Finally, a day MPs could look forward to: a day spent talking about themselves. With Nick Clegg, the Typhoid Mary of constitutional reform, having remembered he wasn’t quite so keen on granting the public more powers to recall MPs if changing policy was included as a reason for doing so, it was left to Greg Clark, minister for universities, to lead the second reading of the government’s recall bill.
Clark acted like a supply teacher who had drawn the short straw of teaching sex education to particularly disruptive year 7s. The bill’s main distinction is that it is disliked by everyone, either for being too libertarian or too repressive, and Clark didn’t even pretend to be an enthusiastic supporter. He fell over himself time and again to acknowledge the limitations of the legislation. “Yes, yes, I know that making MPs who have been banged up for less than a year, or have been suspended from the Commons for more than 21 days, subject to recall is feeble,” he said plaintively. “But it’s marginally better than doing nothing.”
Not for everyone. Richard Drax, aka Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset with a diploma in tractor maintenance, could not believe that MPs who had done something wrong would not turn themselves in to the Old Bill and resign their seat on the spot (the expenses scandal appeared to have passed him by). “What we need to restore is honour,” he argued. “We do not need legislation for that.”
Others were more concerned the bill would be the thin end of the wedge; the electorate might use the power of recall to punish them for voting with their conscience. Voting without their conscience after arm-twisting by party whips seemed a more likely concern, but backbenchers on both sides of the house decided this was such an unlikely scenario it wasn’t worth discussing.
For Douglas Carswell, the failure of the recall bill to go far enough in making MPs accountable to their constituencies was the tipping point in his defection to Ukip and he wasted no time in supporting the amendments put forward by his friend, the more fey and diffident Zac Goldsmith. Forgetting to mention whether recall should apply to an MP whose party leader had just done a deal with a Polish Holocaust denier to screw the European parliament for £2m, Carswell produced a guitar and started singing in a Caribbean accent. “MPs committin’ a cardinal sin / If they doan wanna do dis recall ting …”
Just as Carswell was about to rhyme “MPs skivin” with “Nige high-fivin”, Clark remembered the new bill would have actually resulted in six MPs being recalled in the last 700 years, rather than the twofour that had been suggested. “I mentioned Chris Huhne and Eric Illsley on the imprisonment aspect,” he said. “In terms of suspension, there would have been four more – Teresa Gorman, the Rt Hon member for Leicester East, Denis MacShane and Patrick Mercer.”
It was thoughtful of Clark not to mention Keith Vaz by name, but there was really no need to spare his blushes. Vaz wasn’t in the chamber. He was chairing the home affairs select committee, where the business of the day was to find someone who wasn’t on Leon Brittan’s dinner-party guest list to chair the child abuse enquiry. It’s an uphill struggle. “I’m really not a member of the establishment,” pleaded Fiona Woolf CBE, 686th lord mayor of London. “So am I,” Vaz replied.
