Will MPs be left to simmer, looking like prize chumps?
SHOULD it be a criminal offence to tell a parliamentary select committee to get stuffed? We may be moving towards that territory following a rare debate in the Commons yesterday.
Damian Collins (Con, Folkestone & Hythe), who chairs the Culture select committee, proposed a motion ‘ordering’ a chap called Dominic Cummings ‘to appear before the committee at a time on or before June 20, 2018’. After brief discussion the motion was passed.
The Chamber may have been near- empty but that did not matter. The Commons had spoken. It had ‘ordered’ Mr Cummings to jolly well haul his pantaloons to SW1, sharpish.
Will he obey? If not, what will happen to him? Will his head be severed from its moorings on a Whitehall scaffold at dawn? Or will MPs simmer and steam and, er, be left looking prize chumps while Mr Cummings flashes them a rhetorical moonie?
This Cummings is a feisty political adviser who used to work for Michael Gove and was more recently the brains behind the Leave campaign. He devised the ‘Take Back Control’ slogan which helped the forces of liberation win the EU referendum.
Comrade Cummings is a peppery fellow and holds the Establishment Blob in snorting disregard. He is married to Mary Wakefield, much- worshipped commissioning editress of The Spectator magazine. Zuleika Dobson and the Plate Smasher.
The Culture committee, which under Mr Collins (a Remainer) has acquired an anti-Brexit tone, has been trying to question Mr Cummings for its inquiry it is holding into ‘fake news’.
Inquiries were once mighty inquisitions led by figures of punctilious impartiality. These days the noun has sometimes been hijacked by committees mounting short-term probes for naked political purposes.
Mr Cummings thinks the Culture committee is up to such tricks. And so he has told Mr Collins to get lost, in increasingly colourful language.
Thus it was that yesterday, for the first time since 1920, such impertinence by a member of the public towards Parliament was the subject of a Commons motion.
Mr Collins said he brought the matter forward ‘with regret’ (rather than naked self-promotion, you will understand). There had been ‘a deliberate attempt to deny Parliament its right to question witnesses’.
Hilary Benn (Lab, Leeds C), who hates Brexit possibly even more than Mr Collins (though that is naturally by the by), was next to speak.
He deplored Mr Cummings’s refusal to give evidence to the Culture committee and wondered if the House should now legislate. In Australia and New Zealand, citizens could be fined or gaoled for refusing a parliamentary summons.
Not that they actually had to answer questions once they were there, admitted Mr Benn. They could just sit there in silence, playing patience with a pack of cards.
For the SNP, Pete Wishart harrumphed that Mr Cummings was showing ‘contempt for this House’, which is something no Scots Nat would ever do to the London legislature.
Julian Lewis (Con, New Forest E) suspected Mr Cummings would realise ‘time was up’. Yet Mr Lewis also noted that ministers sometimes refuse to let civil servants give evidence to select committees. Indeed. Sir Bill Cash’s European Scrutiny committee wants to question Downing Street’s Brexit supremo Olly Robbins and has been refused.
Sarah Wollaston (Con, Totnes) said ‘it’s a disgrace and we should call it out’. Call it out of what? Greater eloquence was shown by Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) who argued that if Mr Cummings ‘got away with it’, the Commons would soon find every captain of industry in the land refusing to submit to select-committee questioning.
‘We cannot allow impunity any longer,’ cried Mr Bryant.
Select committees, at their best, can shame over-powerful figures such as the bosses of errant banks and hospital contractors and media firms and venture capitalists.
What went unsaid yesterday was that a few committees (eg Home Affairs in the Vaz years) have in recent times become silly show-trials. Any new law forcing attendance is probably years away. Mr Cummings looks safe for the time being.