A Speaker who fought his corner
GROWING up in a terribly impoverished part of postwar Glasgow, Michael Martin was no stranger to tough surroundings. He would later go on to use the resilience learnt as a young boy to control the heckles and jeers of MPs as the 156th elected Speaker of the House of Commons.
But his tenure was not without controversy and in 2009 he became the first Speaker for more than 300 years to be forced from office.
Michael John Martin was born in Anderston, Glasgow, the son of a merchant seaman and school cleaner. Several of his earliest memories involved his father coming home after a voyage, drinking heavily and using his fists to take his anger out on Martin’s mother Mary.
After leaving school at 15 without any qualifications he became an apprentice sheet metal worker and eventually took a job with RollsRoyce. Simultaneously he became a shop steward for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers.
In 1973 he entered the world of politics, elected as a councillor on Glasgow Corporation before becoming the MP for Springburn in 1979, a Labour stronghold.
He served as a parliamentary aide to deputy leader Denis Healey when Healey was shadow foreign secretary and supported Roy Hattersley when he stood unsuccessfully for the leadership. As an MP he was a voice for Catholic concerns, voting to curb abortion and was against lowering the age of consent for homosexuals.
In 1992 he joined the House of Commons Administrative Committee and five years later was elected Deputy Speaker.
After Betty Boothroyd stood down Martin was elected by MPs to succeed her in the role in 2000.
As a “working-class voice in Parliament” he was quick to depart from tradition, ditching the wig and breeches while sitting in the House, and his thick Glaswegian accent led him to be nicknamed Gorbals Mick by the media. He hated it as it had no bearing on where he was from.
Although Martin was well-liked by MPs from all parties his tenancy as Speaker was often contentious, most notably in 2006 during a round of Prime Minister’s Questions and in 2009 when he faced a no-confidence motion over his handling of the MPs’ expenses scandal.
The first of these occurred when he ruled out of order a question from the then opposition leader David Cameron, about Tony Blair’s future leadership of New Labour.
His decision caused uproar from the House. Who was he to disallow the question, they wondered? After all, the change of prime minister was surely government business.
Three years later he felt their wrath even more when following a newspaper investigation into the hefty sums some MPs had secured from the Fees Office for which he was responsible, Martin was accused of handling the expenses scandal so badly he was forced to stand down.
Martin also had some expense skeletons of his own. In 2007 he had used more than £20,000 of public money to employ a law firm to challenge negative press stories. In 2008 his wife Mary had racked up a bill of £4,000 in taxi expenses, which although approved called into question the morality of MPs’ personal allowances.
When the crisis made headlines calls grew to purge the House of its wrongdoers. Shaking Westminster to its very core, politicians called for a complete reform of Parliament.
Despite his tumultuous descent and in keeping with convention, Martin was elevated to life peer in August 2009 as Baron Martin of Springburn, in the City of Glasgow.
He died peacefully at his home after a short period of illness. He is survived by his wife Mary, whom he met in 1966, and their two children.