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David Howarth

Liberal Democrat MP

for Cambridge 2005-2010

The central feature of parliamentary life is waiting: waiting for the division bell to go off; waiting to be called to speak; waiting for people to turn up for meetings or waiting for stories, good or bad, to appear in the media.

How one copes with waiting defines a parliamentary life. Some people manage to fill all those waiting hours with activity – signing piles of letters to constituents, replying to emails or (for London MPs) rushing to and from constituency engagements. Others, perhaps those whose constituents are not very demanding or who have organised their offices so efficiently that they have completed all their correspondence, engage in a parliamentary form of dolce far niente: hanging around the Tea Room (the best refuge in Parliament because the media are not allowed in), or, for the more distressed, the Strangers’ Bar, or arranging some form of escape – in the past, before the scandals, a foreign trip with a select committee, or latterly an early return home on a Wednesday evening. Some even take an interest in legislation, and spend their time writing amendments to Bills, although that is very much a minority interest.s

There is even an activity that manages to combine all three – giving the appearance of constituency activity and of taking an interest in parliamentary business but, in reality, doing nothing – namely signing early day motions. Members can be seen in every part of the building flicking through an important-looking blue document occasionally scribbling their signature on it. They are adding their names to EDMs. Technically, EDMs are motions the sponsors of which would like the House to debate some time soon, but on no specific day.

In reality, no one sponsoring an EDM expects, or even wants, the House to debate it. EDMs are merely a form of petition that only MPs can sign, a petition aimed at no one in particular that achieves precisely nothing. Even if every single MP signed an EDM, nothing would happen or change. They are, as someone once remarked, parliamentary graffiti.

Most EDMs are cobbled together by pressure groups with some simple-minded campaign message to promote, who have found some sympathetic, or fearful, MPs to act as proposers. The pressure groups’ main purpose, however, is not to create pressure for change but to give their supporters something to do, or merely to build the group’s database. Supporters are given pre-printed postcards to send to their MPs (or, increasingly, preprepared emails) urging the MP to ‘sign EDM no XXX’. The pressure group always gives the impression that signing the EDM is a matter of vast importance, a deception many MPs are happy to go along with if it impresses constituents or a gullible local newspaper.

But the attraction of signing EDMs is that it takes far less energy than the other method of making sure that one’s name appears in the local media, namely the intervention game. The intervention game consists of saying the name of one’s constituency – or, better still, the name of one’s local newspaper – on the record in the chamber or in Westminster Hall as many times as possible.

To achieve this end, MPs scan the agenda to look for opportunities to intervene in questions or debates and then rush from place to place so that they can pop up, utter the name of their constituency and disappear to the next opportunity as soon as is decent (or even sooner). The verb for this activity is ‘to ketter’, in honour of one of its greatest devotees in the 2005 Parliament, Philip Hollobone, the MP for Kettering, who managed to work the name of his constituency into almost every debate.

A determined ketterer will put down questions containing the name of his or her constituency to every department, including the Foreign Office and the House of Commons catering committee. If the question does not come out of the hat, the ketterer will turn up and ‘bob’ (stand up to try to catch the Speaker’s eye) in the hope of being able to ask it anyway. The ketterer will also turn up at the start of every debate to intervene on the minister to ask a question of astounding irrelevance to the debate, but that, naturally, contains the name of the ketterer’s constituency. Ketterers are, of course, a menace for those interested in parliamentary debate, but their party organisations love them, because, from the point of view of the party, the only point of an MP is to achieve re-election, and the only function of Parliament is to assist the MP in that task.

In days past, MPs would deal with all the waiting in another way, namely in other jobs. But second jobs have become very much frowned upon, to the extent that after the expenses crisis the House passed a motion that has been interpreted as meaning that MPs have to report every hour they spend not just in other paid work but even in volunteering.

This is the infamous 168-hour rule, the rule that MPs are MPs for every hour of the week, with no time off at all for anything else. Even writing a book or an article on politics, paid or not, is seen as a shameful activity to be reported to the authorities. One suspects that in the future those MPs who sleep more hours a night than Margaret Thatcher managed with will have to obtain permission from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. But the effect of the 168-hour rule is that MPs will have to spend even more time just waiting.

One wonders what sort of people will want to be MPs in the future. The combination of minor celebrity status, with its constant observation by the media, enforced inactivity and being cooped up in the same place for weeks on end is reminiscent of only one thing. Welcome, then, to the Big Ben Brother House.