Reverend and Honourable

The title to this post would serve as that of a collection of studies of each of the clergymen who have ever sat in the House of Commons. I am surprised that no one has ever written it.

I am raising a glass on this ninetieth anniversary of the first ever rebellion against a Labour Government, by the Reverend Herbert Dunnico, MP for Consett. Having opposed the First World War, he was continuing to oppose apparent preparations for a repetition. Yes, as early as 1924. As the successor to the Consett seat, North West Durham bears the legacy both of Dunnico and of the rather more recently deceased figure of David Watkins.

It is much to my regret that Watkins is no longer with us to lend his support to the ongoing project in which I am involved, and which has the very strong support of local trade union leaders of national and international importance, to secure a triple memorial to those who performed non-military service during the First World War, to the ILP Brigade that went to fight Fascism and was killed by the agents of Stalinism, and to the Fallen of British Palestine, which was once a country on the map and with the Union Flag in the corner of her own, until bombed out of existence by the founders of modern terrorism.

The first, at least, is firmly in the tradition of Dunnico, and the second is firmly in the tradition of Watkins, that figure of international significance and of staggering prescience, who represented this area for 17 years before the Israel Lobby took advantage of boundary changes to replace him with a rather more modestly accomplished man who was 10 years older, whose mind was already starting to go, but who it was common knowledge was only keeping the seat warm for his daughter.

She went on to be the Local Government Minister under a Prime Minister who wanted to abolish both local government and the party that, then as now, it most sustained. He was nominally the Leader of that party, much to his distress.

After that, she served as that Prime Minister's Chief Whip at the time of the invasion of Iraq. The Lobby that, by fouler means than fair, had installed her father, and thus her, certainly had to cause in the end to be glad that it had done so. Even if a Special Adviser from that period, in one of the Departments of which Blairites are still proudest of their achievements, recently described her to me as, "never exactly in the intellectual vanguard of the Movement." I was shocked, I tell you. Truly shocked.

But she was Herbert Dunnico and David Watkins combined, when compared to the more-or-less male Katie Hopkins to whom, in the absence of any heir of her body, she had wished to bequeath this seat. The all-women shortlist that spared us that, and which had several other strong candidates on it in addition to the first rate one who was selected, cannot be all that bad a system, really.