Time and again I spoke and wrote and asked Parliamentary Questions about the plight of the Sahrawi people in the Western Sahara, violently dispossessed by the Kingdom of Morocco. I visited them. I saw their plight. I heard their case. I studied their history. I was convinced. The case I made to the Foreign Secretary was unanswerable.
Indeed unanswered. He could not disagree and did not care to agree. Silence, that most eloquent of Commons responses, should have told me what no minister would put into words: the Sahrawi people have no constituency in the United Kingdom; and the United Kingdom has an interest in supporting Morocco. Silence said so; silence says so much at Westminster; but I was blocking my ears to the silence.
It is a funny feeling, speaking in the chamber when your argument carries no resonance outside it. Your fellow MPs do not howl you down. They just talk among themselves, or lope out for a drink or a cup of tea. You notice the Press Gallery above the Speaker’s Chair clearing. Once you have gained a reputation for arguments that are disconnected from popular sentiment or headline news, your colleagues stop coming in when you are speaking. You argue into a void, like someone talking to the birds in a park. You wait for responses to your speech the next morning; but there is nothing, not even a report. And you reflect on that passage in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, describing an early feminist: “The Abbess was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilisation. She hurled herself against the obstinacy of her time.”
You hear it said, not of yourself but of others like you, that they are “frightfully clever” but “a bit of a loner”. And if not remarkably thick-skinned (which, surprisingly, few MPs are) you become prey to feelings of injustice and self-pity.
They are misplaced. You are overlooking something rather obvious. The House of Commons is not a place where ideas are born and knows in its heart that it is not supposed to be. It is an echo-chamber in which interests and opinions are spoken for, and tested for resonance among more than six hundred other tribunes – and for their resonance, when reported, outside.
Resonance is not the same thing as rationality. During the last Parliament, Joanna Lumley, Nick Clegg and a small band of mostly backbench MPs understood how much more resonant was the case for special privileges for former Gurkhas than it was rational. Towards the end of the last century, Margaret Thatcher and much of her Cabinet failed to understand how much less resonant was the case for the Poll Tax, than it was reasonable. When the last Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was Chancellor in 2000 he and his Cabinet colleagues were surprised (and threatened with a backbench rebellion) when they failed to anticipate that opposition to an entirely rational 75p per week increase in the state pension (in line with subdued inflation) would carry tremendous resonance outside the counting-houses of Whitehall. The same Cabinet entirely misjudged the (irrational) anger of motorists at (rational) increases in fuel duty, in line with rising prices.
Let us try to construct the profile of a fictional backbencher who made the right call on each of these judgments: the imaginary MP (let us call him Reg Smythe) who found himself on the right side of the argument on Poll Tax, Fuel Tax, pension increases, Gurkhas and Joanna Lumley. Three features, I would submit, stand out in Reg Smythe’s profile. First, he is not unduly troubled by logic. Secondly, he has a keen sense of the importance to voters of their wallets. Thirdly, his ear is well-attuned to waves of popular sentiment.
But I would add this about Reg. He gets genuinely fired-up in the causes to which he attaches himself. His eyes prick with tears as he stands beside Dame Joanna and a cluster of ageing Ghurkhas, and the hard-heartedness of the Ministry of Defence infuriates him. His rage at the 75p pension increase is not synthetic, and he knows many pensioners in his own constituency whose distress is real. He has entirely persuaded himself that fuel-tax increases are wrong not because motorists should not pay their share of environmental costs (Reg is passionate about the environment, too) but because transport is the lubricant of our whole economy, and these increases will hit entrepreneurs, road-hauliers and small business people.
And one further and most important remark. Not all these causes, and by no means all the arguments to which a dedicated tribune of the people may devote his energies, are majority causes. Some will be as unpopular among some voters as they are popular among others. Great parliamentary careers have rested, often enough, on the dogged association of an MP with a small but defined interest group, whose self-appointed guardian angel he becomes. He brings to the table that group, their concerns, and their potential support, and may not distract himself with larger causes. He is their man – or she their woman – and the MP the Chancellor takes aside for an anxious chat whenever the issue looks like trouble. An MP, in short, can fight for minorities all his life, while staying in tune with the type of democracy that energises a British parliamentary career.
In 1981 I was lucky to be among the seven backbenchers whose names were drawn from a hat, and who were invited to attend the Prince of Wales’s wedding to Diana Spencer. Sitting among the huge congregation in St Paul’s Cathedral I heard, over the loudspeakers, the questions – “Do you take this woman?” – and the responses. At each “I do” there came into the Cathedral, faintly but audibly, the distant-sounding roar of the crowds of tens of thousands, like the faint rumble of an ocean lapping at the steps of St Paul’s.
That echo was for me the most moving thing of all. I wish I had followed its logic down Fleet Street, the Strand and Whitehall, to Westminster, and understood then what I understand now: that unless when you advance a case at Westminster you can hear in your imagination, and your fellow MPs can hear in theirs, that faint roar of approbation from the sea of public opinion, then prepare for the kindly obituaries many decades hence, after your knighthood and your sobriquet “veteran backbench MP” have long been earned. From the obituarist’s phrase book will come those old favourites “brave thinker”, “keen intellect”, “gadfly”, “never really a team player”, “maverick”, “radical theorist”, “principled debater”…we can almost hear the chamber emptying as we read.
In less smart phraseology than the famous passage quoted above, Burke expressed the opposite view, but a truer one, when he wrote: “To follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.” Matthew Parris was Conservative MP for Derbyshire West from 1979 to 1986 and is a former parliamentary sketch writer for The Times.
The man who detoxified the Conservative brand
Francis Elliott
Deputy Political Editor
David Cameron best reveals his character and that of his political project at moments of defeat. He felt the blow of losing his first attempt at becoming an MP keenly in 1997, analysed correctly the reasons for the Tories’ abject performance in 2001 but then misjudged why Michael Portillo’s subsequent leadership bid fell short. The failure of Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership forced him to reconsider his attitude to modernisation and his last doubts were extinguished by the third successive Conservative defeat under Michael Howard.
During his own period as Leader of the Opposition, Mr Cameron