THE SILENT CHAMBER

Simon Hoggart says that most of the Westminster buzz

has gone from the Commons to Millbank; that's where the television interviewers are

THERE IS a crisis in the House of Com- mons Chamber. The once great heart of our national debate has undergone a bypass and for many MPs is now an occa- sional fringe activity. A speech in the House ranks in prestige slightly above an appearance on Sky News, some way below Breakfast With Frost.

It is as if football reporting consisted of endless wrangles about the new England manag- er, with a throwaway paragraph mentioning that we had just lost to San Marino. Sometimes I wander into the Press Gallery and find three other people there: the attendant, the Hansard reporter and the per- son waiting to take over from the Hansard reporter. My own paper, the Guardian, has just started a column which reprints half a dozen of each week's best speeches. This has been a success, but it also reflects the low esteem in which the Chamber is held; if we didn't print these bons mots, they would be lost. Hansard now costs £5 a day, an absurd price which hovers in limbo between what it does cost to print and what it ought to cost to buy. Few institutions can afford it, so why should a sensible MP think he can immortalise his thoughts by appearing in it? On some particularly thin days, the only reporting of the Chamber is provided by me and Matthew Parris, my opposite num- ber on the Times. But we are sketchwriters, unconcerned with balanced coverage, only on the lookout for cheap jokes. As soon as we have got them, we disappear to our computer terminals by way of the tea room. As Baroness Young put it in the Lords last year, in a debate on declining standards of British public life, 'Some clever political correspondent gives you a ten-inch column, saying isn't that clever, the minister knocked off the backbencher, or the back- bencher knocked off the minister.' I recog- nised Matthew and me in her complaint, and to some extent shared it; 20 years ago the sketch was the blob of cream, your reward for ploughing through the serious stuff. Now it is sometimes all the Chamber has to offer.

The Strangers' Gallery is still full for Prime Minister's Question Time — as seen on television — but it empties soon after- wards, even for what in past years would have been thought high-class entertain- ment: Cook v. Rifkind, Prescott v. Hesel- tine. By the end of the day, there may be nobody there but a handful of puzzled tourists, drunks and schoolchildren whose teachers could not get them into anything more exciting.

MPs themselves will still turn out for the big event —'for three-line whips they are obliged to, and most will deign to listen to the speech before the vote. On high-profile topics, such as the Lottery, MPs' pay or anything to do with Europe, there will be a decent turnout, and the Speaker may need to limit back-bench speeches to ten min- utes. But this is rare. MPs are busier than ever doing other things, and listening to other MPs comes low on their list of priori- ties.

Tony Banks once suggested that there should be desks in the Chamber, so that MPs could deal with correspondence while waiting for their turn to speak. This was thought another waggish Banks joke at the time, but it might be a good idea. Members could work uninterrupted by telephones or constituents, and the standard of debate could rise as other MPs tried to make their colleagues look up and listen.

There used to be MPs whose name appearing on the annun- ciators would 'fill the Cham- ber'. Enoch Powell and Brian Walden were the two out- standing back-bench perform- ers of the early Seventies. I can't think of any now. Geof- frey Howe, Norman Lamont and Margaret Thatcher pro- vided resignation speeches which were dramatic, but none remarkable for their rhetoric. Gordon Brown can be funny, Robin Cook is one front-benchers on either side who can pace a speech and adjust it to the circumstances around him. Heseltine is often amusing, at times given to flights of comic fantasy, but I doubt if anyone hear- ing him has ever had his mind changed. I admired Edwina Currie for her speech on the homosexual age of consent, but more for her courage in standing up to the yob- bos on her own side than for anything she said. Peter Mandelson is thought by some to be the second most (or the most) pow- erful person behind the scenes of the Labour Party, yet his last public interven- tion was barely literate. Oratory is not dead but, like Walt Disney, is alleged to be on ice, waiting for the cure to be invented. If Churchill or Bevan came back, they would of the few sound prolix, pompous and insufferably slow to a modern audience.

Most ministers and their shadows simply plough drearily through the speech in front of them. You wonder why they bother. Often a minister will make a statement to, say, the three dozen MPs who have both- ered to stay behind after Question Time. Meanwhile, the smattering of journalists above his head will be flipping through the text in a quarter of the time it takes him to read it aloud. Why not offer the same facil- ity to MPs? They are busy people, too.

For many MPs, their duties in the Moth- er of Parliaments have shrunk to a 48-hour week, running from PM's Questions on Tuesday to the same event on Thursday. It is no good blaming them. We are always being told that modern technology has made the old office redundant; why not Westminster too? Most of an MP's job can be done at home. Physically turning up at Parliament for some is a way of avoiding work, or at least avoiding their con- stituents. The scandal about Annie's Bar, the real-life setting for the television series, is not that it is full of drunken MPs, but that it isn't. Many nights they are at home.

It is rare now for an important govern- ment announcement to be made in the Chamber. Everything is signalled in advance through leaks and briefs by bur- geoning teams of spin-doctors. Even John Major's support for elections in Northern Ireland on the day of the Mitchell Commis- sion report had been expected; interven- tions from John Hume and David Trimble were predictable and predicted, like the next step in a quadrille. When Harriet Har- man, the quintessence of New Labour, con- trived to give Tony Blair the worst public relations disaster of his leadership, she did not think it worth appearing in the Cham- ber for two days. Instead, she tried to shore up her position on television, having been granted an audience by Jon Snow of Chan- nel 4 News. When she was obliged to address the House next day — her subject, health, was up for debate — all anyone can recall was her waspish put-down of Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman.

There are many reasons for the slow death of parliamentary debate. MPs now have better equipped offices and larger staffs. Word-processors, as always, increase the amount of work to be done: if you do not send a long and sympathetic letter to a distressed constituent, your rival might.

They also have a live feed from the Chamber — necessary now that offices are spread up to ten minutes' walk from the House. For instance, the pleasantly fur- nished quarters at One Parliament Street have television monitors, decent food, a friendly bar and even a shop. Why bother crossing the street? Since you don't need to be there to hear what's being said, you don't need to go there. A vicious circle is established.

The present Government must take much of the blame. The new select com- mittees which oversee each department have had some success, if patchy. MPs find they can have more direct influence on pol- icy there, jostling with only a few other members, their vote sometimes carrying real weight. In the Chamber, their views are heard by a single bored Whip, his ear half-cocked for heresy.

Mr Major's Government has been notori- ous for rewarding sycophancy — or, as I sup- pose they would put it, loyalty. Some of the most egregious greasers in the House, such as Gyles Brandreth, Simon Bums and Cheryl Gillan, have been promoted, sending a mes- sage that Downing Street does not merely want obedience, it demands obeisance. The lesson for an independent MP is that he is not wanted on voyage, and the sensible ones such as George Walden are quitting. The American system of discrete execu- tive and legislature is called the separation of powers; often, as over the budget shut- down, it becomes the diffusion of impo- tence. But the Westminster system, by which the executive is drawn from the leg- islature, can be just as harmful, giving min- isters a grotesque amount of patronage.

The most important element in the decline of the Chamber has been broad- casting. College Green, the narrow triangle of grass opposite the Victoria Tower, is now the unofficial media encampment whenever important news breaks. At one point during John Major's resignation last year, I counted 23 crews fighting for posi- tions which would get Big Ben in shot but exclude other cameras. College Green has become Glastonbury for the chattering classes, and is now even a tourist attraction. Hard to believe, but when Mrs Teresa Gor- man appeared there, she was chased by a gang of admiring (female) groupies — HRT versus EEC.

Meanwhile, back in the House, Labour MPs were trying to find spurious means of raising Major's cry-for-help memo as a subject for debate. But the deputy speak- er was firm. The House debates what is on the order paper, and the world can wait. When every forum for discussion television, radio, newspapers, the Clapham omnibus — is devoted to a sin- gle topic, with the sole exception of the House of Commons, then we pause to wonder what it exists for. Not instant judgments, perhaps, but some response to real life would be welcome.

At less hectic times, or in bad weather, MPs and ministers throng No. 4 Millbank, the building which houses ITN and the BBC's enormous Westminster staff. This is where most MPs yearn to be. Sit in the Chamber and you are heard by a few col- leagues and the minuscule minority which watches the live feed on cable television. Appear on local radio in your constituen- cy, on ITN's House to House, The World at One or, the big prize, News at Ten, and your views are known by thousands, even millions.

There's a permanent buzz there, notice- ably absent from the Chamber. When a big story is moving, astute lobby correspon- dents — themselves invited in for off-the- shelf punditry — hang round the foyer in Millbank, since MPs are more numerous there and more accessible. None of them would dream of taking the pulse of the political world by sitting in the House.

Does the death of the Commons Cham- ber matter? Perhaps not. Few people pay much heed to the proceedings in the Bun- destag, the Senate or the Japanese Diet, all of which pass laws for reasonably successful nations. Perhaps we should bid it the same slow and regretful farewell we seem to be administering to the royal family.

Simon Hoggart is Parliamentary sketchwriter for the Guardian.