Political commentary
Norman's conquest
Ferdinand Mount
What's this — four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, a time when MPs are usually beginning to think about getting off for the weekend, and the House packed to the rafters? What momentous event is about to burst upon us — World War Three, a late recount in North Devon? No, it turns out that MPs have crowded in to hear an announcement of the subject dearest to their own heart, namely their own pay. And the news is grim. Mrs Thatcher proposes a piddling increase of £1,700 a year now, and the same again this time next year, and the same again in the year after that — making a total trifling addition of £5,100 a year to bring an MP's final salary up to an exiguous £12,000 a year.
All hell breaks loose. From Joe Ashton to. Edward Du Cann, from Nicholas Winterton to Philip Whitehead, indeed from anyone to everyone (except for a few extreme puritans such as Mr James Molyneaux and Mr Dennis Skinner) outrage, indignation and umbrage are rife. The broad moderate centre in particular is immoderate and narrow in its fury at the proposed insult to the dignity of the people's representatives. To the suggestion that the people might raise an eyebrow if their representatives paid themselves the whole extra five thousand smackers in one go, thus insulating themselves from the disagreeable shifts to which the rest of us are put to keep abreast of inflation, Sir Derek Walker-Smith (East Hens) opines that the public would react quite otherwise. In Sawbridgeworth and Buntingford they are apparently saying: 'Frankly, I think it's a crying shame that MPs aren't getting their hundred quid a week rise as of now.'
The spectacle is genuinely shocking, and what is most shocking is that the majority of MPs seem to have no clue as to why it is shocking. They appear baffled by public reaction. Surely, they argue, we ought to be worth at least the salary of a marketing manager in a medium-sized firm or an assistant secretary in the civil service (the grade to which it is often claimed that MPs' pay should be automatically linked). But that is not the issue. There is, after all, a comparatively narrow gap between the two-stage increase proposed by Lord Boyle in his report and the three stages agreed by the Cabinet. The point is the naked ferocity of this public display of greed, the lack of any sense of the fitting.
All persons wielding authority depend on the illusion of loftiness. Kings, commissars and presidents may in practice spend much of their working lives in piling up personal fortunes; but they must make some decent pretence of financial abstinence. By con trast, the authority of the House of Commons used in part to rest on the generally held and correct belief that there was no money in it. Even after MPs began to be paid in 1912, in order to make membership possible for persons without private means, pay and conditions were niggardly and were improved only three or four times in the first 50 years; in the last 15 years, there have been twice as many increases and members have developed an obsession with their own payslips. They have, in a word, become proletarianised, and in a way that would have shocked Keir Hardie as much as it would have alarmed Lord Salisbury.
It is a rare degradation and the only good thing in a naughty afternoon was the sight of Mr Norman St John Stevas resolutely upholding the Government's determination that some shreds of self-respect should be clung to. You may find Mr Stevas a rather irritating figure on the TV screen — a drippy wit or a terylene fop according to taste, somehow usually striking the wrong note. But in the House of Commons — perhaps because one's expectations are lowered there — he has turned out to be a man of substance. His leadership of the House is one of the early successes of this Administration.
Success in this job is usually defined as being approachable by your own backbenchers and polite to the opposition — which Mr Michael Foot always found so difficult. The leader of the House is guardian of its rights and therefore must indeed be responsive to backbenchers; which Norman does very nicely. But equally important is the only half-understood function of the leader of the House as the Administration's public spokesman. However much Prime Ministers may depute other ministers to share this role — Mrs Thatcher has appointed Angus Maude — in the end, the public impression of a government's style, its humour in the mediaeval sense, will depend considerably on the persona of the Leader of the House, because he arranges and answers for the Government's business both to the House and to the press, because he is always there, while other ministers surface only at intervals. And Mr Stevas has already done much to alleviate this Government's somewhat taciturn tone. The last leader to have been anything like so candid and affable is said to have been Jim Prior.
The signs are that Mrs Thatcher was a little nervous at the outset that Norman might be a little too candid. It is no secret that he has been accompanied to some meetings by Mr Maude and Mr Whitelaw. There was, it is said, a certain constraint in the air. More recently Mr Stevas at a solo specialist briefing was reported to have remarked, in melodramatic tones, 'at last we are alone.'
But Mr Stevas's first solid achievement is to have quickly and surely guided safe home the first important reform of Commons procedure for years. It was quite a surprise when Francis Pym, then shadow Leader of the House, pledged the Tories at their last party conference to act on the report of the Committee of Procedure. Mrs Thatcher had not been previously thought of as an enthusiast for 'open government'. But if this phrase is more precisely interpreted to mean 'a thorough questioning of the bureaucracy and an effective scrutiny of public expenditure', then it is very much a Thatcherite cause.
The reform is laughably simple. Instead of select committees covering only a few government departments in a random, defective and/or overlapping fashion, in future there will be a dozen committees which between them cover all ministries in a systematic fashion. Sceptics claim that civil servants will continue to clam up and ministers in trouble refuse to appear before these committees; but the bureaucracy could ge,t away with these evasions before only because the investigations of select committees were so sporadic and tentative; now the system will be facing a counter-system. Defenders of the rights of the Commons Chamber should reflect that a minister who now refuses to appear before a select committee or to answer its questions properly Is likely to provoke worse trouble in the Chamber than he would from routine stonewalling at Question Time, because he will have defied a deliberate creation of this parliament.
The flaw is in the selection of the manbers of the new select Committees. This power has at least been removed from the direct nomination of the party whips who could hitherto pluck off at will any member of any select committee who was proving troublesome to the Government. Even this was achieved only after a fierce argument between Mr Stevas and the two whips. No" the selection will be made by the mysterious body of nine MPs known as the Committee of Selection, but, alas, these nine are abo nominated by the whips. Four of them are themselves former whips. None of the, others has any great reputation for independence of judgment. True, as the seleetors have been selected for the duration of this Parliament, they will inevitably develoP some independence and they do interposea little distance between the Government's patronage machine and its intended scrutineers. But the only answer is for MI's toelect the selectors at the beginning of each Parliament; the Committee of Procedure only just rejected, by five votes to seven, ao ingenious proposal to do this. Mr Stevas ought to have another look at it. But, all to all, to have given MPs rather more useful employment and rather less money that' they wanted is not such a bad week's work.
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