The register of members’ interests for the House of Commons turns 50 today. Few MPs will be celebrating. Politicians have long shuddered over a document that provides fertile ground for journalists from which to dig out stories. The register – and the declarations within it – have cost more than a few MPs their careers. Plenty of other MPs and even PMs have come a cropper as a result of what is, and isn’t, in the register: Rishi Sunak is just one of the more high-profile figures to end up in hot water after being accused of failing to fill the register out fully.
While politicians dislike the register, its existence is good news for the rest of us. It’s easy to take it for granted that those we elect to represent us in parliament should declare their interests, but things haven’t always been this way.
Plenty of other MPs and even PMs have come a cropper as a result of what is, and isn’t, in the register
For centuries, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ reigned supreme. In practice, this often meant that parliament stood wholly unaccountable – even to the voters – for there was no ‘need to know’ whether MPs were taking shareholder dividends from arms dealers, or wholly supported by trade unions. Whenever this was queried, MPs could claim ‘parliamentary privilege’, then as now an elastic term.
Into this cozy scene came an outsider: the journalist Andrew Roth. A refugee from the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the United States, Roth’s background was in naval intelligence, and he was a keen amateur psychologist. Working as a parliamentary correspondent, in 1953 he couldn’t work out why the Labour MP Richard Stokes took such a strong pro-Arab line when his party colleagues were mostly pro-Israeli. Eventually, he realised that Stokes’ company directorship, selling oil pipelines across Arab countries, was just one example of a plethora of MPs’ undeclared company directorships, shareholdings and sponsorships.
With little press interest in covering these, Roth privately published his own register: the first edition of The Business Background of MPs launched in 1957, the proofs literally cut-and-pasted together on a typewriter. Subsequent parliaments would see new editions published. When Roth had difficulties with libel threats, friendly MPs like Philip Noel-Baker and Willie Hamilton would read out excerpts on the floor of the Commons – protecting the contents under parliamentary privilege.
While Roth pressed for an official register, the issue was dismissed as a crackpot scheme. This changed with the scandal of the architect John Poulson in the early 1970s, and the revelation that his corrupt practice had kept ‘tame’ politicians on its payroll, from the Labour council leader T. Dan Smith to the Conservative home secretary Reginald Maudling. ‘It’s just a few bad apples’ gave way to ‘something must be done’.
The register of members’ interests, long campaigned for, owes its existence to the unique circumstances of the hung parliament of March to September 1974. The incoming Labour government lacked a majority and was looking for ‘quick wins’ involving no public expenditure – and preferably which would disproportionately embarrass Conservative MPs, who were much more likely to hold company directorships.
Many of the issues debated in 1974 remain surprisingly topical. MPs were divided between those like Peter Shore, who insisted that MPs’ financial affairs were a private matter, and those like Brian Walden, who insisted that MPs should have nothing to hide.
Yet the fateful resolution of the House of 22 May 1974 that brought the register into existence was not the end of the matter. MPs tried to have the register strangled at birth. Resistance to filling out the mandatory new forms led to the first register not being compiled until 1975. Subsequent editions of the register were blocked for another five years, by the improbable alliance of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. They were united in leading backbench rebellions, claiming parliamentary sovereignty extended to MPs’ financial affairs – even after the House had decreed otherwise.
MPs like Neil Hamilton joked about properly declaring a biscuit
Margaret Thatcher’s government resurrected the moribund register in 1980. However, this resuscitation came at a cost. Categories were watered down, alongside their enforcement. There is a direct parallel here to another innovation of the first half of the 1970s, the parliamentary expenses regime, and how MPs in the 1980s were told to ‘spend it, boys’ as a perk of the job. Here, too, there was no mechanism for enforcement.
By the late 1980s, the register had become something of a joke, with reams of undeclared financial interests: Roth’s 1988 revelation that the lobbyist Ian Greer was paying a stable of ‘tame’ MPs like Sir Michael Grylls, who weren’t declaring these payments, foreshadowed the ‘cash for questions’ scandal of the early 1990s. By the time of the Major government, a string of financial scandals stood testament to the emasculation of the register. All the while, MPs like Neil Hamilton joked about properly declaring a biscuit.
What salvaged the register was John Major convening the committee on standards in public life in 1994, and Lord Nolan’s Seven Principles of Public Life, released in the committee’s first annual report the following year. The late 1990s saw a range of public institutions, including the civil service and the House of Lords, instigate far-reaching rule changes that were all aimed at embedding those seven principles. This included introducing the House of Commons’ first enforcement mechanisms, with the 1995 establishment of a parliamentary commissioner for standards. Rules were still flouted – Ted Heath continued to refuse to properly disclose payments from Chinese state-owned companies – but a formal mechanism existed to hold him to account.
The New Labour years saw fresh challenges. On the one hand, there was a broad consensus that the Nolan regime offered the best hope for moving on from the scandals of the Major years. On the other, this came with an assumption that such rules were only for Tories to observe, and a string of Labour MPs fell foul of the commissioner’s rulings. This was further complicated by the piecemeal nature of Nolan reforms for parliamentarians and ministers, leading to a ‘twin track’ of separate rules, and ministers arguing – with some success – that they should be exempt from both sets.
Recent years have seen a sustained assault waged on compliance with the rules, and the damage wrought under Boris Johnson’s premiership has yet to be fully processed. The Owen Paterson case – in which the Tory MP was accused of breaking lobbying rules, something he denied – saw an attempt by MPs to retrospectively rewrite the rules. Some saw this as a bid by politicians to let off one of their own. If so, it failed: the backlash was swift. Paterson – and Boris Johnson, who had attempted to defend his Tory colleague – paid a heavy price. Time will tell whether that was a turning point for the future of the register of members’ interests.
Comments