On Monday, the House of Commons passed, by one vote, a motion to allow MPs to be suspended from parliament (a ‘risk-based exclusion’) if arrested for sexual or violent crime. The government had preferred that the trigger should be charge, not arrest, but there were enough Tory rebels, including Theresa May, for the lower threshold to be chosen. Jess Phillips, supporting the change, asked rhetorically, and contemptuously: ‘Why do we think we’re so special in here?’ There is, in fact, an answer to her question, and it has nothing to do with any unmerited self-esteem which MPs may feel. King Charles I entered the Commons in person on 4 January 1642. His purpose was to arrest five MPs. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I have accused these persons of no slight crime, but treason, I must have them wheresoever I find them.’ They were not there. The King famously said: ‘I see the birds have flown.’ Equally famously, the Speaker refused to ‘say anything but what the House commands’. As the King retreated from the chamber, members shouted out: ‘Privilege, Privilege.’ They were not referring to generous expenses (a late-20th-century excrescence), but to the privilege of the proceedings of the House over any other authority, including the King (or what we nowadays call the executive, since King Charles III would quite rightly not dream of attending in person). Because MPs have been duly elected, they have the absolute right of attendance. This is what is implied in the phrase ‘the High Court of Parliament’. That right has never been withdrawn from an individual member – as is now proposed – by a committee, but only by the decision of the whole House.
It is strange this is not obvious to all MPs, because it is the basis on which they must operate and almost always have. In her speech in the Commons on Monday, the Leader of the House and thus the responsible minister, Penny Mordaunt, seemed not to understand it. Yet if the executive, in any form, has the power to decide that an MP be suspended or expelled from parliament, it thereby becomes a higher authority than parliament, so nullifying the voters’ choice. The new rule means that henceforth the police have only to arrest an MP on a sex or violence accusation for a committee to get him or her out. That power is wrong in principle and will, in practice, corrupt.
Applications have just closed for the editorship of Conservative Home, the most important independent website for Conservative news and debate. But why did the vacancy occur? No one knows. Conservative Home was very well edited by a former colleague of mine, Paul Goodman. In February, it was announced that he had been made a life peer. The boss of Conservative Home, Lord Ashcroft, immediately tweeted his congratulations to Goodman on becoming ‘a working peer’, but continued: ‘Paul has been Editor of Conservative Home for ten years for which I thank him for his professionalism in that role as he leaves us for the next stage in his career.’ Goodman has made no public remarks about his departure, and no one has been told why Lord Ashcroft chose to remove him from his post in this oblique way. After all, there is no rule of honour, ethics or employment which says that only one life peer can be involved with Conservative Home. So it may be of interest to note that Goodman has recently put down a written question in the House of Lords to the Department for Business and Trade asking the government about its policy on employment tribunals and unfair dismissal.
As I write this column, my wife is working steadily away in her role as churchwarden and treasurer of the parochial church council in our village. She is filling in answers to laborious inquiries about who she and her fellow PCC members are from Churches, Charities and Local Authorities (CCLA) Investment Management Limited, which does what its name suggests. She must do this work to comply with laws about money-laundering. She bitterly regrets that her parish has no money to launder. If she had it, she says, adapting Psalm 51, she would wash it and it would be whiter than snow. Meanwhile, the Church Commissioners are setting up a £100 million programme of ‘impact investment, research and engagement’ to atone for the earnings from slavery amassed 300 years ago by its predecessor, Queen Anne’s Bounty. It turns out, however, that almost all the Bounty’s earnings came not from slavery but from British government debt, paying out interest on annuities, a fact which the Commissioners discovered once they had investigated it, but in effect ignored. Please could this non-dirty money be quickly recycled into the function for which it was intended – the Christian life of the parishes of England?
The other week, I mentioned Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov’s wonderful 19th-century novel about a man who does nothing. I have been reading it, suitably slowly, and have just finished. One day, Oblomov, trying feebly to learn what is going on in the great world, asks a few desultory questions of a friend, Alexeyev. The talk peters out: “‘Well,’ Oblomov said after a pause, ‘what other news is there in politics?’ ‘They write that the earth is cooling down: one day it will be all frozen.’ ‘Will it indeed? But that is not politics at all, is it?’ said Oblomov.” No, it isn’t, and nor is the belief that the world is warming up. What misery, money-wasting and bad policy have resulted in our time from our failure to understand this.
I find the phrase ‘deep dive’ useful. As soon as you hear it, you know that the person offering it is not to be trusted. It is one of a growing collection of official words and phrases which mean the opposite of what they state. Others include, ‘We welcome the report’, ‘We take allegations of x very seriously’, ‘Your call is important to us’, ‘We’ve been very clear’ and ‘diversity’.
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