ANALYSIS:Britain's political expenses scandal claimed its first big scalp yesterday – the speaker of the House of Commons, only the second holder of the office forced out in over 300 years, writes FRANK MILLAR
SPEAKER MARTIN – “Gorbals Mick” to cruel sketch writers – was simply the last one to “get it”. Amid mounting outrage across Britain, and with parliament’s reputation now in the gutter, the speaker – chairman of the House of Commons in effect – had become part of the problem and a live, visible obstacle to even the beginnings of a solution.
The keeper of parliament's interests, he woefully misinterpreted the function of his high office, using taxpayers' money in an ultimately doomed attempt to block the Freedom of Information disclosures – pre-empted by the Daily Telegraph– that would lay bare the shameless ingenuity with which some MPs have abused their expenses.
As his chief Tory tormentor Douglas Carswell put it, the speaker embroiled in repeated controversies about his own use of expenses – had been seen to use the public purse in a desperate attempt to “keep the secret secret”. Yet even this discredit was not enough to trigger the revolt that finally sealed his fate in Monday’s unprecedented challenge to his authority on the floor of the House of Commons by a succession of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs.
Seven days earlier, Martin had finally surrendered the respect due his office when he abdicated his duty to protect the rights of individual MPs and delivered a stingingly partisan and openly contemptuous rebuke to Labour's Kate Hoey. Hoey's offence had been to question the speaker's decision to ask the police to investigate the leak of MPs' expenses details to the Daily Telegraph.
Almost incoherent with indignation at her affront, Martin – looking every inch the Glasgow shop steward, and now beyond a joke as a Commons speaker – told her it was easy to talk to the press and that he could hear her “pearls of wisdom” any night of the week on Sky News. He was equally dismissive of Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, complaining that he had denied him the same easy access to the airwaves.
As speaker (his public role is essentially the same as the Dáil’s Ceann Comhairle) Martin enjoyed an almost unrivalled platform from which to address not just the media but the British public. He seized that opportunity on Monday and spectacularly blew it.
It was a characteristically halting, stumbling performance, almost painful to watch. Reading from a prepared text, as if in need of prompting and reminding, Martin apologised on his own behalf and on behalf of all MPs for what had taken place.
He then proceeded to announce that he was summoning all the party leaders to a meeting within 48 hours at which, hopefully, they would agree urgent interim reforms ahead of Sir Christopher Kelly’s report and recommendations scheduled for the autumn.
It was all too little, too late. Some MPs thought that if he had taken such an initiative even six weeks before, his position might have been secured, at least for the remaining term of this parliament. By this week, however, they needed at least his confirmation that he would indeed be standing down before the general election.
Insensitive and unyielding to the last, however, Martin made no reference to his own position, triggering instant pressure on Gordon Brown’s government to make time available for an immediate debate on a substantive “no confidence” motion. Even as MPs lined up to tell the cameras his position was now untenable, it seems Speaker Martin still thought to defy them. The loyal Sir Stuart Bell confirmed he had been among those privately advising the Speaker last weekend that he should seek to defuse the situation by clarifying his intentions. Apparently also impressed by Martin’s Glaswegian grit, however, Bell then insisted the speaker retained majority support among Labour MPs and would win any confidence vote.
It is a measure of quite how detached some MPs can become from reality that Sir Stuart could imagine a speaker so challenged hanging on long enough even to permit such a debate and vote to take place.
Razor sharp Labour MP Gordon Prentice, on the other hand, was the first to grasp the impossibility of the developing situation. Sensing events running even beyond the government’s control, Prentice divined that the speaker would not survive the week.
And so it proved. After a meeting with the prime minister on Monday night came the realisation that the game was up. Not even Brown’s tribalist instinct to protect one of his own could save the speaker now. The personal tragedy for Martin (who will presumably go to the House of Lords) was that his short and brilliantly efficient statement to a packed Commons chamber yesterday came 24 hours too late to allow any lingering pretence that his was a voluntary departure.
This, rather, had been a public execution – Martin is the first Commons speaker to be forced from office since 1695. That predecessor, Sir John Trevor, was found guilty of “a high crime and misdemeanour” in accepting a bribe. Martin’s “crime” was to be seen – not entirely fairly as it happens – to resist reform of a Westminster system which many MPs have blatantly abused, and some patently defrauded.
Former minister Frank Dobson was not alone among Labour MPs revolted by what they considered, or at least feared might be regarded as, the “scapegoating” of Martin.
Lord Foulkes accused MPs of an Old Testament-style projection of their own sins on to him in the hope that it might absolve their own. It won’t of course.
More blood will inevitably be spilled by Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron as they seek to purge their parties of the most serious offenders before facing the voters in a general election. But as Carswell – a new MP and surely now a new star on the Westminster horizon – put it, Martin's departure was the necessary first step on the long and painful road to sweeping parliamentary reforms needed to rebuild public trust.
Frank Millar is London Editor ofThe Irish Times