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Parliament must be empowered if honesty is to be restored to politics, argues Edward Pearce

The procession of fiddles, moral amnesia and plain fraud continues, starting every kind of wild populist talk – advancement of dud celebrities such as Esther Rantzen or wet fireworks like Martin Bell or, worse, an instant general election in this climate of rage.

The Conservatives must reflect and bury their dead elsewhere, but on the Labour side the real problem is a historic deterioration in the motivation and quality of MPs under “modernisation”. One long-term minister told me his reaction to the 1983 landslide. “If it has to be machine politics, so be it.” So it was, so it has been. An inferior, hollowed-out model of MP, then office holder, was consciously fostered. Would Hazel Blears or Tony McNulty and comparable members of the Right Honourable undead have held high office in a healthy ministry? As for Michael Martin, he was machine politics to end machine politics – a low-flying Jimmy from the Glasgow municipal pool of untalent.

The deterioration was largely conscious and contrived, following Tony Blair’s impulse to remove debate, which requires intelligence, for compliance, which doesn’t. Compliance was a silent injunction and comfortably achieved. A marked increase in the number of junior ministers edged up some incomes without anyone noticing. A lake of parliamentary private secretaries, at once stagnant and growing, extended voting control. Quality was never a priority.

However, some offices actually require quality. Consequently, the moral tone of our immediate times was struck by the Home Secretary – the Home Secretary! The great crisis of political honesty, now entering its second month, made its immediate start with Jacqui Smith, whose obtaining of money by deception served as trailer before the Daily Telegraph ran the big picture. The Home Office has been held by Peel, Palmerston, Asquith, Churchill and Butler, and recently by the likes of Roy Jenkins, Douglas Hurd, Merlyn Rees and, contention notwithstanding, Michael Howard – serious people. So how could it ever have been given to this peculating jobsworth?

Not quite honest politicians do not jump up suddenly to annoy us. They are the creatures of the low and level sea of mediocrity from which contemporary ministers are drawn. That mediocrity owes everything to the ditching of serious purpose in undistracted pursuit of assorted bitch goddesses – victory, office, power. Private shabbiness fits perfectly with the atrophied conscience of public persons. Jacqui Smith was never in creation Cabinet material, morally, intellectually or by reason of an atom of independent spirit. But she was dumb-loyal. She rose to be Chief Whip as the present Prime Minister’s trustee. She was bloody infantry indeed, although not, if she could help it, poor.

There are roots to such discreditable hirings. Machine politics would be accomplished by “new” Labour’s contempt for debate, conviction and individual spirit. Nothing illustrates this better than the occupancy of the Speaker’s chair by Michael Martin, a machine politician’s runner. I knew very well indeed another Speaker, Jack Weatherill, a gentle, high-conscienced,

un-pompous ex-soldier with all sorts of depths and a stubborn, conscienced autonomy, non compliant, his party truly a discarded robe. The Thatcherites regretted Weatherill as, for reasons altogether different, Labour regrets Martin.

If you are bored by argument, intellectually incurious and contemptuous of history, you will diminish everything you touch – in this case, the forum of national government. The Blair people were not political in any sense worth having. They put power before the reasons for having power. At best managerialists, they stood on descending steps as enforcers, functionaries and parasites.

If, on your first day in government, you shoo out a civil servant to discreetly oil a million-pound donation from a millionaire by dropping a proclaimed advertising ban on his patch, you have identified yourself. If you begin with such means, what decent ends will ever interest you? And after that, what is so very shocking about a colleague taking a few thousand privately by way of a phantom mortgage?

The Labour Party has been many things, contained many beliefs, all of them arguing furiously – Marxist, Fabian, Christian-Socialist, Bevanite, Croslandite and, never to be forgotten, Puritan. In my university days, we revisionists, equally earnest, were regularly accused by the highly moral left of “careerism”. They hadn’t seen nothing yet.

Blair despised that Labour Party for its virtues more than its chaotic faults. It was his distinction to be at once high gloss and shabby. Before the imperious security culture, national identity cards, original 90-day detention plan, an education policy designed through ticked boxes and enfeebled examinations to obtain false achievement, the caressing of rich men and the by-passing of independent civil servants, came the corruption of party and Parliament.

A culture of deceit run by concentrated central power requires a demoted chamber, loaded with constituency chores rightly belonging to a healthy local government. Officially, this enforced rustication was explained as a way of handling the embarrassment of 418 MPs. It was, in practice, gloriously apt for smothering contradiction.

The early days of Blair’s leadership had seen a clear-out of many seats and the way opened to numb loyalists, not least, sadly, those “babes”, far too many of whom became hand-maidens. The Georgia Gould scandal is only its late flower. What have been missing in this spavined chamber are autonomy, argument and self-respect. In defiance of Lord Acton, it is a thing corrupted by an absence of power. Members don’t matter. With honourable exceptions, they exist to follow, applaud, hold small places under favour, drudge in the constituency and to reserve constructive thought for the expenses sheet. Demoralisation rules.

In the current hoo-hah, the word “democracy” is on everybody’s lips – not least those of the very press lords who so applauded the dismantling of the old-fashioned, messy, noisy, unmodern, actual thing. To achieve any real democracy, disregard that essentially right-wing slogan “Power to the people”. We should apply ourselves to restoring power to a free and difficult parliament. The honesty will follow.