but not forgotten after his expenses got tangled up with his attempt to get rid of his moles. And then there is Mr Moat (aka Douglas Hogg), whose final act was to give an interview clarifying that he had not claimed for the moat per se and noting that, anyway, it wasn’t a moat at all but a “broad dyke”. Does that make it worse? After all, there is a certain majesty in a moat.

On Labour’s side, in addition to the expenses villains, there are the lobbyists, not to mention the plotters. Stephen Byers, who once described himself as a cab for hire, is now out in the big bad world, his light on. I will never have to hear the patronising undulations of Patricia “Patsy” Hewitt’s voice again. Geoff “Buff” Hoon, the man who specialised in never being there when it came to Iraq, now really won’t be there. Despite it all I rather liked his plodding pedestrian ways. Other “hall of shame” retirees include Kitty Ussher, a once rising star, who wrote a two-page letter explaining why her London house needed major repairs: “Most of the ceilings have Artex coverings. Threedimensional swirls. It could be a matter of taste, but this counts as ‘dilapidations’ in my book!” And Kitty, let us remember, was a member of the People’s Party.

So where is the good in the good, the bad and the ugly? Almost everybody else, actually. Of particular note is James Purnell, facial hair fashionista, whose sideburns will be missed by me. His shock resignation from the Cabinet almost brought down Gordon Brown. Mr Purnell was the brave one. It could have all been so different if he had succeeded.

For us sketch writers, John Prescott is simply irreplaceable: but he lives on, in the Twitter-sphere, boldly going where no one would have predicted he would. I will miss the bolshie proclamations of Labour’s Andrew Mackinlay and the snide if somewhat forlorn comments of Chris Mullin, who proved to be a better diarist than politician. Others of note to go include Labour’s Bob Marshall-Andrews, a man more or less permanently in opposition to his own side. In September 1997, commenting on an opinion poll that gave Tony Blair a 93 per cent approval rating, he said: “Seven per cent. We can build on that.”

Others to be missed include

• Tony Wright, the much respected Labour MP who coined the phrase “Manure Parliament”. He headed the eponymous committee on parliamentary reforms with tenacity and, dare I say it, wisdom.

• The Rev Ian Paisley, ancient Galapagos tortoise, who always spoke as if he was sermonising, possibly because he was.

• Michael Howard and Ann Widdecombe, linked forever by her “something of the night” comment about him. He was always worth watching, an astute and clever parliamentarian, and she was the only true reality TV star in the Commons: “I always imagined that when I was making my last speech, I would be sad. Instead I find that my uppermost sentiment is one of profound relief.”

• David Howarth, a thoughtful Liberal Democrat, who returns to teach law at Cambridge. “People talk about standing down. I am standing up!” he told me. He is gloomy about politics, saying that it is no longer a “high trust” profession. Like estate agents, MPs now must always be watched like hawks. Inevitably, he said, the result will be that it attracts less trustworthy people.

• Martin Salter, the Labour MP for Reading West, was larger than life and louder than it too. Before he left, I found him in his chaotic office brandishing a “stress banana”, a gift. “I use my banana for pointing,” he chortled. “People say, ‘Don’t Miliband me!’” His office was plastered with pictures of fish. “I am leaving politics to spend more time with my wife, my camper van and my fish, in that order.”

Last but not least in any way is Sir Patrick Cormack, the Tory grandee who bowed out after 40 years. He was a bit of an old buffer but no one doubts that he loves Parliament (which he pronounced “Parl-i-ament”, with a little wiggle). When I stopped by to see him in his magnificent office, which he was emptying out, there was palpable regret in his voice as he talked of his career ups and downs. He had wanted to be Speaker but, when he stood, received only 13 votes. “You take the rough with the rough!” he noted, his pug face crinkling. “Absolutely!”

So, at 71, he left to spend more time with his weekends. “It will be a terrible wrench. It has been my life for more than half my life. It is a very funny feeling at the moment: it is the last of this, the last of that. I am still behaving as normal but all the time I am sort of signing off.” It is hard to imagine the chamber without Sir Patrick. For 40 years, whenever “Parl-i-ament” was sitting, he spent at least three hours a day seated in his place, the middle aisle seat towards the back. In his last speech, he ended with these words of Catullus: “Ave atque vale”. Hail and farewell, indeed. Ann Treneman is the author of Annus Horribilis: the Worst Year in British Politics (2009)

The tragedy of Gordon Brown

David Aaronovitch

Times columnist

It was the longest understudy, for one of the shortest performances. A decade of increasingly unquiet waiting for his moment to take over from Tony Blair was followed by just under three years in the long-coveted post. Departing No 10, Gordon Brown left behind a reputation for grumpiness, intellectual brilliance, ambition and, in the end, enduring personal tragedy.

The grey, jowly, plodding figure who left office was scarcely recognisable as the brilliant, Heathcliffian man who entered the Treasury in 1997. In opposition, Mr Brown had shredded his opponents with thunder and wit, which turned to lightning and cleverness early in new Labour’s first term. In the first week of that term he announced the independence of the Bank of England, a reform that was to become accepted by his political rivals, but which was not even put to the Cabinet.

His most deployed political term in the first two years of the Labour Government was the legendary “prudence”, who was invariably accompanied by “with a purpose”. He knew exactly what he was doing; he was the great intellectual of modern politics. His supporters told anyone who would listen that he was the real brains behind new Labour. He was literally unassailable.

When writers use terms such as “paradox”, “enigma” and “contradiction” it is often a sign that they simply do not understand the subject. Gordon Brown has had these words applied to him more often than any other modern British politician. It has been hard, throughout his career in government, to explain how his different characteristics coexisted within the same person.

Mr Brown was, famously, the “son of the manse” – a man built upon the bedrock of religious and social principles as bequeathed to him by his minister father. “Understand this about him,” I was told more than once by Scots, “and you understand everything.” And when he repeatedly used the word “values”, like a mallet on a wooden tent-peg and pronounced with an almost unending first vowel, it sounded convincing and deeply meant.

In his international campaigns to reduce Third World debt and to increase aid to Africa, both hugely successful, it was easy to see high moral principle at work, although such goods are indeed oft interred with the politician’s bones. These were real and important achievements, but ones unlikely to be appreciated by most journalists, let alone most voters.

It could also be that in 30 years the first historians of the 2000s will single out Gordon Brown’s leadership during the banking crisis of 2008-09 as having been central to saving the world from a second full-scale Great Depression. For a year a formerly depressed Prime Minister was transformed into a man full of hectic energy and knowledgeable determination.

But then there was the thin-skinned, jealous, tricksy and occasionally even treacherous Brown, who seemed to stand at 90 degrees to the morals of the manse. This was the Chancellor who would cook the figures to make them more palatable and to suggest that he was being more generous than in fact he was; the colleague who allowed his closest advisers to run around Westminster bad-mouthing anyone who was considered to be an opponent; the Cabinet member who tried to keep his budgets secret from his own Prime Minister; the co-founder of new Labour who, for half a decade, connived secretly at the replacement of his one-time friend.

When, in the late Nineties, the first reports began to be written about rival camps forming around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, some of us dismissed them as overblown – the product of junior aides shooting their mouths off and hacks anxious for a story. It seemed intrinsically unlikely that men who had been so disciplined and thoughtful in their pursuit of government should be so adolescent in their relationships with each other. I could not have been more wrong and gradually it became clear that this was not a matter of six of one and half a dozen of the other, but of a jealousy and resentment felt by Mr Brown towards Mr Blair.

So Gordon Brown became the man who opposed Tony Blair’s attempts at public service reform when the latter was in office, and then embraced the same reforms once he had been pushed out.

And then, when in the post he had wanted so long, elected from a field of one, the politician who had moved decisively in 1997 on the question of the Bank of England, havered disastrously when, for a moment almost exactly ten years later, he might have won a general election in his own right.

In the televised debates in the 2010 campaign the former romantic lead came over as a rather querulous and awkward pensioner, barely restraining his innate grumpiness. Perhaps most ruinous to his long-term reputation, though, was the perception, widely shared and cleverly exploited by political opponents, that the economic crisis was somehow his fault, almost alone. The accusation was that Britain was particularly disadvantaged in responding to the crisis because of his earlier profligacy, saddling the nation with a mountain of public debt. When the Cameron-Clegg coalition began its governance of the country its main theme was blaming Mr Brown and his high-spending ways for any unpopular decision that it was about to make.

It might also be that Mr Brown is the last British leader in the modern era to be nothing like a television or film celebrity. His predecessor and his successor both possessed an easy public charm and a capacity to share their private existences in some way with the public and the media. Mr Brown palpably loathed this aspect of 21st-century politics, taking care to minimise the significant disability represented by his damaged eyesight, to play down the trauma of the loss of his first child in 2002, and to guard the privacy of his two young sons who, for one moment only, shared his last public appearance outside 10 Downing Street.

Gordon Brown was a substantial politician, a man of substantial achievement and significant faults, probably in the end too cautious, too thin-skinned and too cussedly human to be a great leader.

New Labour found its reforming stride too late

Phil Collins

Leader writer

The obituaries of the new Labour period in office are already being written, even though its time has only just passed. Politics always requires that you tell a clear story about what you are doing. In truth, in the maelstrom of internal conflict and external pressure, policy formation is often driven by scandal and panic as much as it is by principle and forethought. Much of the policy work the Labour Party did in opposition turned out to be inoperable. Policies enacted spawned unintended consequences. Then events occur that come to define the period in office that were never part of the original prospectus.

All that said, it still makes sense to divide the Labour period in office into three parts, broadly corresponding to changes in approach. The first period lasted from the golden glow of May 1997 until the winter crisis in the National Health Service in 2000. The failure of extra money alone to improve the service prompted the second, most fruitful, period of government between 2001 and the departure of Tony Blair from office in the summer of 2007. The premiership of Gordon Brown then marks a third phase in the Government, in which the pace of the second was slowed.

When the Blair Government was elected in May 1997 it came to office with a long history of policy development behind it. In office, though, it exhausted that preparatory work quite quickly. The granting of independence to the Bank of England was the most conspicuous policy, but really stood alone. There were three themes during this period in government. The governing idea of the administration was supplied by Mr Brown: the idea of work. The New Deal for the long-term unemployed, funded by a levy on the privatised utilities, and the introduction of tax credits to supplement the wages of those in work, heralded, it was said, a return to the idea that work was the best form of welfare.

The second notable theme of the first period was constitutional reform, although the half-hearted and incomplete programme indicated ambiguity on the part of senior personnel, not least the Prime Minister himself. Still, the devolved assemblies for Scotland and Wales are now a part of the political landscape accepted by all parties and the argument about the House of Lords is how to finish off Labour’s near-abolition of the hereditary principle, rather than how to reverse it.

In the public services, the Government’s strategy, which was essentially command and control from the central State, was well-equipped to deal with deep failure. There had been, for example, no progress on literacy for almost half a century. Placing a team in the department to force through curriculum change was an old-fashioned, and for a time very effective, use of state power. Hundreds of Public Service Agreements were set. The regimes of inspection and audit were toughened and the publication of information about services became commonplace.

The time ran out on this approach when the Chancellor of the Exchequer released the grip he had hitherto held on spending. The Government had come to office determined to shed Labour’s historical association with profligacy. Mr Brown had, for that reason, submitted to the spending plans he had inherited from his Conservative predecessor. The paradox of releasing that restraint, though, was that it called forth the need for reform.

The standard Labour analysis, throughout the Thatcher and Major years, had been that there was not a great deal wrong with the public services that a lot of money could not put right. To some extent, that was true. Teachers, nurses, doctors and police officers had all fallen behind in the pay scales, relative to their professional counterparts in the private sector. Schools and hospitals were in a dilapidated state and the system was rationing provision in the only way it could – by queues. It was obvious that extra money was going to be part of the answer. That it was not the whole answer became clear when the money started to pour. The Prime Minister, late in 2000, realised that the analysis he had inherited from opposition was wrong. He realised too that the provision of extra money was a necessary accompaniment to the difficult reforms that, it was now clear, were needed.

The second phase of Labour government was dominated, in the coverage at the time and by the accounts of it since, by foreign policy. The terrorist atrocity on September 11, 2001 confirmed in the mind of the Prime Minister something that he had defined in a speech in Chicago in 1999: that terrorist threats could no longer be contained within national borders and that, therefore, the definition of what was in Britain’s interest had to be hugely expanded. The attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the immediate consequences of the Chicago doctrine, applied to the terrorist attacks.

The last word will probably never be said on these decisions but it is not true that foreign policy meant that the Government’s domestic momentum was lost. On the contrary, it started to speed up. Changes to the healthcare system began in earnest. The internal market bequeathed by the Conservatives, which Frank Dobson had torn up, was remade. A tariff was introduced to apply to procedures to change the incentives in the system. Private companies were encouraged to offer their services and patients were given a choice of which hospital to go to.

In education, the gradual demise of what Alastair Campbell famously called the “bog-standard” comprehensive began. City Academies, free from local authority control and aided by bequests from philanthropists, made the schools system more diverse. Again, the ideas inherited from the Major Government, which had been vanquished in the first term, were revived. Much to the chagrin of the Labour Party, which contains more than its fair share of defenders of municipal accountability, a new model school was established: independent and not wholly funded by the State. The dispute between the Labour leadership and the Labour Party reached a head over the 2005 Act, which sought to establish a new cadre of independent state schools. After a bruising battle, a very much diluted Act passed into statute, to no great effect.

Over time, a model of public service reform had developed that came to define the Government at its most radical. Pressure on the provider of the service came from three sources: from the users who could choose to go elsewhere; from the central State, which set targets for performance and ensured that services were audited and inspected; and from the threat that any failing institution would be subject to losing its franchise in competition with a private company.

The practice always fell some way short of the theory, not least because few Labour MPs could be assembled to agree with it. A more comfortable phase began when Mr Blair left office and was replaced by Mr Brown. Although, ostensibly, there was no serious change of direction, the Government slowed everything down. The reforms in health were slowed almost to a standstill. Education policy was almost entirely derailed by a crisis in child protection with the aftermath of the dreadful case of Baby P, a boy battered to death at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger despite repeated visits by social workers. Only in welfare did the radicalism of the second phase continue as James Purnell tried to add greater conditions to the receipt of benefits and tried to widen the range of suppliers of welfare.

In a sense, the third phase of the Government brought it full circle. The emphasis during the Brown years on a multitude of small initiatives driven by central targets, now rebranded as guarantees, and the evident reluctance of the Government to open up the health and education markets were reminiscent of the Government’s stuttering beginnings.

Of course, just as the Blair years will not be remembered for the travails of domestic policy, so the Brown years will be recalled as the moment that the banking system almost collapsed. The banking rescue, the small discretionary fiscal stimulus and the recession were events of great economic magnitude on which the Government chose, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to fight the general election.

By the time of that general election the ideas that had sustained the Labour Party through more than a decade of government were widely felt to have been emptied of content. And yet this was only a half truth. In the Conservative policy on free schools, for example, there were glimpses of where second-phase Labour was trying to get to. The social liberalism of the coalition Government owed something to Mr Cameron’s desire to change his party, something to Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, but rather more to the example of the Labour governments.

Phil Collins is a former speechwriter for Tony Blair

‘This sucker’s going down’: diary of a financial crisis

Suzy Jagger

Politics & Business

Correspondent

For the man who told a reporter three years ago that he had no idea whether the US was heading into recession because he got a B in basic economics, President Bush showed astonishing prescience on the future of the world financial system. As Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, almost dragging the global banking system down with it, the President declared: “This sucker’s going down.”

While Britain’s “sucker” of a financial sector started to go down before its American rival, it was a US fiscal malaise that triggered the fall. Throughout the summer of 2007 banks who had lent extensively to borrowers on low incomes with bad credit histories began to warn publicly that in many cases they would not get their money back. HSBC, the owner of a US lender called Household International, startled the City and Wall Street in May of that year when it wrote off $5 billion of bad US debts. As the summer dragged on, more banks admitted that mortgage borrowers were defaulting on their repayments and that they would have to write the bad debts off. Banks started to become wary about lending to each other and by the end of the summer the wholesale lending market, where banks lend billions to each other for short periods, had dried up.

It was the crisis in this market that triggered the collapse of Northern Rock, sparking the first run on a British bank for more than a century. Its business model, devised by Adam Applegarth, its chief executive, had two main consequences. By choosing the wholesale lending market to fund Northern Rock’s mortgage book, rather than backing it with savers’ deposits, the former mutual was able to grow its business quickly and become Britain’s fifth biggest provider of home loans. It also meant that when the wholesale lending market ground to a halt, Northern Rock was the most heavily exposed.

The public began to develop a new financial vocabulary. The word “liquidity” crept into headlines, television news alerts and ordinary conversations. It seemed, almost overnight, that everyone had become familiar with the term “sub-prime loan”, even if they were not entirely sure what it meant. (It means a loan to a low-income borrower with a poor credit score.)

Central banks started to pump cheap money into the financial system to get capital markets moving again but it failed to stem the rot. If the British public had become nervous about the state of the banking sector, their anxieties took a turn for the worse on September 13, 2007. At about 10pm, the news ticker along the bottom of the BBC news screen reported that Northern Rock had gone to the Bank of England to beg for emergency funds. Once news of the approach leaked out, the bank was effectively dead. The next day, a Friday, the shares lost 32 per cent of their value. Savers, who formed long queues outside branches, withdrew £1 billion that day.