Chris McLaughlin describes the momentous events behind the scenes which led to Michael Martin’s resignation and Gordon Brown’s pledge to clean up the whole parliamentary system
SOMETIME last Sunday morning, the alarm flashed around the Downing Street grapevine. “He’s gone missing”, telephoned a worried aide to a colleague. Gordon Brown had ensconced himself with civil servants for discussions on how to sort out the out-of-control expenses scandal and the imminent demise of House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin.
And that was the last place the small coterie of political advisors wanted the Prime Minister to be. These were party and political matters requiring bold political moves, not a Whitehall fudge. The re-establishment of faith in the political system, and the need to keep Labour in the electoral game at all, required reaching out further than a spring clean of the Westminster village.
The advice eventually advocated from within the political team included an independent panel, with fraud squad and Inland Revenue officers present, to deal with individual cases of extravagant or illegal expenses claims by MPs; root-and-branch reform of the system, the abolition of national identity cards and the deferment or abolition of Trident, a constitutional convention involving, among others, church and civic leaders and an end to all second jobs for MPs. There was talk of a televised address to the nation.
Above all, after a week of being seen to be dragging his feet and playing catch up with David Cameron, Mr Brown had to take a lead. Saying sorry just wasn’t good enough.
By the time Mr Brown and his team turned up to Labour’s National Executive Meeting in Portcullis House in Westminster on Tuesday, he was “ready to read the riot act” against the offending MPs, according to one aide.
“We discussed the options, waterboarding, electricity and so on, and deciding to go for a good clubbing”, he explained in a graphic attempt to convey the Number 10 mood.
The NEC meeting had been choreographed with the party general secretary Ray Collins and party chiefs. Mr Brown kicked off the discussion and the debate went round the table in alphabetical order.
By the time it came to MPs’ representative Anne Snelgrove, the MP for South Swindon, the atmosphere in the room was so fraught she burst into tears.
The committee had already listened, with members nodding assent, to Ellie Reeves argued in favour of wholesale reselection of all MPs in order to ensure a thorough cleansing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, a move passed over in favour of the steps unanimously adopted and which grant Mr Collins and the chief whip Nick Brown the power to act swiftly in dealing with those MPs who fail the independent audit to be carried out by the end of the year.
The previous evening Mr Brown had held a meeting with Mr Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to get their backing for the Commons reforms. The encounter with Mr Cameron was, as usual, not an easy one between two men who simply do not trust each other.
“Put it this way”, said an aide, “if you are being charitable you could say it was a moment of clarity for the two leaders who realised they had to leap out of their party strait-jackets to deal with the biggest crisis threatening the entire political edifice in their lifetime. If you wanted to be uncharitable, you could say Gordon finally wrung out of Cameron what he has been trying to get agreement on for ages: reform of the expenses system. Gordon has been a hairshirt on this stuff for years.”
Mr Brown also saw Speaker Martin. But speculation that he told the Glasgow North East MP that his time in the chair was up is vehemently denied. Chief Whip Nick Brown, who was the first to be informed by Mr Martin, insists the decision was entirely his own and that the Prime Minister was genuinely surprised when told. It might be true, but there are many in the party and Parliament who would feel better if the story was the other way round, regardless of parliamentary protocol. It is going to be a tough by-election for Labour.
Almost as tough as the campaigns the party is attempting to fight in the local council and European elections, where the expenses debacle has poured fuel on the bonfire of Labour votes.
In Hertford, party activists were forced to cancel the market stall launch of their campaign because, as they said in an email to the NEC, “almost all our usual party stalwarts are not only just as angry as the wider public but are also simply too scared to face the public themselves, knowing that we will all be blamed for the actions of a number of greedy MPs”.
In a message to party members after the NEC meeting, which decided to place under independent scrutiny every expenses claim made by every Labour MP in the past four years, Mr Brown said: “This is not a time for papering over the cracks – it’s a time to clean up the system as a whole.”
So how far will it go, and how many MPs will be culled? On Tuesday, Mr Brown was talking about those “who broke the rules”. By Wednesday morning, he was telling GMTV viewers: “There are many cases where people will be suspended, where people will have to stand down at the next election and no longer be candidates for the Labour Party.”
Or as one well-placed minister put it: “There just might be a group of MPs who decide the game’s just not worth it. There will be a lot of MPs wondering how they are going to pay the bills. They have taken quite a hit in terms and conditions, but a necessary hit.”
