Into the filth with a cynical sneer
In about 9 days time crocodile tears and insincere good wishes will be commonplace in Westminster as the Commons say farewell to the Speaker they have sacked and was probably the worst Speaker ever.
Not only was he incompetent at the job but he milked the system to the utmost for personal pleasure and convenience. The foreign holidays he arranged for himself and his wife by getting dodgy invitations as Speaker to some of the most exotic tourist spots in the world were notorious. His own living expenses in his free state apartments were extravagantly claimed and he encouraged the whole climate of ‘milking’ the MPs’ expenses system with the results we now know. So it seems the right time to remind readers of what a monster we are losing, while at the same time seeing how the climate of disregard for the traditions of Parliament seems to be not one whit abated when it comes to the choice of his successor.
The sooner this parliament is dissolved the better. It’s the pits and dragging us all down into the filth.
Christina Speight
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PRIVATE EYE 1237 29.5-11.6.09
Called to Ordure
What crocodile tears were shed after the glorious obliteration of the Commons’ Speaker. The day after Michael Martin accepted the inevitable and announced he would resign in June, relieved MPs rushed up to his chair to show their solidarity.
Among them was health secretary Alan Johnson, who gave Martin a handshake and a fraternal wink. Can this be the same Alan Johnson whose “friends” just two days earlier had been putting it about that he thought his brother trade union veteran Martin was a complete liability in the Speaker’s chair? It certainly can be folks!
Labour whips are furious that they have lost their pet speaker. Feeling the loss most keenly is John Spellar who led the applause in the commons’ lobby on the day of his resignation. The entire whips’ office lined up like a cricket team clapping the batsman off the pitch at the end of a big innings.
Spellar, a hard-nut shop steward, had long plotted with Martin groupies to keep the freedom of Information Act at bay and ensure that the whips’ back bench lobby donkeys got their full entitlements. With chief whip Nick Brown going on Radio 4 to say that “Michael was one of us” , and another whip. Barbara Keeley, in tears at his departure. Labour party managers are no longer bothering to pretend that they saw Martin as a genuinely non-partisan figure - which is, after all, the whole point of the speaker.
Martin was seen not just as “one of us” om the chamber and the Fees Office, the Commons expenses fountain over which he presided with such benign grace. Labour class warriors regarded the former steel factory convener as a symbol of their swagger over the political system. Having now seen Martin explode so messily, Labour’s heavies are proving bad losers.
Backbenchers who stabbed Martin in the front have been booed and hissed in the chamber. Political hacks who wrote about the Speaker with insufficient respect have been called “racist” and Jim Sheridan (Lab, Paisley & Renfrewshire North) has demanded the such journalists be expelled from the Palace of Westminster for “abusing the facilities” [Aren’t they allowed to go to the loo, then? -cs}
The response by Martin’s mafia to this setback suggests that, if Labour doesn’t win the next general election, we could have a job dragging them out of Downing Street.
The person who has really pissed off the old Speaker’s thugs is Labour MP Gordon Prentice (Pendle) who was the first to stick in the knife on the day before his resignation. Prentice collaborated with Tory backbencher Douglas Carswell (Harwich) and shortly before the two men attacked Martin in front of a packed chamber, they were to be seen in deep discussion with one another in the corridor just behind the Speaker’s chair. Perhaps they were discussing the pressure and abuse they were encountering for organising a motion of ‘no confidence’ in Martin.
Prentice sits for a Lancashire seat but he is a Scot educated in Glasgow . This wrecked the whips absurd case that all the criticism of Martin was being got up by English public school toffs. The voters of Pendle may recognise Prentice’s courage; but if he manages to hold on to the marginal seat it will not be thanks to any help from the Brownite party machine.
When Betty Boothroyd stood down as Speaker in 2000, the same Gordon Prentice organised hustings for the large number of candidates for the Speakership. The one person who refused to take part? Mick Martin. If he had been exposed to examination in front of MPs at that point, he might have betrayed his inability to string a sentence together.
Speakers, by custom, have to be dragged to the chair - a symbol of the reluctance they are meant to show. Yet Martin had long been campaigning for the job. How can we be sure of that? The morning after Martin and his Glaswegian machine politics had won him the Speakership Martin came across Prentice in the Commons Tea Room. “Ah Mr Hustings, “ he said sarcastically, “This is where I held my hustings.”, he added, pointing to the Tea Room tables.
This was a Speaker, let us remember, who not only hired Carter-Fuck as his official spokesmen (running up a characteristically hefty bill for the taxpayer) , but who was also proposed and seconded by those fine upstanding figures. Peter Snape (now Lord Snape, (one of the peers investigated by the Sunday Times) and Ann Keen (since outed as one of the most notorious expenses claimers in the Commons) . In their speeches on 23 October 2000 they spoke at length about Martin’s Glaswegian upbringing. Snape almost pulled out an onion as he claimed that Martin had first gone to work in “a second-hand boiler suit and a pair of boots” and praised his “even temper” - something that often deserted him over the next nine years.
Snape went on to attack “ a media [sic] obsessed with plots, counter-plots, and tittle-tattle” and even made a wisecrack about journalists who “put the wrong name on their expense accounts” . As we now know, it was not just hacks who fiddled their exes.
‘Gavel Basher’
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TELEGRAPH 12.6.09
John Bercow is the Speaker that Parliament is going to get but not the one it needs
John Bercow will almost certainly win – the question is whether he will last, says Benedict Brogan.
Shortly after noon yesterday, the next Speaker of the House of Commons crossed his legs and nodded approvingly as Gordon Brown spouted his schemes for democratic renewal. Wedged between his backbench colleagues, he allowed himself an indulgent smile at one of the Prime Minister's attempts at humour, and appeared to add a murmured "hear, hear" to the cheers of the Labour benches. When David Cameron spoke, he looked suitably stern, careful not to betray a hint of sympathy, in case it alarmed his followers.
His campaign manager, lurking at the rear of the chamber, darted occasional looks towards the candidate. A Labour MP of redoubtable talent as an organiser, Martin Salter is masterminding a military operation to secure the Left-wing majority that will put his man in the chair when MPs vote in less than a fortnight.
I should point out, of course, that this hero of the Labour benches is in fact a Conservative – and that unless someone can be found to stop him, John Bercow, the MP for Buckingham, will become the second Speaker in a row, after Michael Martin, to be elected by a socialist block vote, with no support from the Conservatives.
The prospect of a Bercow Speakership is causing dismay in the Tory ranks, and barely disguised glee on the Government benches. Until now, both sides have viewed the outcome in strictly personal terms: a beauty contest between competing peacocks in the parliamentary aviary. Those who bothered to think about it treated the contest as a bit of a joke, a sideshow to the political circus of a party trying and failing – woefully – to unseat its leader.
But with Mr Brown safely barricaded in his bunker, the House can now turn its mind to the pressing question of its future, and more specifically its choice of a replacement for Mr Martin. The secret ballot on June 22 will start the reshaping of an institutional reputation that has sunk to an abysmal low.
As the public face of the Commons, the next Speaker must contribute to the rebuilding of public confidence, as well as reversing Parliament's supine uselessness in the face of an overweening executive. Above all, he or she must lead the way in restoring the morale of MPs, by encouraging the good and helping drive out the bad.
This burden of expectations is perhaps unrealistic. Some MPs will point out that the Speaker should be no more than a good referee: impartial, anonymous and, above all, unobtrusive. They see little role for him in the battles to rebuild British politics after the devastation of the past month.
By last night, the number of possible candidates had risen to eight: five Conservatives, two from Labour and one Liberal Democrat. With such a wide field, and 11 days to go, it seems premature to predict the outcome. But in the past few days, I have struggled to find anyone who does not expect Mr Bercow to be elected. Conservatives have all but given up, and are instead looking for ways to make sure everyone knows he will win without Tory votes. On the Labour side, no other candidate is securing significant support.
To many, the case against Mr Bercow is overwhelming. Some may mock his Pickwickian manner, or voice tribal contempt for a politician whose personal trajectory has taken him from the fringes of the far-Right Monday Club to the deepest bosom of the Labour Party (despite his retaining the Tory whip). But what Mr Bercow's colleagues really hate is this: he is a greaser. It is not the ideological flipping that has earned him such enmity; it is the oleaginous way that he has sucked up to the enemy for years, to the detriment of his own side.
No one can deny that Mr Bercow is a parliamentarian to his fingertips, passionate about the central place of the Commons in national life. From his earliest days as a backbencher, he mastered its procedures, using his talent as a public speaker to turn himself into a redoubtable debater. By itself, his fluency might be a welcome relief from the inarticulate ramblings of Mr Martin. It would be noteworthy – though he makes nothing of it – that Mr Bercow would be the first Jewish Speaker.
Yet if the Commons is to regain some measure of public respect, it must above all be prepared to defy the established order, to stand fast against the tyranny of Downing Street and the contempt of Cabinet ministers. The charge against Mr Bercow is that his efforts to win the Speakership have been so blatantly partisan that his impartiality must be in doubt. Also cited against him are his performance as a chairman of standing committees – "a martinet" was one description – and his time as a Tory Treasury spokesman under Iain Duncan Smith ("not intellectually up to it").
With the defenestration of Mr Martin still raw in Labour minds, Mr Bercow risks appearing a prisoner of those Labour MPs who see the contest as an opportunity to avenge the removal of one of their own. In the Whips' Office and elsewhere, there is an appetite for punishing the toffs on the opposing benches by giving them the Tory the Tories hate.
He has, admittedly, secured wider support within Labour: from the Right of the party, from Cabinet ministers, including David Miliband, from Labour women, and from those who accept that it has to be a Tory and see him as the least worst option. They claim that he is the only candidate who combines parliamentary experience and modernising credentials.
They also argue – with some justification – that the obvious Tory alternatives scarcely rebut the Prime Minister's jibe that the Commons is no more than a "gentlemen's club". Sir Patrick Cormack is the first to admit that his reputation for pomposity might get in the way of his surprisingly modernist credentials, not least his pledge to serve only one term. Sir Alan Haselhurst, the deputy speaker, destroyed his chances by charging his lavish gardening bills to the taxpayer. Sir George Young, who is likely to emerge as the preferred choice of the Conservative benches, is an Old Etonian baronet, who may be judged too genteel to give a decisive lead. Asks one MP: "Do we want to end up with a Speaker who went to the same school as the Mayor of London and the future Prime Minister?"
However, the most telling point is made by another potential Tory candidate, Richard Shepherd. This "dead parliament walking" is not fit to take this decision: the next Speaker will have a duty to ignore convention and submit himself to re-election by a new, purged House after a dissolution. With Speaker Bercow considered a foregone conclusion, there is high-level talk among the Tories of using their majority in the coming Parliament, if it materialises, to reverse the result.
Whoever wins the Speakership must contemplate the prospect of being the first Speaker to face a fight for re-election less than a year after being dragged – so very willingly – to the chair. And, of course, being ejected from it.
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