Big Ben must bong for Brexit – and show Britain isn’t ruled by bureaucrats

Whitehall mandarins may not want bells to ring out, but the people do. No10 needs to make it happen

If, a month ago, you had asked me whether it was important that the currently disabled bongs of Big Ben should be restored for Brexit night, I would probably have said no. If you asked me now, I would probably say yes. I suspect many others feel the same. To get one thing out of the way quickly: this is not a matter of triumphalism. On the night of January 31, there will be lots of lovely private parties (of which I shall attend as many as possible) to celebrate the long-awaited victory of the cause. They can be as joyous as they like. But the symbolism of the Big Ben bongs bonging once more should not be as a gloat by the winners. It is a powerful, public statement of a plain constitutional fact. Our status as a country is changing as it has done only once before (when we entered the European Economic Community (EEC) on January 1 1973). We are regaining our independence because we voted to do so. If that exact moment is captured by the world’s most famous clock striking 11 times, it will mark the change for Parliament and people, right round the globe. It will show that the deed is done.

The swing of sentiment in favour of the bongs has to do with the obstructive nature of the objections to the scheme. On Tuesday, the House of Commons Commission, the body formally charged with pronouncing on such issues, issued a gloomy statement. It claimed that the cost, once you included the erection of the necessary platform and the delay of the restoration work occasioned, would be £500,000. The sum would increase further as the notice period decreased, it warned.

The Commission also described the idea, emanating from the Prime Minister, that the thing could be paid for by public contributions as “an unprecedented approach”, as if that must mean it was a bad one. The rumour is that no one on the Commission, with the sole exception of the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-mogg, voted for Big Ben to bong.

This negativity is a classic symptom of bureaucracy. It is also a repetition of the mentality, displayed again and again under the disastrous, pre-brexit Speakership of John Bercow, in which Parliament gets its kicks not by serving the people it is supposed to represent, but by blocking them. The newly elected Parliament, with its sensible new Speaker, surely thinks differently and should have a chance to decide.

Obviously the cost of £500,000, if correct, is a big sum (nearly £50,000 per bong), but it is typical of lumbering institutions that they love to skimp on a one-off cost yet happily pour unaccounted millions into grandiose projects.

The current restoration of Big Ben

– which has silenced the bongs – was estimated at £33million when it began three years ago. The latest private estimate puts it well over double that, with wider Commons capital spending also racing ahead. This excess is as nothing beside the colossal ambition of the “restoration and renewal”

(“R & R”) project for the Houses of Parliament themselves. This includes the total evacuation of the present chambers and the construction of an unnecessarily permanent new extra chamber on the Richmond House site off Whitehall. Critics naturally fear that the existence of the new chamber will be used as an argument for never going back into the old ones. Under

R & R, Parliament will literally have been re-formed, without any properly debated decision about whether this is right.

Part of what lies behind this is the growth, so characteristic of modern times, of unanswerable official power. The point about the House of Commons – for all its many faults – is that it should be run by its members, because they alone answer to the voters. Nowadays, especially under Mr Bercow, that principle has been eroded.

Using a lingo which is part wokery and part management-speak, officials have aggrandised their own role. Behind the House of Commons Commission, mentioned above, is the Commons Executive Board, with its “Managing Director, HR and Diversity”, its “Acting Managing Director, Participation” and no job titles – except for that of Clerk of the House – which reflect the fundamental constitutional role of the body they seek to control. It has become customary for MPS themselves to know almost nothing about what is happening in the place in which they work and sit. Quite recently, it emerged almost too late to protest that a third of the House’s superb library was about to be given up to make space for – guess what? – more officials.

As for the crowd-funding of the bongs, there may well be administrative complications here, but the simple fact remains that almost nothing would be easier than raising half a million pounds from the public in this cause. If people say how awkward it is for a part of the British constitution to receive free-will offerings from the voters, it is worth pointing out that the Treasury already accepts gifts, and even, I am told, has a special fund for doing so. Wellintentioned old people worried about the national debt sometimes leave money to help pay it off. All those rich, smug Corbynite celebrities who like saying at election time that they would be happy to pay more income tax are perfectly free to pay it anyway, at any time, and leave the cheque in the Treasury post-box at 1 Horse Guards.

In a nutshell, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

If the Government now shows that there isn’t a will, it might lose its way, as Theresa May’s one so often did in relation to Brexit. It will look as if Boris Johnson, who won a referendum under the slogan “Take back control” and last month won a general election landslide by repeating “Get Brexit done”, has not quite got the control and cannot quite get Brexit done with a flourish. Millions are ready to follow Boris’s alliteration and “Bung a bob for Brexit”. It does not sound so good when he says, in Boris how-doi-get-out-of-this-one mode, “Well actually, chaps, I hadn’t quite thought it through. So we’ll just project a clock face on to the walls of Number 10 instead.” For Big Ben not to bong now will look like a defeat.

Besides, such a moment could be just the sort of theatre at which Boris Johnson excels (and when he should not allow himself to be upstaged by Nigel Farage). The moment of Brexit is obviously the right one for a prime ministerial broadcast to the nation.

When we entered the EEC in 1973, the then prime minister, Ted Heath, put on a black tie for a grandee dinner, sitting next to an applauding Archbishop of Canterbury. He made a speech about how we should now get rid of the old phrase “Common Market”, because Europe would be a Community which “will gradually extend until it covers virtually the whole field of collective human endeavour”.

It is perhaps because the European Union did indeed attempt to capture that whole, vast field, that we have at last decided to leave it. As we depart in 2020, the present Prime Minister will have no need of a dinner jacket. All he needs to do is speak briefly to the country from Downing Street about the future of our whole nation – one nation – as an independent United Kingdom once again.

He should finish at 10.59pm. Then he should invite us to listen to Big Ben’s bongs. Nothing more need be said.