If Westminster is, as many say, simply a kind of club, then Peter Bone MP was a consummate club member. Peter Bone was one of those perennial backbenchers happy to pass their careers as amusing side characters. Politicians like Bone seem to recede into the Palace of Westminster itself, becoming one of its grinning gargoyles.
You know the type. The distinctive silhouette. The signature outfit (in Bone’s case, boiler room pinstripes). The belligerently encyclopaedic knowledge of Erskine May. The wry devotion to constituency issues, which are raised in the chamber even during great moments of national crisis. The reserved seat on the green benches – woe to him that unwittingly steals it. The collection of potted eccentricities. The easy familiarity with the Commons staff. People like Bone just come with the house; even their views, which are often heterodox, are simply treated as another funny quirk.
Last December Peter Bone disappeared from Parliament. This was at the behest of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the Independent Expert Panel – two extra-parliamentary bodies – which had each recommended Bone’s suspension from Parliament for bullying and sexual harassment. Bone was a grand old chair of British politics; suddenly he wasn’t. Very little stirred. A duly elected member of the House of Commons had been bundled from office with unnerving speed, and silence.
Bone is far from the only one. In the Britain of the 2020s, politicians – indeed entire factions of politicians – have the habit of abruptly disappearing.
Where do they go? These MPs have each come under investigation by one of several tribunals; once one of these bodies brings proceedings against an MP they find themselves dragged into a strange nether pocket from which few escape.
A nether world, because these tribunals defy description. They overlap and tangle together; they disappear and reappear. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. The Independent Expert Panel. The Commons Select Committee on Standards (which oversees the Work of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards). The Committee of Privileges. The Commons Select Committee of Privileges. What exactly is their remit? Nobody knows. In July of last year, the Committee of Privileges formally rebuked several of Boris Johnson’s allies for words spoken outside of Westminster, where its writ does not run.
A nether world, because these aren’t law courts, but they have each taken on a sham judicial character, and are decked out with court-like appearance and rigmarole. These are powerful bodies: each has the right to recommend or order the suspension of an MP from the House of Commons; if this term of suspension is over six weeks, then the MP’s mandate from his or her constituents is junked and must be sought anew. But the actual penal code is seldom invoked in these places; Peter Bone was accused of a number of misdemeanours as reason for his suspension, but no actual criminal charges have since been brought against him.
And despite the judicial conceit, none of the usual freedoms of the defendant apply here. Making prejudicial statements about the defendant doesn’t bar a committee member from sitting in judgement of them. The real judicial system will only deploy gag orders when there is a physical danger to those involved in a trial; but the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards immediately slapped one on Miriam Cates the moment he announced his investigation into her in December.
‘Scandalising’ the court was abolished as a form of contempt in England and Wales in 2013. But these tribunals haven’t been so gracious; these are, again, not real courts, but they still demand that other people take them at their own swollen estimate. In a recent ruling against Andrew Bridgen MP, the fact that he “called [the Commissioner’s] integrity into question on the basis of wholly unsubstantiated and false allegations” was listed as an aggravating factor.
These tribunals are transforming British public life. We’re often told that our politics is merely a reflection of bigger social and historical churns. But these great questions can now be suspended through bureaucratic fiat. Johnsonism as a political force survived his resignation from Downing Street. What it did not survive was the Privileges Committee, which barred Boris Johnson from the Palace of Westminster itself, and intimated that his allies in Parliament might be in for the same if they criticised its proceedings.
Similarly, the coalesced Tory Right – the ‘five families’ – seemed to hold the future of Rishi Sunak’s premiership in their hands back in December. The announcement of the Cates investigation, which arrived at a very convenient hour, immediately blew all this momentum. Sunak can now openly avow that he won’t countenance any further tightening of the Rwanda bill – the five families’ signature demand.
For years this has been going on, and for years we have pretended it is normal. The Westminster lobby, which always holds itself to be a smiling sceptic of power, sedulously uses these tribunals’ own jargon: ‘public confidence’, ‘public trust’, ‘unlawful’.
But these tribunals make a mockery of representative government. An electoral mandate from the people isn’t something that can be thrown out by what is essentially an internal HR procedure. Members of Parliament are part of a sovereign legislature; they are not, and have never been, Government employees.
And what’s being enforced by these tribunals is only risible. Miriam Cates is currently being accused of violating Paragraph 17 of the House of Commons Code of Conduct, which holds that “Members shall never undertake any action which would cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons”. The House of Commons is of course not entitled to a “reputation” of any kind; this is the language of a school assembly, not a democratic legislature. To this dubious inventory of rules we can add the list of apparently binding General Principles of Conduct, which includes offensive inanities like “Selflessness”, “Leadership” and “Openness”.
What this represents is a fairly open attempt to impose ideological tests on MPs. Note who gets a light touch. Keith Vaz’s flamboyant personal corruption was known to all, but procedural wheels only started to turn against him in late 2016. Barry Gardiner, despite having taken a six-figure sum from a CCP influence-peddler, has simply been allowed to carry on in his career as a Peter Bone-esque house eccentric.
It’s a system that parliamentarians have to a large extent constructed themselves. MPs from all parties have connived in the HR methods that are now used against them. The powers of Britain’s Parliament are no joke; there is by definition no law above it, and those who exercise it must accept the resentment, hatred and to an extent danger that come with real sovereign authority. But at every turn MPs have sought to insulate themselves from this, and grant themselves the perks and protections of an ordinary workplace. Even MPs of the populist Right, those most menaced by these tribunals, have been all too complicit: witness Nadine Dorries’s and Mark Francois’s demands for action against those who criticise them online. If MPs are now treated as mere employees, then they must accept a large part of the blame. They do not deserve our sympathy.
But they do deserve our support. The tribunal system will be used to throw a wrench into any constitutional effort to reform the status quo. The system is a result of that breezy contempt for electoral mandates which has become common since 2016; you can see this in the term used to describe these tribunals – a ‘watchdog’ – which is a piece of vulgar brawn, machismo, and faux-scepticism. The people’s elected representatives are not to be menaced by these bodies, and any future parliamentary opposition that does not want to be steadily winnowed away must have the courage to face them down.
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