Rachel Sylvester in yesterday’s Times had an important piece about the election of John Bercow as the new Speaker on Monday.  I’m not going to go over the arguments for or against any of the candidates – none of them were particularly inspiring. Most of them have expenses problems. Almost all of them had in some way acted against more openness in the House of Commons, either by voting to exempt themselves from FoI requests, or by other votes. Most of them were virtual non-entities.

I quite liked some of Parmjit Dhanda’s ideas.  I particularly liked his insistence that MPs don’t understand why the public have disdain for them.

Until MPs understand why so many voters are so angry, there is no chance of the changes that are needed. The constant carping against John Bercow, for example (who, for the record, I thought did a pretty fair job at PMQs today) is pointless – who the Speaker is is just not that important in the wider scheme of things, and it smacks of self-obsession to continue to complain. The Speaker is who he is. Get over it.

What is important is that MPs grasp the mettle of reform.  They need to make changes to the way the Commons works so that MPs’ activities and the laws that are passed are responsive to their constituents, transparent, honest and provide value for money.  It is no longer good enough for whips to stitch up backroom deals or for MPs to be able to hide behind bleats of ‘we regulate ourselves’.

It’s time to change how politics works.  This speech is a good place to start but there’s plenty more to be done.

David Cameron’s speech this afternoon was bookended by TV and radio interviews.  The speech itself was an important one.

But the really big political story was not the admission that debt is out of control. Nor the admission that the system does have some fundamental weaknesses. No – it was the simple apology in those interviews. 

One of the questions on the subsequent PoliticsHome poll was along the lines of ‘was David Cameron bounced into a direct apology?’  No – of course not. First of all, you can see a pattern across numerous big speeches: the written speech is released, but in the interviews a more direct message comes through – more humane, more in tune with how normal people think and speak.  

Secondly, and politically more weighty at least in the short-term, this apology ups the pressure on Gordon Brown.  He cannot apologise – for he knows that the moment he apologises for one thing, something else will become the issue.  Basically he will end up being asked to apologise for being born.

However, the most important result from this is, for now, only a possibility.  In the longer-term, this apology could set the tone for the future. As I’ve argued before, politicians are only human, like the rest of us, and they do make mistakes, like the rest of us.  

And admitting there’s a problem is the first step to a solution.

Whether Jacqui Smith actually broke the rules of the Standards and Privileges Committee is, I think, beside the point – they seem to be almost endlessly interpretable, no-one ever seems to actually BREAK them, and no-one is ever held to account for their interesting interpretations of the rules.

What does count is that she is perceived to be fleecing the taxpayer, and her behaviour is seen as unacceptable – this is what Tony Blair meant when he talked about ‘whiter than white’ and ‘we are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. . . What the electorate gives, the electorate can take away.’ 
Quite right we can take it away. We can vote you out (whatever party you belong to).  As an aside, this goes back to the question I was asking here – are our MPs accountable enough?

To return to Jacqui Smith though – the rules are set by the MPs themselves; the information released is decided by MPs and officers of the House of Commons and any media enquiries are usually met with a defiant, ‘We abide by the decisions of the Fees Office’.  The Fees Office, as Guido points out frequently, takes MPs at their word that, for example, their constituency home is their secondary residence despite the fact that their spouse and children live there.

Once again we’re seeing just how corrosive the effect of breaking voters’ trust is.  I am utterly fed up of seeing politicians scraping every single benefit they can from the taxpayer.  It’s certainly not all of them, it’s not all the time, but it’s demeaning to our democracy that some of them seem to pay more attention to their expenses claims than to what they were elected to do – and Jacqui Smith is certainly one of those who needs to spend a lot more time thinking about the policies she is supposedly responsible for.

I’ve argued before for fewer MPs, higher salaries, proper expense-auditing and receipting, and that MPs should no longer be allowed to argue that they should be responsible for their own salaries, expenses policies and most of all auditing.  It’s time to restore trust in politicians by cleaning up this system. I absolutely agree that MPs need a second home, that they need a sufficient number of competent staff, and that they need to travel around and meet people from all walks of life.  But it’s not good enough that obfuscation and ‘but the Fees Office authorised it’ allow MPs to get away with what would often be considered sackable offences in most work-places.

The MPs I have discussed this with tend to find the current system complicated, messy, unclear and slightly demeaning.  I’d like to see simple, transparent rules that everyone understands and which leave no wiggle-room for the relatively small number of MPs who want to exploit the system. 

Great to see Ken Clarke back on the front bench today, in typically great form taking apart Peter Mandelson’s scheme to boost the car industry.  His performance since being recalled to the front bench has done much to justify those Conservatives, including many of us at Platform 10, who argued for his recall to the front line.  His return to the Shadow Cabinet represents a decisive shift in favour of governing and winning elections and away from an obsession with Europe and ideological purity, as personified by the hard right who objected so much to Ken’s recall.  Conservative Home is continuing to publish anti-Ken stories about statements he made long before he was recalled to the front bench and which have nothing to do with his front bench responsibilities.  Surely it is now time for Con Home turn their fire on the Labour Party and get behind all of the Shadow Cabinet who will be representing us come the election.

Mr Montgomerie and his friends over at Conservative Home have got a real bee in their bonnet at the moment over the potential return to the front bench of Ken Clarke.  When not busy openly undermining the Party Chairman, Con Home seems to be repeatedly rehashing “the case against” a return to the Shadow Cabinet for one of the most formidable figures of his political generation.  I fundamentally disagree with them about Ken.  I also have to wonder at the temerity of Conservative Home to think that they can dictate who should and shouldn’t be in the Shadow Cabinet.  That is the business of nobody but the Party Leader.

Today, Con Home have yet another article about a potential return for Ken, including tiresomely predictable reservations from the likes of Tebbit and Wheeler as though they were mind blowing pieces of new evidence that might have got Woodward and Bernstein excited.   The same piece also attempts to pour cold water on a survey of grassroots opinion conducted by, you guessed it, Conservative Home, that supported the return of Clarke.  Con Home argues that Clarke is “disloyal” – which is a tad rich coming from the blog that is openly disloyal to the Party Chairman and founded by the man who advised IDS – one of the most disruptive influences to the Major Government.  The second charge is that his pro European views would make his elevation to the Shadow Cabinet unacceptable.  Of course, that second point is only the case if we adopt the same dash for ideological purity that made us unacceptable to the majority of the electorate for much of the past ten years.  Are we the broad church that made us the most phenomenal election winning machine of the 20th Century or should we be, as Montgomerie seems to wish, some kind of 21st Century version of the Jacobin Club?

Of course, whether to restore Ken Clarke to the Shadow Cabinet is entirely up to the Party Leader and this blog would not have the impertinence to push the Leader in one direction or another.  Nevertheless, there are some very persuasive and powerful arguments for a return to the front bench of Ken Clarke. 

Firstly, he remains one of our most formidable performers.  When I speak to members of the public; leaders in business; and work colleagues, most of whom are Conservative minded, they all express their support for a bigger role for Ken.  He comes over superbly on TV and on the radio; is a superb debater in the House (one of the few Parliamentarians for whom the bars still empty when he makes a speech); and has a wonderful habit of tearing apart Brown’s Government and it’s tattered claims to economic competence piece by piece.

After George Osborne, Clarke is by our most convincing voice on the economy – reminding people that we gave Gordon Brown a golden legacy, which he has fatally undermined.   When you ask the question, will the addition to our team of one of our strongest performers in the House and on the media strengthen or weaken the team the only answer is that it will be strengthen by the addition. 

Of course, the thorny issue of Europe always rears its ugly head.   But Ken is an experienced politician.  He knows that joining the Shadow Cabinet would mean toeing the Party line on every issue, including Europe.  There is no reason to suggest that he would not be prepared to do this.  What he does on the backbenches is quite different to what he would do if part of a Shadow Cabinet and bound by the collective responsibility that entails. 

Don’t forget the fundamental point that we have been making on this blog for some time – in order to win, we need to convince the British people that we are a Party of Government, genuinely ready for the challenges entailed by that.  Nobody would remind the British people of our seriousness as a Party and our ability to step into Government as much as Ken Clarke.

These are serious times.  Gordon Brown’s casual destruction of the economy is threatening the livelihoods of so many British workers and their families.  During these times, we need to utilise all of our strongest weapons.  Ken Clarke is undoubtedly one of those weapons.  It is up to us as a Party whether we put the internecine disputes of more than a decade ago to one side and go forward as a united force to victory.  The hard right ultras need to make a choice between ideological purity and Government.  I hope for the sake of the Party and the country that they choose the latter.