Tributes paid to former Speaker Lord Martin
Highly controversial Speaker of the House who was pushed out over his handling of the scandal of MPS’ expenses, including his own
Tributes have been paid to Michael Martin, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, after he died yesterday aged 72.
John Bercow, who took over as Speaker in 2009, said Lord Martin was a “decent, public-spirited man who had a real care and concern for Members, their staff and the staff of the House”.
The cross-bench peer was forced to resign over the way he handled the MPS’ expenses scandal.
LORD MARTIN OF SPRINGBURN, who has died aged 72, was the 156th Speaker of the House of Commons, and the first since 1695 to be forced from office; he resigned in May 2009 facing a no-confidence motion over his handling of the MPS’ expenses scandal exposed by The Daily Telegraph.
A Glaswegian former sheet metal worker, Michael Martin – even before the unprecedented scenes in the House that brought his downfall – was a highly controversial occupant of the Chair. He overcame misgivings over his impartiality – if not, entirely, his competence – but his nine-year tenure was marred by a high turnover among his staff, and latterly by his own sizeable claims for expenses.
Pressure on Martin intensified when in November 2008 the police investigating leaks from the Home Office raided the Commons office of the Tory frontbencher Damian Green. Martin told the House he had been unaware the police had not obtained a search warrant, and blamed his staff. Nine years later, fallout from the raid would force Green’s resignation as deputy to Theresa May.
When the Telegraph began disclosing the hefty sums some MPS had secured from the Fees Office – for which the Speaker was responsible – for mortgages already paid off, lavish furnishings and even cleaning out a moat, Martin circled the wagons. He launched a personal attack in the House on two members who suggested his priority should be reforming the system rather than prosecuting whoever had leaked the data.
With the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg openly saying he should go, Martin made a statement apologising for the way Parliament had let the nation down – but to widespread dismay did not announce his retirement at the next election. When several backbenchers unprecedentedly urged him to quit and warned that a no-confidence motion would be tabled, he told them it would not be debated unless the Government brought it forward.
Martin now appeared an obstacle to change rather than the instrument for achieving it. Overnight, 23 MPS signed the motion, and after Gordon Brown told him his position was untenable, Martin told the House on May 20 2009 that he would retire in a month “in order that unity can be maintained”. He then chaired a meeting with party leaders at which interim reforms were agreed.
Martin seldom looked at ease in the Chair; his manner was that of a Pope delivering a homily in a language not his own. It was his misfortune to succeed the colourful and media-savvy Betty Boothroyd, and to be elected by an overwhelmingly Labour House in preference to such popular Opposition figures as Sir George Young – whom the Labour leadership would have preferred – and Sir Menzies Campbell.
It was no fault of Martin’s that his election on October 23 2000 was a shambles. The arcane system under which each candidate in turn was voted on had been found wanting when his predecessor was elected, but nothing had been done about it. It took MPS more than seven hours to vote on each of 12 candidates before Martin emerged the winner, approved by 370 votes to 8 after Sir George had been defeated 317-241 despite 20 ministers supporting him. The 84-year-old Sir Edward Heath, presiding as Father of the House, told reformers led by Tony Benn that he had no powers to change the system.
Martin, in an unprecedented move, called a press conference to stress that he would be “not the Executive’s man but the House’s man”. He halted Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions for criticising the policies of the Opposition, and causing a furore by preventing David Cameron questioning Blair about his relations with Brown. The day Blair stood down, Martin inadvertently introduced Brown as “Prime Minister”. Yet he managed to hold the ring during bitter exchanges between Cameron and Brown as the latter’s premiership ran into difficulties.
After early wobbles, Martin showed himself determined to maintain the integrity of the Commons and bring to heel publicity-seeking ministers who made announcements elsewhere. Some of his decisions inevitably aroused protest, such as his ruling in 2004 that the Parliament Act could be used to override the Lords’ opposition to the hardfought legislation to ban foxhunting. He upset parliamentary journalists by ending the system under which they received copies of ministerial statements as they were made, instead of afterwards.
A Glasgow MP for three decades and the first Roman Catholic Speaker for four and a half centuries, Martin, who passed his first O-level at 42, had to live down the epithet of “Gorbals Mick” bestowed on him by sketchwriters. He had in part brought their hostility on himself, through his decision as chairman of the Services Committee to bar Lobby correspondents from the riverside terrace where they had customarily mingled with MPS.
A shy man who could overcompensate with gruffness, Martin was less successful than some Speakers in keeping his views to himself. He had a strong social conscience, and when in 2001 MPS pressed for a debate after an asylum seeker was murdered in his constituency, Martin could not resist observing from the Chair that he was well aware of local concerns over the issue.
Criticised by some, he stood his ground, noting that though he had been elected as a non-party candidate (the SNP, breaking convention, insisted on opposing him) he still had a duty to his constituents.
Martin’s Springburn constituency (from 2005 Glasgow North East) had its problems. In 1984 he warned that heroin addicts were inundating local hospitals, and complained that inadequate precautions had led to 14 constituents contracting legionnaires’ disease. Glasgow’s high death rate from cancer made him an early campaigner over passive smoking, and after attacks on local children he supported legislation to curb dangerous dogs.
Away from the Chair, Martin started on a contentious note, sacking his diary secretary, Charlotte Every, over the objections of his private secretary Sir Nicholas Bevan, for not showing him proper respect; supporters of the privately educated Miss Every said she had been branded “too posh” and a crypto-tory.
Martin’s relationship with Sir Nicholas, a former MOD mandarin, was never good, and when Bevan took early retirement in 2003 it was claimed the Speaker regarded him as “pompous”. Martin’s wife had clashed with him over her plans to redecorate the Speaker’s palatial residence.
When Maj Gen Peter Grant Peterkin retired as Serjeant-atarms in 2007, forced out by Martin after embarrassing breaches of security, the Speaker did not attend his farewell drinks. This was just as well, as Peterkin’s deputy Muir Morton told guests: “Peter … has had a testing time. Not everyone here is easy to get on with. When others would have packed it in, gone back to the glens and said: ‘Sod this for a load of Highland cow droppings’, he has played the gentleman and hung in there.”
Martin broke new ground by appointing as Peterkin’s successor Jill Pay, a parliamentary official with no military background. The Queen did not take kindly to the innovation, and when the Damian Green affair broke Martin had no compunction in shuffling blame on to Mrs Pay.
Controversy over Martin’s own use of public money began when the former Independent MP Martin Bell complained that the Speaker had claimed £20,000 a year for a London home despite living over the shop (he let out his Pimlico flat and donated much of the rent to the homeless), and that his wife was paid for constituency work she was not undertaking. After it was revealed that she had claimed £4,000 for using taxis in London, Martin’s spokesman, Mike Granatt, resigned, saying he had been given misleading information. Martin had also used air miles collected on official business to pay for business-class travel for members of his family (rather than saving them to offset his own travel costs).
Early in 2008 it emerged that he had claimed up to £75,000 in “second home” expenses for his house in Glasgow, which doubled as his constituency office. Although it was unmortgaged and the allowance was largely intended to meet mortgage payments, the claim was within the rules.
Disclosures about the misuse of allowances by others began with Derek Conway, stripped of the Tory whip after it emerged that he had two sons – one a student – on his payroll. Pressure to tighten the rules intensified, and Martin found himself chairing the working party to recommend changes, just as his own expenses were in the spotlight.
Moreover, he enraged campaigners for open government by fighting all the way to the High Court a Freedom of Information request for the expenses of prominent MPS including Blair, Brown and Cameron.
The teetotal Martin’s most audible hobby was the pipes. He was a member of the College of Piping, his coat of arms included a chanter as well as a steel rule and locomotive wheel to acknowledge his constituency’s traditional industries, and at functions he was happy to break the ice with a tune.
The pipes did not adapt well to London life, however; his performance at a Scots’ MPS’ karaoke night at a Soho restaurant came to a premature end when he announced: “The air conditioning has buggered the drones.”
Michael John Martin was born in Glasgow on July 3 1945, the son of Michael Martin, a merchant seaman, and his wife Mary, a school cleaner. He left St Patrick’s boys’ school, Anderston, at 15 to become an apprentice sheet metal worker, and from 1970 was an engineering union shop steward at Rolls-royce, Hillington. In 1976 he became a full-time organiser for the public service union Nupe. He joined the Labour Party at 21; from 1973 he served on Glasgow city council, and in 1979 he was elected MP for Springburn.
Firmly on the Right of the party, Martin in 1981 became PPS to its deputy leader Denis Healey, being closely involved in Healey’s narrow defeat of Tony Benn that autumn and the start of the drive to roll back the hard Left. When Joe Ashton formed a “Rambo tendency” of working-class MPS to counteract Labour’s middle-class Marxists, Martin was a foundermember.
When Healey stood down in 1983, Martin joined the Trade and Industry Select Committee. But his skill as a chairman had been noted, and in 1987 he was appointed to the Speaker’s Panel to chair committees. His most regular duty during a 10-year apprenticeship before being appointed Deputy Speaker was to chair the Scottish Grand Committee, which notably met in Edinburgh before the 1992 election to press the claims of Labour’s Scottish leadership for a devolved parliament.
At this stage he retained his partisanship. In 1990 he startled colleagues by addressing Dick Douglas, a former colleague who had defected to the SNP, in what the Speaker Bernard Weatherill termed “shipyard language”. He upset Conservatives by chairing the committee on their reorganisation of Scotland’s water industry while wearing a badge opposing it.
There was little controversy when Martin moved up in 1997 to be Betty Boothroyd’s deputy. The House was not then difficult to chair; Labour’s majority of 178 ruled out most of the close votes and late-night sittings during which it becomes most unruly. Only when Miss Boothroyd decided to retire in October 2000 did doubts about his suitability surface.
On his election as Speaker, Martin was appointed to the Privy Council. He gave up his seat on retiring as Speaker, precipitating a by-election which Labour comfortably won, and received his life peerage – awarded under convention despite protests by some MPS – in August 2009.
Michael Martin married Mary Mclay in 1966. She and their son and daughter survive him.
Lord Martin of Springburn, born July 3 1945, died April 29 2018