Bercow the brazen

You can buy the latest edition of Thomas Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice for just over three hundred quid, but I wouldn’t advise it. Short on jokes, in my opinion. A product of its time, fastidious early Victoriana striving desperately for the coming paradigm: scientism. Old Erskine was possibly the bastard offspring of one of our better lord chancellors, the libidinous Whig Thomas Erskine, who was born in Edinburgh and served under Grenville and Fox in the supposed ‘Government of All the Talents’ — as opposed to the one we have now, which is the ‘Government Of No Fucking Clue Whatsoever’. Thomas Erskine was a proponent of parliamentary reform and acted as defence counsel for Thomas Paine, which is chiefly why he is remembered — i.e. as a Georgian leftie, a kind of early and probably less irritating Michael Mansfield.

Of east coast Scottish ancestry, then, our Erskine May — which you would recognise in his pernickety prose. Frankly, he makes Thomas Carlyle resemble Irvine Welsh. You want lengthy subordinate clauses? He’s got ’em. I assume somewhere along the line he’s related to the Aberdonian Jim Naughtie, famous for his multiply-qualified questions which ended only when the pips began to squeak on the Today programme and the interviewee had given up the ghost and gone home. There is something about the east coast Scots, their joyless punctiliousness and sense of propriety. I had relatives living up there and they were a pretty dour crowd, perpetually lashed by wind, rain and their singularly unforgiving brand of Protestantism. I seem to remember that I wasn’t allowed to smile on a Sunday.