Anthony Howard: MPs take themselves too seriously

Partly because we don't in any formal sense have one, the constitution always seems to bring out the pompous worst in our politicians. No other topic is as guaranteed to sweep frontbenchers and backbenchers alike into a positive lava of self-righteous over-excitement. So, as we look back on a week in which exaggeration and hyperbole appear to reign supreme, one or two things probably need to be cleared away at the outset.

Of course, what the Anglican prayer book calls "the High Court of Parliament" had every right to feel affronted by the totally unwarranted raid conducted on the offices of its members. But that hardly means that the 17th-century Civil War needs to be fought all over again, that Britain has overnight become a form of Zimbabwe or that the Metropolitan Police have suddenly been transformed overnight into a new version of the old KGB.

Even the demand that some senior police officer should be summoned to the Bar of the House in order to explain the action taken by members of his force is bound to look in retrospect every bit as self-regarding as the decision actually taken more than 50 years ago to compel the editor of the Sunday Express to come and grovel before MPs for allegations his paper had made about the likely unfair impact of the proposed post-Suez petrol rationing. That was not the most glorious episode in the history of Parliament and nor will be any attempt to reek revenge on those who believed that they were merely doing no more than their duty.

No, if blame is to be found and fixed, it has to be pinned on the relevant authorities within the Commons itself. It frankly defies belief that the first female Serjeant-at-Arms should not have enquired as to under what authority the police thought they were acting – and, if she failed to ask that question, why did not the Speaker, Michael Martin, with far more years of experience behind him, put it to her? And should it not have occurred to someone that in matters of this kind, the prime source to be consulted must always be the Clerk of the Commons as the acknowledged expert of parliamentary precedent and practice?

No one, however mighty in the land (as Lord Denning once said), is above the law – and the doctrine of parliamentary privilege on which MPs traditionally love to prattle has always applied to civil proceedings and not to criminal ones. If MPs are to avoid convicting themselves of absurd self-importance, they would do well before Monday's Commons debate, to restore some sense of proportion to the more excitable utterances that they have come up with in the past few days.

None of which is to deny, at least on the available evidence, that the boys in blue (or in this case in plain clothes) badly blundered, and there remains something objectionable about the high-handed fashion in which they barged their way into Portcullis House, an integral part of the precinct of the Palace of Westminster.

Admittedly, they could be said to have had bad luck, Damian Green – though it should, no doubt, make no difference – happens to be one of the most popular boys in the school, and his background in newspapers and television ensures that personal sympathy with him extends to the media. The more the world of Whitehall hints starkly at issues of "national security", the less persuasive does its whole case become.

And here it is probably worth noticing that at least one senior mandarin – Sir David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Home Office – hardly emerges unscathed from his own role in the imbroglio whatever he thought he was doing in summoning officers from the Metropolitan Police to the Home Office in order to remind them of their responsibilities in law enforcement, the result was certainly devastating to his own reputation.

Yet the positions of the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-Arms still strike me as being a good deal more vulnerable than his. To take Mr Speaker Martin first. He has had much to put up with in terms of snobbery and social condescension since he was elected to succeed Betty Boothroyd eight years ago. But not even his warmest admirers could pretend that this has been the happiest chapter in the often turbulent story of his occupation of the Commons chair.

There is nothing that would help more to bring this entire unhappy episode to a close than a dignified intimation on his part that he will not be seeking to serve in the next Parliament. That would open the way for the choice of a new Speaker either after next election or (preferably) sometime before it so that those taking part in the vote would at least know something of the qualities of the rival contenders.

The position of Jill Pay, the Serjeant-at-Arms, is by no means so clear cut, not least because she has gathered a good deal of sympathy from the way in which the Speaker chose to dump on her in his statement last Wednesday. Plainly, though, she failed to display the necessary vigilance when confronted by the police request to search an MP's office (the fault here may well have lain in her inexperience).

Whatever the case against her original appointment – and her civil service, medical and advertising background hardly qualified her even for the reduced parliamentary role that she now plays – to force her to pay the forfeit for a decision that should never have been left to her alone would smack of manifest injustice with the responsibility for her appointment resting squarely with the Speaker himself, it is surely he who should bear the ultimate accountability.

It is customary to claim after all such mishaps that at least lessons will be learned. I am not sure this will prove to be the case on this occasion – unless, that is, MPs themselves wake up to the absurd position they will remain in for as long as they insist on regarding themselves as part of a Brahmin caste superior to and remote from the general public. A formal repudiation of that view, preferably from No 10, could amount at least to a first step to getting the relationship between Parliament, the Government and the police back on an even keel.