Michael Martin: One last insult to the public

By David Higgerson on Jul 4, 09 08:59 PM

What with the froth around the death of Michael Jackson over the last week, a lot of otherwise note-worthy news stories have been pushed down the news agenda - or in the case of the 24-hour news channels, on to the news tickers at the bottom of the screen.

One which grabbed my eye, briefly, on Tuesday or Wednesday, was the Queen's nodding through of Downing Street's request to give Michael Martin, a peerage so he can go and live in the House of Lords.

Michael Martin, lest we forget, is the first speaker in many hundreds of years to effectively be forced from office for his part in the expenses scandal. While, of course, he wasn't putting a gun to the head of the MPs who bent the rules until they were almost round and demanding they claim for duck houses, he certainly wasn't in a rush to change things.

The news that he was likely to swan off (duck, swan, geddit?) to the Lords after resigning as an MP (something the speaker has to do if he retires) isn't new news - it was always part of the deal to get him to go.

And I didn't think any more about it until today, when I attended a conference at which Heather Brooke, the tireless investigative journalist who brought about the publication of MPs expenses by refusing to take no for an answer, talked about the lengths she had to go to to get parliament to agree to publication.

It was during that presentation that the audience was reminded that Speaker Martin wasn't just following Parliamentary rules when, as speaker of the house, he fought hard to block the release of expenses.

This is the man who, after Brooke had won one of her appeals to the upper courts, was told by legal advisors that Parliament should back down and publish the expenses lock, stock and barrel.

Speaker Martin's response? To go and get another legal team - one which said keep on fighting, wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of cash in the process.

Brooke made another good point. The redacted expenses we were given from Parliament the other week weren't in the spirit of the court's ruling - something happened between the court ruling and publication which prompted Commons staff - who reported to Speaker Martin - to start blocking out huge chunks of information.

Over the last couple of weeks, a myth has built up around the expenses scandal that everything is going to be ok now Speaker Martin is gone, and giving him a peerage is a price worth paying to move on.

Rubbish. The only person who benefits from this situation is the man who squandered hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to keeping Parliament's dirty little secret kept under wraps.

He goes from being an elected MP, accountable to the public (supposedly) to living the life of Riley in the Lords, claiming big allowances but expected to do very little for it.

The man who should have been run out of Westminster for his shameful actions is actually getting a reward for behaving like a cowboy shopfloor steward.

It's a fact not lost on the public either. According to PoliticsHome, two-third of voters opposed the peerage. Fortunately for Gordon Brown and those politicians seeking to make out as though they are new brooms in the expenses game, Michael Jackson's death proved a very timely way to bury bad news.