Sir Michael Cummins
Serjeant at Arms who oversaw the introduction of TV cameras and gave MPS better office space
SIR MICHAEL CUMMINS, who has died aged 80, was a cavalry officer who became a reforming Serjeant at Arms at the House of Commons, but in his final months had to cope with several embarrassing security lapses.
The Serjeant at Arms is the most important parliamentary official after the Speaker, and has a wide range of responsibilities covering how the Commons end of the Palace of Westminster is run.
Over 23 years as assistant, then deputy and finally as Serjeant at Arms from 2000 to 2004, Cummins oversaw the introduction of television coverage, a huge expansion of information technology and the creation of a new senior management structure.
He managed the completion of Portcullis House, the Commons’ new building on the other side of Bridge Street, the plan for its occupation and its opening by the Queen in 2001. The following year he oversaw the lying-in-state of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the Commons’ part in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
Cummins led the review which, for the first time, led to the House having a coherent strategy for providing MPS with office space. After the 9/11 attacks he formulated a contingency plan for the Commons to relocate in an emergency.
The Serjeant at Arms was responsible for the internal security of his end of the building, and the Metropolitan Police for the exterior. However, the lines were blurred, Cummins regarding the Met as in effective day-to-day charge, and police sources eager, when anything went wrong, to blame the “men in tights”.
Pressure on security had been increased when MPS neglected one year to pass the Sessional Orders, which had historically barred demonstrators from Parliament Square. The turn of the century saw a series of protests by the Countryside Alliance and gay rights activists which lapped at the doors of the building.
Cummins responded to the possibility of demonstrators getting inside by having a perspex screen erected between the public gallery and the Commons chamber over Easter 2004. Peter Hain, Leader of the House, had suggested further reforms, but these were rejected by the House authorities, and that May the Met was given the right to take charge in an emergency, overruling the Commons’ own security staff.
The same month, two protesters from Fathers4justice who had been given passes by an unwitting Labour life peeress pelted Tony Blair with condoms filled with purple flour from the Peers’ Gallery during Prime Minister’s Questions. Soon after, protesters from Greenpeace scaled Big Ben. That September, eight anti-hunt campaigners tried to force their way into the Chamber. Three were stopped by Cummins’s doorkeepers, one of whom was wearing a sword. Five others got in and screamed abuse at ministers, until more doorkeepers wrestled them to the ground.
Hain wanted to bring in MI5, making little secret of his view that a less amateurish security system was needed; there had been rumours that al Qaeda would try to smuggle in a “dirty bomb”. But Blair gave him a public warning not to go “over the top”, saying constituents had to be able to meet their MPS, and people with a grievance had to be free to protest.
In the wake of the antihunting incursion a parttime security coordinator was appointed, taking up his post as Cummins retired at the end of 2004. Before he went, MPS from all sides told him he had been subjected to unfair criticism, and had weathered it with dignity and resolve.
They also told him the parties he and his wife gave at their residence on the premises were the best in Westminster, with even more fancy dress than he wore when on duty. Cummins’s hobbies included riding and tapestry-making, which they advised him not to try simultaneously.
Michael John Austin Cummins was born on November 26 1939, the son of Harold Cummins and the former Florence Austin. From Queen Mary School he attended Sandhurst, then in 1959 was commissioned into the 3rd Carabiniers, the Prince of Wales’s Dragoon Guards (later the Royal Scots
Dragoon Guards). Cummins served in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Aden and Kuwait. He also did operational tours in Northern Ireland as a squadron leader with the Queen’s Own Hussars, seeing front-line service in dangerous areas along the Border.
Retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-colonel, he joined the Serjeant at Arms’s Department in 1981. He was appointed assistant Serjeant at Arms in 1982 and deputy in 1995, then Serjeant at Arms at the start of 2000.
A man with a deep affection for the Commons, Cummins retired just a few hundred yards to Pimlico, learning to play the cello.
His legacy, apart from improved accommodation and working arrangements for MPS and their staff, is his book Serjeant for the Commons (1994), written with one of his predecessors, Sir Peter Thorne. He was knighted in 2003.
Michael Cummins married, first in 1964, Mary Farman. The marriage was dissolved in 1995 and that year he married, secondly, Catherine Lamb. She survives him, with two sons from his first marriage and a stepdaughter from his second.
Sir Michael Cummins, born November 26 1939, died January 25 2020