Editorial Comment:
The House of Commons returns today, and one of the most striking changes will be who is no longer there. John Bercow is tending his new career as a television personality, replaced as Speaker by the less self-aggrandising figure of Sir Lindsay Hoyle. From Dominic Grieve and David Gauke to Sir Oliver Letwin and Philip Hammond, the ex-tory rebels are out, either losing their seats in doomed attempts to win as independents or having pre-emptively decided to leave politics for good. Those Conservatives who defected to the Lib Dems to campaign for a second referendum all failed in their attempts to re-enter Parliament. Remainer Labour MPS for Brexit areas, meanwhile, were kicked out in their dozens.
These are the politicians responsible for turning the last parliament into a log-jammed, paralysed mess. No constitutional norm or established procedure was safe from their single-minded determination to thwart Brexit. They hoped to keep Boris Johnson a prisoner in Downing Street, incapable of moving forward with his agenda and yet unable to go to the country for a new mandate.
That aspect of their plan fell apart when the Liberal Democrats and the SNP decided to accept the need for a general election, pressuring Labour to do the same. In the parallel universe where the general election never happened, we would be staring at a miserable Christmas of yet more stasis followed by yet another failure to get Brexit done in January.
It is small wonder that most of the country is relieved. The 365 Conservative MPS who will take their seats today all ran on a platform of voting for Mr Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement, and the Prime Minister has been clear that he wants to complete negotiations for the trade deal by the end of next year. The Government has also indicated that it will repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, the ill-conceived piece of legislation that enabled the dysfunction of the past few years.
The people really to be congratulated, however, are the voters. With a few exceptions, particularly on the Labour front-bench, last Thursday’s election saw nearly all of those MPS who turned the last parliament into a chaotic sixth-form debating society of self-indulgent grandstanding and undemocratic manoeuvring removed from office. For all the talk of the country’s constitution being broken, at least one part of it has worked exactly as it needed to.