What is Christopher Chope’s problem?

The Tory MP’s latest achievement is to shout ‘objection’ while the government was quietly trying to reverse its botched attempt to get Owen Paterson off the hook

There’s a bloke in the House of Commons who, every so often, embarrasses himself, his party and parliament itself because he’s got an unhealthy obsession with procedure. His name is Christopher Chope, and his latest achievement is to shout “objection” while the government was quietly trying to reverse its botched attempt to get Owen Paterson off the hook and rig the standards procedure the better to protect the prime minister.

The idea was that the vote would go through on the nod and the whole thing given as decent a burial as could be managed in the circumstances, ie an unmarked grave, no mourners and no floral tributes. Instead, Chope has inflicted – on his own side – something of a public humiliation, as if the corpse had suddenly kicked the lid off the coffin and shouted that he wanted a fair trial.

So now there’ll be an hour-long debate during which the main points will be restated and then it’ll be nodded through, about a day later. The ill-fated attempt to debase standards in public life will at last be committed to God’s earth to rest in whatever peace it can.

The irony is that, to a general public that wisely takes little notice of the Commons, it looks very much like some Tory backbencher is still trying to get Paterson off the charges and fix the system. Ascetic-looking and a little cranky in speech and manner, Chope very much fits the public image of an utterly out-of-touch Tory MP sitting complacently on a vast parliamentary majority, the worst sort of product of the British political system.

So, as far as I can tell, Chope has, once again, wreaked havoc and tarnished the image of his party and indeed heaped ridicule and hatred upon himself, but to no great purpose beyond what looks to me to be a fanatical pursuit of the parliamentary rulebook. It should have a name, so established has the ritual become: “Chopery”.

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Chopery has in fact been going on for some time, and Chopery’s greatest victim is Chope, celebrated, if that’s the right word for it, for all the wrong reasons. One of the sub-rituals of Chopery is that every time a new act of Chopery is committed, the media is obliged to remind the public of past shameful episodes. Thus, he might as well change his name from Christopher Chope MP to “Christopher Chope Who Has Previously Blocked Bills On Upskirting, Female Genital Mutilation, The Pardon Of Alan Turing, And Free Hospital Parking For Carers MP”. He’s been going for some time, and was once a minister, during which time his main contribution to the welfare of the British people was to help privatise the water industry.

Of course there’s a role for someone to object to a cosy consensus and point out that compassion is an overrated virtue, I suppose, but it does seem a bit warped that it’s the same bloke, sometimes accompanied by the odd disciple, who does it every damnable time. He gets nothing but scorn on social media and bad press out of it, plus punishment from the whips, but that just seems to add to the joys of Chopery, the political expression of sado-masochism. It’s a cult many of us would rather see the back of.