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Matthew Parris

Times columnist

That no MP has yet suffered a heart attack in the minutes before making a maiden speech in the House of Commons, is some kind of miracle. The waiting is the worst. Sitting on those green leather benches, dreading the moment when the Speaker first calls your name, yet longing to get it over with as fast as possible, remains one of the most intense short periods of personal anxiety a man or woman can experience outside warfare.

I have parachuted freefall; aged 10 and dressed in a sailor-suit I have waited to launch into a song-and-dance routine of I Whistle a Happy Tune before a packed house in a repertory production of The King and I, as the orchestra struck up. Neither was as scary as awaiting my Commons maiden speech. But once you are on your feet, and you have your trembling hands and shaking notes under control, and you have started to talk, it is fine. You are away.

For me it went well. In light of what I shall tell you next I can tell you now that my maiden speech was considered one of the best of many maidens from the big and unusually talented parliamentary intake of 1979. That speech was a triumph. It was the rest of my parliamentary career that flopped. After my moment of glory I sank without trace in the Commons, never to resurface.

In all the seven years that followed at Westminster I did not say or do or achieve anything that came anywhere close to the success of that first Commons occasion, my maiden speech. My parliamentary career was undistinguished: for me a bitter if infinitely gentle disappointment. Cleverer new MPs than me, yes, but in time stupider ones too, overtook me one by one.

Why? My slow-burn failure baffled me. What had I overlooked? I wasn’t lazy, crazy, or personally objectionable. Even after I had left I did not really understand. Only during the decades since, decades of thinking about politics as a journalist and commentator, has the truth dawned.

The truth is this: you will never get anywhere in the House of Commons speaking for yourself. You are the representative of people’s interests, or you are nothing. There are, of course, ideals to be championed. There are arguments to be explained. There is policy logic to be pursued on its merits as well as its popular appeal. But, in the end, if what you say within that surprisingly small chamber carries no echo in the big country outside it then you are without point, and with discreet and subtle cruelty the very stones and carpets at Westminster will communicate to you that fact.

“Speaking for myself, Mr Deputy Speaker…” is a phrase that, sought in Hansard’s electronic archive, would doubtless yield a generous harvest of instances. Do not be fooled. Whether they know it consciously or not, the most effective parliamentarians are never speaking mainly for themselves. They are inhabited by a kind of animal understanding of the beast that an MP is supposed to be: of what, in that remarkably large assembly of directly elected persons that with unintended accuracy we call the Lower House, an MP is for.

You, the MP, are there for the herd. You are there to speak for substantial groups of citizens with shared interests or desires. By no means are you there for the majority alone – or, necessarily, at all. You can usefully spend your whole career fighting for minorities. Groups for whom you speak may be beleaguered and outnumbered; but they must be groups. They must need and want a voice. You are their voice; they must respond to your voice, adding theirs; and your fellow parliamentarians must hear the noise. Your voice is your own, but if you are not somebody else’s voice too, the place will not work for you.

You, the MP, are mainly there – not only, but mainly – as a messenger. You bring the message; you frame the message; you may have a talent for phrasing and targeting and marketing the message. You may even improve the message. You may have the skill so to express the message that it gathers force among those you represent. But you are seldom there to create the message, and unless and until it has gathered that force, you are the sounding brass or tinkling cymbal of St Paul’s epistle. In the end the message comes not from inside your head but from outside the walls of Westminster, or it does not come at all. You, the MP, are there to carry it.

“Tribune” is an old-fashioned word whose meaning as we move into a new millennium is in danger of passing from the popular understanding. But if the word is out of date, what it signifies is not. Not for nothing have MPs been classically called the tribunes of the people. Their own beliefs and opinions carry most weight, and sometimes only carry weight at all, when they reflect the beliefs, opinions and interests of significant, numerous or powerful groups among the people who have sent them to Westminster.

Edmund Burke missed the point when he wrote: “Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Note the sly old propagandist’s selection of the word “judgment” for the MP’s view, and “opinion” for the elector’s. But in rejecting Burke’s advice I am not making a moral judgment. I am describing a dynamic. In our legislature, arguments born of the personal reflections of individual legislators do not prosper. Arguments carried into the chamber from the country outside do. Burke, in fact, knew that well enough, and in terms of his own personal career fared better articulating the external voice than advancing it within the chamber. The Commons is not really about debate, it is about tug-o’-war; and your pull on the rope is a pull-by-proxy, for those not present.

How do I know this? I can only reply that it is not a matter of constitutional theory, but of experience. There was perhaps one moment during my seven years when I did, flickeringly, understand in heart as well as head what it meant to be an advocate – and I realised even at the time that it was on an arcane, minor and minority issue. I had become greatly exercised by the brutality and pointlessness of sending women convicted of prostitution to prison. In the event (with Robert Kilroy-Silk, then an MP) I managed to persuade my standing committee, and through them the Home Secretary, to change the law and remove imprisonment from the tariff.

Much of my argument was an argument in logic, but to bolster our case I invited the English Collective of Prostitutes to send down to the Commons a bus-load of their members (waiting for them in the Central Lobby I mistook a delegation on another issue from the Catholic Women’s League for my own invitees, displeasing the League greatly) and led them to a committee room in Westminster Hall, where we addressed the other members of my standing committee, and took questions.

As I spoke, believing in the women’s cause, and with many of them, real people, sitting around me, responding, I understood in the gut as well as the brain, what it means to be an MP.

Democracy as we British know it is not experienced in the intellect but in the stomach. What an MP is for is felt collectively at an unconscious level by a population few of whom could express it even if they cared to try. Popular sentiment is a current. It is a wind. It is a subterranean force. When you are with it – when it is with you – you just know. When you are not, you are that sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.

Time and again I rose to my feet in the chamber with what I thought, and still think, a brilliantly true idea to explain. How sure I was that we should adopt road-pricing in our country: that the economic theory of rationing a scarce commodity by price rather than by queue applied not just to turf or treacle tarts, but to tarmac too. Time and again I made speeches, asked questions, wrote newspaper articles, or argued in my Transport Select Committee, setting out a logical case that I knew, and still know, to be true and in the end inevitable.

Nobody listened. Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed either. Nobody was interested. Nobody cared. Inevitable, yes: but not in 1986. Twentieth-century Britain was not ready for road pricing.

Or reform of the law on homosexuality. Time and again I argued the case for reducing the age of consent. Persistently I complained about police harassment of gay men. How cogently did I unpick the contradictions and expose the imperfections of the law relating to importuning in a public place. How assiduously did I collect evidence, interview defendants, correspond with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and question ministers. How patiently I explained all this in the standing committee. How contemptuous I felt when a kindly Labour whip, the late Walter Harrison, took me aside to advise: “You will get nowhere in this place, lad, unless you leave all that alone.” There is not (Walter went on to explain) the feeling for it in the country. How hotly I protested to myself, under my breath: “Well there ought to be.”

Walter and I were both wrong. Public opinion on homosexuality was moving, changing. There existed the beginnings of an interest group among aggrieved gay men, the beginnings of the courage to stand up for themselves in public; and the beginnings of a supporting group of sympathisers among their millions of friends and relatives. HIV-Aids would in time bring all this to the surface. But 1982 was too early. Fifteen years later, Tony Blair, with his cannier instinct for the public mood, judged the moment right to propose change, as I had judged the moment wrong; and laws were duly amended. That was a time when young politicians and soon-to-be politicians such as David Cameron were changing their minds on social issues like these – or under the impression that they were changing their minds. What they were really doing was picking up, instinctively, a message from the people.

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.