The Times Guide to the House of Commons

The police also investigated the admission in December 2007 by Peter Hain that some donations to his own campaign to become Labour’s deputy leader “were not registered as they should have been”. The police inquiry, at the request of the Electoral Commission, cost him his post as Work and Pensions Secretary. He was cleared 11 months later, however, after prosecutors questioned the watchdog’s interpretation of the law, suggesting that no one involved in Mr Hain’s campaign could be prosecuted.

This was one of several uncomfortable moments for the Electoral Commission. In its first full term between 2001 and 2005 the watchdog, which oversees money in politics, was regarded as a largely benign if somewhat bureaucratic body. But its failure to see that political parties were taking out huge secret loans led to accusations that it was unfocused, too passive and failed to use its powers to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. It defended itself vigorously, saying that it could only act using the laws passed by Parliament. Nevertheless, the commission strengthened its investigative capacity and started casting its spotlight elsewhere, bringing its own complications when it started picking over the donations by Lord Ashcroft to the Conservatives.

Lord Ashcroft, Tory vice-chairman, businessman and philanthropist, had long been a Labour hate figure whose funding they blamed for losing their party a number of seats in 2005. He revelled in his pariah status. After receiving his peerage in 2000 from William Hague, then Tory leader, he attempted unsuccessfully to become Lord Ashcroft of Belize, reflecting his dual citizenship. He stopped donating to the Conservatives under his own name in November 2001, fuelling suggestions, which he never denied, that he was no longer on the electoral register and giving instead through a small company, Bearwood Corporate Services.

In 2009 the Electoral Commission began examining suggestions that millions given to the Tories by Bearwood originated in Belize, possibly making the donations against electoral law. The money was reported to have been moved from Stargate Holdings based at Lord Ashcroft’s bank in Belize City through two British holding companies and then to Bearwood Corporate Services. In a 15-month investigation, however, the watchdog was unable to discover what, if any, business the secretive Belize City-based Stargate conducted, and how it was financed. Lord Ashcroft was cleared.

He still ended up causing the party much embarrassment on the eve of the election, when it emerged that he had accepted his peerage on the understanding that he would pay full tax in Britain, only to remain secretly non-domiciled for tax purposes for a decade. This allowed him to save an estimated “tens of millions” of pounds of British tax on his overseas earnings while retaining his ermine.

Yet for all the fury directed at Lord Ashcroft, it is not clear that the marginal seats campaign he ran once he became the Conservatives’ deputy chairman had the impact that many Conservatives had hoped for. His blueprint, outlined in a 2006 pamphlet Smell the Coffee, involved early candidate selection, relentless leaf-leting, repeated canvassing, candidate performance polling and targeted advertising as the key to winning marginal seats. Constituencies such as Hammersmith, Cheltenham and Bolton followed to the letter the Ashcroft plan yet all remained in Labour or Liberal Democrat hands. Indeed, research suggests that the spending advantage in the marginal seats helped the Tories to win at most an additional 14 seats above those that would have fallen anyway on the 5 per cent Labour to Tory swing.

Much analysis on the 2010 general election is yet to be done but the early indications suggest that it was one where, refreshingly, big money still failed to have a decisive impact on the result.

Little joy for the smaller parties

Jill Sherman

Whitehall Editor

The election of the Green Party’s first MP as dawn broke on May 7, 2010 was one of the highlights of a long, unpredictable night. Caroline Lucas’s breakthrough in Brighton Pavilion was some compensation for an otherwise disappointing result for the minority parties, who failed to exploit the disaffection with mainstream politics. Dr Lucas, leader of the Green Party since 2008, capitalised on her own popularity and activists’ hard work for years in southern England to achieve, finally, a foothold at Westminster.

In the final stages of post-election negotiations between the parties after the inconclusive result, Dr Lucas, an MEP for the South East since 1999, briefly found herself being counted as part of a “progressive alliance” as the arithmetic meant that every additional seat was crucial. The plans fell apart but Dr Lucas turned her suitors down anyway, saying that she was interested in cooperation but not a formal coalition.

The Greens made their biggest push in a general election by fielding 335 candidates and spending £400,000 on their campaign. They had particularly high hopes in three target seats: Brighton Pavilion, Norwich South, and Lewisham Deptford. By early morning the day after the election, however, it became clear that Dr Lucas, a charismatic former CND-protester, was the only victor and the party’s overall share of the vote fell slightly by 0.1 per cent from 2005.

The party argues that the decline was a result of a highly targeted election campaign in which it pooled most of its resources into those key seats, with busloads of Green activists brought in to campaign along the seafront each weekend. In the end, the tactic was vindicated, but it was a close race: despite being favourites to win the seat, after a nail-biting count the Greens eventually won with 1,252 votes.

While disappointing for Adrian Ramsay, the party’s deputy leader, who lost in Norwich South, and Darren Johnson, who failed to make much headway in Lewisham Deptford, the most important thing for the party, was winning its first seat. As Dr Lucas said in an interview with The Times, she hopes she won’t be there on her own for too long.

Most of the minority parties failed to recapture their success in the European elections the previous year. In 2010, squeezed out of the running by the three-horse race of the main parties, the smaller ones retained their 14 Westminster seats but took a smaller overall share of the vote, 11.9 per cent, than the previous year. It was, however, up 1.6 per cent from the general election in 2005, mainly because the parties fielded more candidates. The results were particularly disappointing because many of the smaller parties had looked likely to benefit more from the backlash against the main parties over MPs’ expenses the previous year. The scandal may have stopped people voting for those individuals who had been at the centre of the expenses storm but in the end the minority parties failed to reap what should have been easy pickings.

The UK Independence Party, which had seen its popularity soar during the European elections, in which it took second place and 16.5 per cent of the vote, again failed to win a Commons seat. At one stage it looked as if Nigel Farage, the party’s former leader, could be out of the race altogether when a light aircraft in which he was being flown crashed on the eve of the election. He was fortunate to escape without serious injury but was unable to oust John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, in Buckingham.

The British National Party also failed to make the breakthrough that many had feared after the party’s shock success in 2009 when it won two European seats. It did, however, increase its share of the vote by a whisker, from 1.2 per cent in 2005 to 1.9 per cent. Nick Griffin, the party chairman and an MEP, raised his profile after appearing on Question Time on BBC One in autumn 2009, when he faced a barrage of criticism from other panellists. He was humiliated in the general election in Barking, where he stood against Margaret Hodge, the Labour incumbent, who increased her majority.

The BNP also targeted Stoke-on-Trent, where it had previously won a clutch of council seats, but Simon Darby the party’s deputy chairman, was beaten into fourth place after Tristram Hunt, the Labour candidate parachuted into the constituency, won the seat.

George Galloway, the leader of the anti-war Respect party, also had his comeuppance. The colourful Mr Galloway, who made an embarrassing appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, failed to hang on in Poplar & Limehouse, East London, where he came third behind Labour and the Tories. He did not even turn up for his count. Respect’s national share of the vote halved from 2005 to about 0.1 per cent mainly because the Iraq war was no longer a big central issue in the 2010 election.

The march of the independent MPs also came to a halt. In 2005 a record number stood and total votes cast for them reached 141,903. The betting money was on a further surge this year, with a predicted revolt against duck houses and flipped homes. But in the end it was the independents who were driven off the Commons green benches. Richard Taylor, the retired consultant who took Wyre Forest in 2001 on the back of a single-issue campaign to save his local hospital in Kidderminster, failed to retain his seat in 2010. Dr Taylor, who in his professional life wore a white coat, had taken the place of the white-suited Martin Bell, the former independent MP who seized Tatton on the back of the cash-for-favours scandal in 1997.

Dai Davies, who won a by-election at Blaenau Gwent in 2006 as an independent, was also unable to retain his seat. Even Esther Rantzen failed in her well-publicised bid to oust Labour in Luton South. The former That’s Life presenter stood as an anti-sleaze candidate against Margaret Moran, the Labour MP who claimed £22,500 in Commons allowances to fix dry rot in a second home in Southampton. Ms Moran, however, decided to stand down before the election. Her replacement, Gavin Shuker, a 28-year-old church pastor, won 14,725 votes. Ms Rantzen came fourth with 1,872 and lost her deposit.

Only one MP was left holding the flag for the independents: Lady Sylvia Hermon, a former Ulster Unionist. Lady Hermon stood down from her party in March 2010 after the UUP formed an alliance with the Conservatives. Two months later she romped home to retain her North Down seat as an independent.

Don’t emerge as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal

Matthew Parris

Times columnist

That no MP has yet suffered a heart attack in the minutes before making a maiden speech in the House of Commons, is some kind of miracle. The waiting is the worst. Sitting on those green leather benches, dreading the moment when the Speaker first calls your name, yet longing to get it over with as fast as possible, remains one of the most intense short periods of personal anxiety a man or woman can experience outside warfare.

I have parachuted freefall; aged 10 and dressed in a sailor-suit I have waited to launch into a song-and-dance routine of I Whistle a Happy Tune before a packed house in a repertory production of The King and I, as the orchestra struck up. Neither was as scary as awaiting my Commons maiden speech. But once you are on your feet, and you have your trembling hands and shaking notes under control, and you have started to talk, it is fine. You are away.

For me it went well. In light of what I shall tell you next I can tell you now that my maiden speech was considered one of the best of many maidens from the big and unusually talented parliamentary intake of 1979. That speech was a triumph. It was the rest of my parliamentary career that flopped. After my moment of glory I sank without trace in the Commons, never to resurface.

In all the seven years that followed at Westminster I did not say or do or achieve anything that came anywhere close to the success of that first Commons occasion, my maiden speech. My parliamentary career was undistinguished: for me a bitter if infinitely gentle disappointment. Cleverer new MPs than me, yes, but in time stupider ones too, overtook me one by one.

Why? My slow-burn failure baffled me. What had I overlooked? I wasn’t lazy, crazy, or personally objectionable. Even after I had left I did not really understand. Only during the decades since, decades of thinking about politics as a journalist and commentator, has the truth dawned.

The truth is this: you will never get anywhere in the House of Commons speaking for yourself. You are the representative of people’s interests, or you are nothing. There are, of course, ideals to be championed. There are arguments to be explained. There is policy logic to be pursued on its merits as well as its popular appeal. But, in the end, if what you say within that surprisingly small chamber carries no echo in the big country outside it then you are without point, and with discreet and subtle cruelty the very stones and carpets at Westminster will communicate to you that fact.

“Speaking for myself, Mr Deputy Speaker…” is a phrase that, sought in Hansard’s electronic archive, would doubtless yield a generous harvest of instances. Do not be fooled. Whether they know it consciously or not, the most effective parliamentarians are never speaking mainly for themselves. They are inhabited by a kind of animal understanding of the beast that an MP is supposed to be: of what, in that remarkably large assembly of directly elected persons that with unintended accuracy we call the Lower House, an MP is for.

You, the MP, are there for the herd. You are there to speak for substantial groups of citizens with shared interests or desires. By no means are you there for the majority alone – or, necessarily, at all. You can usefully spend your whole career fighting for minorities. Groups for whom you speak may be beleaguered and outnumbered; but they must be groups. They must need and want a voice. You are their voice; they must respond to your voice, adding theirs; and your fellow parliamentarians must hear the noise. Your voice is your own, but if you are not somebody else’s voice too, the place will not work for you.

You, the MP, are mainly there – not only, but mainly – as a messenger. You bring the message; you frame the message; you may have a talent for phrasing and targeting and marketing the message. You may even improve the message. You may have the skill so to express the message that it gathers force among those you represent. But you are seldom there to create the message, and unless and until it has gathered that force, you are the sounding brass or tinkling cymbal of St Paul’s epistle. In the end the message comes not from inside your head but from outside the walls of Westminster, or it does not come at all. You, the MP, are there to carry it.

“Tribune” is an old-fashioned word whose meaning as we move into a new millennium is in danger of passing from the popular understanding. But if the word is out of date, what it signifies is not. Not for nothing have MPs been classically called the tribunes of the people. Their own beliefs and opinions carry most weight, and sometimes only carry weight at all, when they reflect the beliefs, opinions and interests of significant, numerous or powerful groups among the people who have sent them to Westminster.

Edmund Burke missed the point when he wrote: “Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Note the sly old propagandist’s selection of the word “judgment” for the MP’s view, and “opinion” for the elector’s. But in rejecting Burke’s advice I am not making a moral judgment. I am describing a dynamic. In our legislature, arguments born of the personal reflections of individual legislators do not prosper. Arguments carried into the chamber from the country outside do. Burke, in fact, knew that well enough, and in terms of his own personal career fared better articulating the external voice than advancing it within the chamber. The Commons is not really about debate, it is about tug-o’-war; and your pull on the rope is a pull-by-proxy, for those not present.

How do I know this? I can only reply that it is not a matter of constitutional theory, but of experience. There was perhaps one moment during my seven years when I did, flickeringly, understand in heart as well as head what it meant to be an advocate – and I realised even at the time that it was on an arcane, minor and minority issue. I had become greatly exercised by the brutality and pointlessness of sending women convicted of prostitution to prison. In the event (with Robert Kilroy-Silk, then an MP) I managed to persuade my standing committee, and through them the Home Secretary, to change the law and remove imprisonment from the tariff.

Much of my argument was an argument in logic, but to bolster our case I invited the English Collective of Prostitutes to send down to the Commons a bus-load of their members (waiting for them in the Central Lobby I mistook a delegation on another issue from the Catholic Women’s League for my own invitees, displeasing the League greatly) and led them to a committee room in Westminster Hall, where we addressed the other members of my standing committee, and took questions.

As I spoke, believing in the women’s cause, and with many of them, real people, sitting around me, responding, I understood in the gut as well as the brain, what it means to be an MP.

Democracy as we British know it is not experienced in the intellect but in the stomach. What an MP is for is felt collectively at an unconscious level by a population few of whom could express it even if they cared to try. Popular sentiment is a current. It is a wind. It is a subterranean force. When you are with it – when it is with you – you just know. When you are not, you are that sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.

Time and again I rose to my feet in the chamber with what I thought, and still think, a brilliantly true idea to explain. How sure I was that we should adopt road-pricing in our country: that the economic theory of rationing a scarce commodity by price rather than by queue applied not just to turf or treacle tarts, but to tarmac too. Time and again I made speeches, asked questions, wrote newspaper articles, or argued in my Transport Select Committee, setting out a logical case that I knew, and still know, to be true and in the end inevitable.

Nobody listened. Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed either. Nobody was interested. Nobody cared. Inevitable, yes: but not in 1986. Twentieth-century Britain was not ready for road pricing.

Or reform of the law on homosexuality. Time and again I argued the case for reducing the age of consent. Persistently I complained about police harassment of gay men. How cogently did I unpick the contradictions and expose the imperfections of the law relating to importuning in a public place. How assiduously did I collect evidence, interview defendants, correspond with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and question ministers. How patiently I explained all this in the standing committee. How contemptuous I felt when a kindly Labour whip, the late Walter Harrison, took me aside to advise: “You will get nowhere in this place, lad, unless you leave all that alone.” There is not (Walter went on to explain) the feeling for it in the country. How hotly I protested to myself, under my breath: “Well there ought to be.”

Walter and I were both wrong. Public opinion on homosexuality was moving, changing. There existed the beginnings of an interest group among aggrieved gay men, the beginnings of the courage to stand up for themselves in public; and the beginnings of a supporting group of sympathisers among their millions of friends and relatives. HIV-Aids would in time bring all this to the surface. But 1982 was too early. Fifteen years later, Tony Blair, with his cannier instinct for the public mood, judged the moment right to propose change, as I had judged the moment wrong; and laws were duly amended. That was a time when young politicians and soon-to-be politicians such as David Cameron were changing their minds on social issues like these – or under the impression that they were changing their minds. What they were really doing was picking up, instinctively, a message from the people.

Time and again I spoke and wrote and asked Parliamentary Questions about the plight of the Sahrawi people in the Western Sahara, violently dispossessed by the Kingdom of Morocco. I visited them. I saw their plight. I heard their case. I studied their history. I was convinced. The case I made to the Foreign Secretary was unanswerable.

Indeed unanswered. He could not disagree and did not care to agree. Silence, that most eloquent of Commons responses, should have told me what no minister would put into words: the Sahrawi people have no constituency in the United Kingdom; and the United Kingdom has an interest in supporting Morocco. Silence said so; silence says so much at Westminster; but I was blocking my ears to the silence.

It is a funny feeling, speaking in the chamber when your argument carries no resonance outside it. Your fellow MPs do not howl you down. They just talk among themselves, or lope out for a drink or a cup of tea. You notice the Press Gallery above the Speaker’s Chair clearing. Once you have gained a reputation for arguments that are disconnected from popular sentiment or headline news, your colleagues stop coming in when you are speaking. You argue into a void, like someone talking to the birds in a park. You wait for responses to your speech the next morning; but there is nothing, not even a report. And you reflect on that passage in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, describing an early feminist: “The Abbess was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilisation. She hurled herself against the obstinacy of her time.”

You hear it said, not of yourself but of others like you, that they are “frightfully clever” but “a bit of a loner”. And if not remarkably thick-skinned (which, surprisingly, few MPs are) you become prey to feelings of injustice and self-pity.

They are misplaced. You are overlooking something rather obvious. The House of Commons is not a place where ideas are born and knows in its heart that it is not supposed to be. It is an echo-chamber in which interests and opinions are spoken for, and tested for resonance among more than six hundred other tribunes – and for their resonance, when reported, outside.

Resonance is not the same thing as rationality. During the last Parliament, Joanna Lumley, Nick Clegg and a small band of mostly backbench MPs understood how much more resonant was the case for special privileges for former Gurkhas than it was rational. Towards the end of the last century, Margaret Thatcher and much of her Cabinet failed to understand how much less resonant was the case for the Poll Tax, than it was reasonable. When the last Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was Chancellor in 2000 he and his Cabinet colleagues were surprised (and threatened with a backbench rebellion) when they failed to anticipate that opposition to an entirely rational 75p per week increase in the state pension (in line with subdued inflation) would carry tremendous resonance outside the counting-houses of Whitehall. The same Cabinet entirely misjudged the (irrational) anger of motorists at (rational) increases in fuel duty, in line with rising prices.

Let us try to construct the profile of a fictional backbencher who made the right call on each of these judgments: the imaginary MP (let us call him Reg Smythe) who found himself on the right side of the argument on Poll Tax, Fuel Tax, pension increases, Gurkhas and Joanna Lumley. Three features, I would submit, stand out in Reg Smythe’s profile. First, he is not unduly troubled by logic. Secondly, he has a keen sense of the importance to voters of their wallets. Thirdly, his ear is well-attuned to waves of popular sentiment.

But I would add this about Reg. He gets genuinely fired-up in the causes to which he attaches himself. His eyes prick with tears as he stands beside Dame Joanna and a cluster of ageing Ghurkhas, and the hard-heartedness of the Ministry of Defence infuriates him. His rage at the 75p pension increase is not synthetic, and he knows many pensioners in his own constituency whose distress is real. He has entirely persuaded himself that fuel-tax increases are wrong not because motorists should not pay their share of environmental costs (Reg is passionate about the environment, too) but because transport is the lubricant of our whole economy, and these increases will hit entrepreneurs, road-hauliers and small business people.