Kelly’s Eye

THE first thing that struck me after reading about MP Sir Geoffrey Cox’s £1million second job as a barrister was that perhaps I should have studied law all those years ago.The second was to ponder why he gets all the flak for having done nothing proved illegal, while Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe, who was convicted of harassment for threatening a woman with acid, receives vanishingly little coverage by comparison.

This certainly is not to champion Cox’s cause.As shadow Cabinet member Anneliese Dodds rather neatly put it, there’s a legitimate question to be posed about whether Cox regards himself as a “Caribbean-based barrister or a Conservative MP”. But that should be a matter for the voters of Cox’s Torridge andWest Devon constituency the next time they get to pass verdict upon him.

His case goes to the heart of what is wrong with the House of Commons. Its members should be as subject to the laws of the land as the rest of us, but otherwise the way they conduct themselves should be a matter of conscience, not compliance with an unelected watchdog. In a democracy, under the close scrutiny of a free press, those who err will invariably be found out, and the public will ultimately make its judgment.

It’s scarcely surprising, too, that Cox felt he could devote so much time to the intricacies of governance on the distant British Virgin Islands, given that the Commons has repeatedly voted itself into irrelevance by renewing the terms of the Coronavirus Act and the draconian powers it meekly hands to the government.

After a half-century of effective subservience to yet another unelected body in Brussels, the Commons continues to labour under a form of Stockholm Syndrome to those it voluntarily makes its captors.

For the Geoffrey Coxes of this world to pay it more respect, the House of Commons must be supreme – but at the mercy of those to whom it owes its existence: us, the electors.