AND ANOTHER THING
A strong stench of putrefaction from a curried Parliament
PAUL JOHNSON
One of my possessions which gives me constant pleasure is a framed crudely print- ed handbill from the 1650s, which hangs in the downstairs loo. I have read it so many times I almost know it by heart. It was given to me by Antonia Fraser when she was working on her life of Oliver Cromwell, and it provides the text of the great man's speech when he dissolved the Long Parlia- ment on 20 April 1653. Cromwell was not one for messing about. He told the MPs exactly what he thought. They were 'a Pack of mercenary Wretches', who had dishon- oured Parliament 'by your Contempt of all Virtue' and defied it 'by your Practise of every Vice'. They had 'no more Religion than my Horse'. Their 'God was gold'. They were 'sordid Prostitutes' who had turned the Commons house into 'a Den of Thieves'. He said to them, his voice rising in anger: 'Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole Nation. You, who were deput- ed here by the People to get Grievances redressed, are yourselves become the great- est Grievance.' He commanded them, therefore, 'upon the Peril of your Lives', to `depart immediately from this place', end- ing: 'Go, get you out! Make Haste! Ye Venal Slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining Baubel [the Mace] there, and lock up the Doors!'
There must be many people today, sur- veying the ever-growing iniquities of the present House of Commons, who long for another Cromwell to march down to West- minster at the head of 'a few files of sol- diers' and clear out the Augean stables once again. Never in living memory has a parliament so quickly and comprehensively forfeited the confidence of the nation and made itself so generally detested by every kind of misbehaviour. I don't know which is more conspicuous — the lack of leadership or distinction of any kind, or the low moral tone to be found in all quarters of the House. I feel sorry for Speaker Betty Boothroyd, an upright and high-minded woman, who has to preside over the sordid antics of this disreputable assembly: how she must groan inwardly as she looks down daily on that sea of godless, crafty, malevo- lent or merely bovine faces! There are, I know for a fact, good men and women in that crew, perhaps more than we realise. But their voices are scarce- ly heard in the pandemonium. From top to bottom the accent is on self-service, buck- passing, dodging, evasion and vice. At the posh end, the Foreign Secretary primly tells the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee that he himself is blame- less, and plants the black spot firmly on his former colleague Lord Younger. Michael Heseltine — 'Mister President', as he has the impudence to call himself — gleefully tips a bucket of garbage on the head of the Attorney-General. No nonsense about loy- alty among this lot! It is a measure of the standards of the present House of Com- mons that Heseltine is now declared, by the backbenches, to be 'Mister Clean', though his caution over the immunity certificates was no more than yardarm-squaring: he signed them along with the rest, and, if it had not been for Alan Clark's confession in court, three innocent men would still have gone to jail. At the other end of the spec- trum we have Denis Skinner, ludicrously disguised, discovered grubbing about among the fleshpots of Carlyle Square. In between there is every variety of venality and lewdness. There was a time when a Tory MP who wrote a salacious novel about goings-on in Westminster might have aroused a certain amount of disapproval, to put it mildly. Not in this House. Edwina Currie queens it in the lob- bies and smirks all the way to the bank as she slips another wadge of moolah down her cleavage. Of course she took the pre- caution, before she gave birth, of securing the protection of the Commons homintern — and we have it on the authority of Matthew Parris, the homosexual Times par- liamentary columnist, that it has many more members than we are allowed to know. I sometimes wonder whether this pushy lady is not the archetypal member of the present House and if it will go down in history as the Curried Parliament. But there are so many other claimants to this distinction. David Mellor, Michael Mates, Tim Yeo, Hartley Booth, the five-mistress transport minister Steven Norris — and so the list goes on. It is an interesting sign of the times that most of these delinquents seem to have aroused envy rather than dis- approbation. In this sleazy Commons, the finger of scorn and ridicule is pointed, rather, at John Selwyn Gummer, denounced to me by one of his colleagues as 'a nasty goody-goody' who has the nerve to set a good example in his private life and who appears to possess, and be guided by, that almost forgotten organ, a conscience.
But if Edwina Currie is the typical mem- ber of this Parliament, its chief characteris- tic is contempt for democracy. Never, since the suffrage became universal, have MPs collectively paid so little attention to the views of their constituents. The leaders of all three parties, followed by the bulk of their followers, pushed through the Maas- tricht Treaty though they knew the nation was against it; they refused a referendum though three-quarters of the people wanted one. On a typical day last month, the Com- mons voted overwhelmingly against capital punishment, which has the passionate sup- port of four-fifths of the voters, and low- ered the age of consent for sodomy, in direct defiance of the popular majority. Labour MPs are even more disdainful of the public than the Tories. Only two lis- tened to their constituents and so refused to toe the homosexual party line. They are already being witch-hunted. On the issues which transfix the British — the over- whelming increase in crime and the failure to deal with it, the relentless increase in public expenditure and the consequent surge in taxes — the generality of MPs are blind, deaf, apathetic, aloof, nonchalant or callous. Their only response to popular anxiety is a derisive two-fingered salute.
Theoretically this Parliament has more than three years to run. It is a disturbing thought. For if the Political Nation and the Real Nation are so far apart now, what will it be like by 1997? Are we moving towards a crisis of the system? Is there, lurking in the shadows, a Cromwell waiting for his hour to come?
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