Still Speaking

Martin Meenagh writes:

There is currently a controversy over Michael Martin. As the Speaker of the Commons, he has not got the confidence of around three dozen anonymous members. A further dozen or so, led by the Hero of This Blog, Commodore Sir Lord Robert Marshall Andrews QC MP of Gray's Inn, have denounced him in public.

Michael Martin is a working class Glaswegian of Irish descent, and the first Roman Catholic to hold the post in the modern period. For these reasons more than most others, (though he as neither the elan nor the competence of many of Glasgow's products) Speaker Martin is generally disliked by the middle-class boys and girls of London's political-media class. Ostensibly because of the Damien Green Affair, many now want him to resign.

However, it is almost impossible to get a speaker to resign. The job is a constitutional anomaly, a bit like the Solicitor-General of the United States, who sits in the American Cabinet from time to time and who also sits with the Supreme Court to represent the USA. Speakers continue by convention even though Parliament is dissolved, and in theory hold the job for as long as they like.

The office, for American readers, is not the same as that in the United States. A House of Commons Speaker controls only his or her own administrative committee, is meant to be above politics, and is not meant to be a controversial figure but a defender of the whole Parliament in the face of the executive. No one resigns.

I've been trawling the history of the office since it emerged in 1376 to see if I could find a precedent for a Speaker resigning under a cloud. I have not found very much at all.

In the nineteenth century, some Speakers were dispensed with. This was not because they had abrogated the petition for liberty, freedom from arrest, and access to the Sovereign that has been a feature of Parliaments since at least the time of Speaker Onslow in 1566. It was because the government of the day got sick of them and voted them out, or shamed them into going. This happened with the resignation of William Court Gully in 1905, and with the deselection of Manners-Sutton in 1835.

The Speakership has often pretended to be above politics, but wasn't. This is a point worth making, given the way Conservatives have recently claimed that Labour was somehow acting wrongly in appointing one Labour MP after another. In this, however, they were only following Liberals in the nineteenth century, who had a close grip on the chair. Curiously, there were only three Conservative Speakers in the nineteenth century--Sir John Mitford, Charles Abbot, and Charles Manners-Sutton.

In the twentieth century, as far as I can tell, fewer than a handful retired before the start of a new Parliament. Though open to shenanigans, like the misplaced attempt to elevate Kettering's reluctant MP, Geoffrey deFreitas in 1971 by a Scottish Republican, and to undermine a Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, in 1992, the office was never compromised with a challenge to a sitting Speaker before a general election.

Michael Martin can only go, therefore, if one of two things happens. Either there is a general parliamentary revolt and someone summons the courage to tell him that he has lost confidence and should go--in which case he should--or he resigns. There is no mechanism to get rid of him. Tom Foley would have been safe here.

Legislating the office would be a bad mistake, and writing a law, as some seem to want to do, to regulate parliament would invite trouble from my learned friends.

Speaker Martin is therefore safe, if he wants to be. However, the whole sorry affair is one more example of how out of touch and out of shame the political classes are. No one has the guts to stand up and say what they should say, as far as I can tell. Anyone who thinks that they can make him go in some other fashion will have an awful job to do looking for any historical or political support. His fate is in his own hands, and they are filled covering his own rear end.

The only happy thing about all this is that the type of English person keen to look down on the Governor of Illinois, or the politics of Ireland, or the general activities of the continental political class, has absolutely no credibility or right to do so at all.