21st April 2022
Well.
Those were an interesting few days in parliament.
We went from a government bullishly seeking to block the prime minister being investigated by the powerful committee on privileges, to supporting the opposition motion.
This government cannot even get political gangsterism right.
Great credit here should go to the opposition parties.
Faced with a law-breaking prime minister who has said – on any view – incorrect things to parliament about the facts relevant to that law-breaking, the opposition could have gone for censure motion, or a confidence motion, or a contempt motion.
And had the opposition done so, it would have been defeated – perhaps on a whipped vote.
But instead the Labour leadership put forward a motion to which no sensible member of parliament could object, and the motion even said any consideration by the privileges committee should await the end of the Metropolitan police investigation.
And the Labour chair of the privileges committee – who had been vocal in his disdain of the prime minister on this issue – said he would recuse himself, thereby removing another possible objection.
Against this tactical savviness, the government position collapsed.
First there was to be an amendment: but that went.
Then the vote was to be unwhipped: and that went.
And in the end, there was not even a vote.
The motion went through on the nod.
Let’s just think about that.
A motion of the house of commons that a sitting prime minister should be investigated by the privileges committee in respect of four statements he made in the house about the circumstances of that law breaking went through – and not a single member of parliament opposed it.
Of course: asking for an investigation is one thing – and the committee may well not find the prime minister in contempt.
But – in and of itself – that such a motion should go through without any objection is remarkable.
One reason for the opposition’s tactical success is that Conservative members of parliament do not want another situation like with Owen Paterson – where they were whipped to frustrate a report, only for the position to be reversed in front of their eyes.
Another reason is that – as this blog has previously averred – a parliamentary majority is no barrier to Nemesis following Hubris.
Other prime ministers in command of working majorities have been brought down before between elections – Thatcher, Blair – and so there is no reason this one cannot be either.
A privileges committee investigation is a serious matter, as they have the power to recommend suspensions from the house.
Another investigation – following the Sue Gray and metropolitan investigations – will also keep this issue alive – and that is, no doubt, the strategic goal of the opposition.
The constitutional Wednesday Addams in any of us can only smile at all of this not going away.
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What is happening here is – in effect – a parliamentary stress-test, an anxious examination of our constitutional arrangements.
What do you do with a law-breaking prime minister who has misled the house of commons?
Can this be checked and balanced?
The answer to this should not be a civil servant’s report – however independently minded the civil servant.
Nor should it be a decision by the police to issue a penalty, or not.
It is – rightly – a matter for parliament.
And this week’s deft parliamentary footwork by Labour and the other opposition parties has ensured that there will be a parliamentary answer to this particular parliamentary question.
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Encouraging to see a solid tactical play from the opposition parties at last. Judging by Johnson’s anger at Starmer yesterday and apparent frustration with Beth Rigby continuing to ask the ‘wrong’ questions in an interview today, the PM is perhaps finally beginning to realise that these tactics may actually hurt him, that he might not get away with just shrugging this all off.
And as a bit of an aside from the main point, not being an Addams family expert I’m struggling with the Wednesday Addams reference. Wikipedia tells me she is obsessed with death, and depending on the depiction either sweet-natured or sadistic. I assume the intention is more the latter?
If Wednesday Addams were a constitutional law expert, she would enjoy constitutional law being ‘eventful’ – just to see what happens.
Your response reminds me of the (probably fictitious) example of “officer performance reports” curated from the Armed Forces of several western nations:-
“His men would follow him, but only out of curiosity…”
Sproggit quoted:
> “His men would follow him, but only out of curiosity…”
I don’t think any of his men followed the certainly fictitious subaltern described in the admirable “England, Their England” who was reported to run to put out fires in ammunition dumps. Although this caused an artillery officer to drop his cigarette, before asking
“Where is he buried?”
Available at Faded Page (Canada)
https://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20110106
and in the public domain in the UK as well (author died 1941) and described at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England,_Their_England
I hope the committee gets hold of the rumoured taxpayer-funded 300 photos.
Anyone who has ever worked in “critical service provision” or perhaps a highly regulated industry will have some experience of a “post incident review” or a “problem management review” of some kind.
The concept is simple. It starts when something bad happens. Then, like as not, a large number of people will run around, frantically trying to fix the problem and return things to “normal operations”. Then, shortly after the event, the participants are called together to triage what happened, learn from the mistakes and implement changes to ensure that the same issue does not repeat. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
If you step back from the inevitable “noise” from Westminster – the theatrics of PMQs, the gushed statements to cameras, the preening ministers as then enter or leave No. 10, the one thing that is missing from this event – and so many before it – is to ask: do we need to revisit our rules or protocols and implement changes to prevent this from happening again?
In this specific case, I’ll conceded it might be a tad premature, at least if all the facts are not yet known. But if, for the sake of discourse, we could hypothesize that investigations discover that the PM did in fact attend more than one social gathering where others were fined, did in fact knowingly mislead parliament and therefore did in fact breach the rules, what do we expect will happen?
Well, H.M. Opposition are going to call for the PM to resign, obviously. The PM, the Cabinet and likely a good number of Conservative MP’s are going to laugh back. And shortly thereafter a new scandal will arise, to take the place of this tawdry tale in the daily news cycle. This will be consigned to the waste-bin of history.
But if that is all that happens, then we have every reason to expect that the door remains open to repetitions of this scenario, where a Prime Minister or member of the Cabinet will lie, break the law, perhaps say sorry, and carry on regardless.
If a bank kept on screwing up with issues of similar import, they would get cautions, warnings, fines and ultimately lose their banking license.
If a surgeon kept on making mistakes whilst operating on patients, they would get warnings, peer reviews, patient lawsuits and may lose their license to practice medicine.
Yet if you think about it, the nature, scope and importance of parliamentarians and their ability to shape and influence the lives of citizens is greater than all the other examples I’ve given you. Whether it’s a decision to go to war or not; a decision on blood alcohol limits, or speed limits, or mask mandates, lives are at risk.
So why is it that the group of people charged with the highest responsibility in this country are not held to the highest standard? Why should we tolerate a scenario in which those charged with these responsibilities can treat them with disdain and then, even if caught, shrug it off and carry on regardless? Perhaps to repeat their malfeasance?
The problem is one of design. No matter how vocal they may be during a period of opposition, it remains highly unlikely that any party winning office at the polls will turn around and enact laws that hold them to a higher standard. Where is their incentive to do that? As a result, the controls we may like to see over parliamentary and ministerial conduct will simply never come in to being. Some of our parliamentarians may be stupid, but even they recognise the foot-gun potential of actually holding themselves to account.
It seems to me that we simply don’t have a framework of checks and balances for the most important branches of our government. Arguing that we can always eject the party in power at the next General Election is pointless if their replacements have no more incentive to address these issues than the present incumbents.
It rather feels as though we should empanel some form of oversight; still elected, but completely separate from parliament, charged with establishing the rules of parliamentary conduct, overseeing it, and so on.
If we don’t repeats of the current farce will be with us until the end of time. Or perhaps this is just another example of the UK experiencing a “Joseph de Maistre moment” (he being the (writer, lawyer, diplomat and) philosopher attributed with the saying, “Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.” (Every nation gets the government it deserves.)
“It is – rightly – a matter for parliament.”
And yet Boris Johnson’s lying should not be a matter for lengthy discussion by anyone, let alone Parliament. He clearly lied and yet his lying that he lied and lying that he lied that he lied has meant people have been embroiled in this ludicrous matter for months. Don’t forget that Genesis practically begins with a lie – the serpent is portrayed as a deceptive creature or trickster, who promotes as good what God had forbidden and shows particular cunning in its deception.