There’s one in every House

Thursday, 20th November 2008

The Joker, the Crackpot, the Deadweight Bore: Matthew Parris suggests some awards to recognise the enduring characters in the Commons

For decades now I’ve been quoting an after-dinner speech made by Joseph Chamberlain in 1888, about the perennial human types of the House of Commons. I have tended to conclude — as did Chamberlain — that they never change. But I’m beginning to think that we need to update the pantomime he describes. There are some new roles these day. Tempting as it is to murmur in a worldly way that the old place and its inmates are timeless, I do begin to wonder whether a top-hatted gentleman MP from Queen Victoria’s day would recognise our 21st-century House.

I’m beginning to conclude that The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, which in my time as a judge and subsequently have always been open to innovation, should take a new look, for a new century, at the categories we honour.

Much stays, of course, just as Chamberlain described it:

‘I have never known the House of Commons without a funny man. Then there is the House of Commons bore — of course, there is more than one, but there is always one par excellence; he is generally a man who is very clever, a man of encyclopaedic information which… he is always ready to impart to everybody else. Then you have the weighty man, and the gravity of the weighty man of the House of Commons is a thing to which there is no parallel in the world. You have the foolish man, you have the man with one idea, you have the independent man, you have the man who is a little cracked…’

One can almost hear — almost smell — the post-prandial cordiality, the gas, the candles, the brandy. And what Chamberlain said remains the truth, but no longer the whole truth. Even when I was in Parliament, the Smoking Room, that most quintessentially male of places, was losing its primacy. Nor is that only because of the change of hours — the slow death of long evening sittings, the rise of professional MPs whose workdays are more nine-to-five, and who do not blow in after sundown, slightly the worse for wear. It’s because, too, the demands are different.

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