James Forsyth reviews the week in Politics
To step into the House of Commons nowadays is like gatecrashing a wake. In happier days, its corridors were full of MPs quietly plotting. Now, the scene is members being offered a supportive squeeze of the shoulder by a colleague. The ones being consoled are those who have been ‘Legged’ — to use a phrase — ordered to repay substantial sums of money by Sir Thomas Legg. There is no gloating over the fate of these unfortunates; too many MPs know it could have been them.
For scores of MPs, such concerns have supplanted normal politics. One shadow cabinet minister told me recently that he had spent ages on the phone trying to get companies to produce receipts for work that he had done five years ago, before coming to the realisation that there were better uses for his time and just refunded the money. But if Legg’s final repayment demands and the Kelly review finally begin to allow parliament to move on from the expenses scandal then politics could start moving again — and at pace. The unresolved battle over the Labour leadership could be restarted soon.
The first step out of the expenses morass is the Kelly review. Even before its publication, MPs had braced themselves for the new order: second homes are rented, not owned, those within ‘reasonable’ commuting distance of Westminster having only one home, and no one is allowed to hire their spouse. All these proposals have public support — as does anything that makes life difficult for the hated political class. So they will likely be passed, even if the effect is to deter anyone but the rich and most determined political obsessive from entering parliament. No party wants to stand between the mob and its anger. Some MPs even talk of going beyond Kelly’s recommendations to prevent the papers singling them out. It would be a brave commuter-belt MP who continued to claim for a second home.
This is all the more agonising for MPs because in a panic they voted away their right to set their own pay and conditions: they are at Kelly’s mercy. So they are putting their hopes in the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the body that the Kelly review will be referred to. It won’t be up and running until the New Year but they hope it will dilute some of Kelly’s most unpalatable proposals (as Harriet Harman was strongly signalling it would). One MP, for example, told me that he thought the independent panel would allow him to keep his second home because renting a house in his constituency would be more expensive than his mortgage interest.
In Cameron’s circle, there was intense discussion of how he could once more steal a march on Brown over expenses. One idea discussed was calling for the immediate implementation of the review; a call that would have been meaningless given that the legislation means that it has to be referred to the IPSA, but would have produced a strong soundbite for the six o’clock news. The Cameron leadership has always had an eye for a stunt and the prospect of being able to skewer the Prime Minister — as either the defender of the troughers or as a leader too weak to stand up to his own backbenchers — was tempting. (Think of the Blair soundbite, ‘I lead my party, he follows his.’)
On the Labour side, the dynamics are very different. The expenses scandal has killed leadership speculation. One Cabinet member complains that the Kelly affair has ‘discombobulated’ the backbenchers — instead of plotting to depose Gordon Brown, as they should be, they are worrying about their mortgage interest. Should the expenses issue be resolved somehow, they might once again devote their mental energy to good old- fashioned disloyalty.
Much has changed since the failed June coup against Gordon Brown: the soft left has lost faith in him. If Jon Cruddas and the other Compass MPs had joined the rebellion, the Prime Minister would have been toppled. Instead they stayed on the sidelines. They stood aside thinking that the would-be plotters did not represent a change of direction. However, electoral reality is now catching up with them. One well-connected figure in this wing of the party says that the prospect of knocking on a door and having to explain why people should vote for five more years of Prime Minister Brown is ‘terrifying, chilling’. They know there is no answer to the Tories’ planned closing argument: do you want five more years of Brown?
As before, the Labour leadership issue distils into two questions: what mechanism would depose him, and who would replace him? The view is that one way to force Brown out would be for departing MPs to do one last service to the party and deliver enough names in the New Year to make Brown’s position untenable. But the problem is the potential candidates remain in come-and-get-me mode. Alan Johnson has shown no desire even to walk towards the mantle, let alone pick it up and run with it. Word is that Team Miliband is once again installing the metaphorical phone lines. But as was the case last time, he won’t wield the dagger himself. The cautious Miliband must be aware that if he won and Labour lost the next election then he would almost certainly be challenged for the leadership post-election by a couple of candidates, Balls and Cruddas.
The Conservatives, to a man, know that they need Brown to stay. His departure is the single biggest risk factor in the Tory game-plan. Glasses are raised to him in Westminster bars. He is called a ‘treasure’ and ‘our greatest asset’. Without Mr Brown the Tories would, as one shadow cabinet member puts it, ‘be back in hung parliament territory’. The Tories can only hope that Labour MPs remain too obsessed by their expenses to do anything about it.
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