Welcome to Westminster: where lecherous shysters get pissed at our expense
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Version 0 of 1. Come Russell Brand's revolution, I'm not sure what plans the comedian has for the Palace of Westminster. Perhaps it will become a hotel in which Andrew Sachs could redemptively reprise his Manuel to Brand's Wonka-esque Basil Fawlty. But I would urge him to consider preserving the building just as it is, complete with everyone currently in it, as a cautionary museum to the worst aspects of the 1970s. In many ways it already functions precisely as that. In keeping with its period-piece status, MPs should really be strutting its corridors in glittery platform heels and bopping to Slade. Instead, revelations of their timewarped oddness simply dovetail with the re-evaluation of the past that has been under way over the past couple of years. Despite having been held up as the pre-Thatcherism Arcadia for so long, warmly eulogised by a series of talking heads on nostalgia shows like the BBC's I Love The Winter of Discontent and Channel 4's 100 Greatest Yewtree Stars, the floodgates opened by Jimmy Savile's death have seen many reminded that the 1970s were often perfectly horrible. They also seem to be alive and well and accessible via the police cordon that rings the Houses of Parliament. In the wake of Nigel Evans's acquittal on rape and sexual assault charges, and the ongoing disquiet around Lord Rennard's ongoing presence at Westminster, Channel 4 News broadcast an investigation into sexual conduct in parliament. Convention in such cases demands that my next remark is "and the results were shocking" – except of course that they weren't to anyone already of the opinion that the entire place is a depressing hotbed of 30-years-outmoded attitudes and unimaginative iniquity. Of the 70 people researchers spoke to across the parties, a third had personally experienced sexual harassment, and a further 21% had witnessed others being harassed or had been the confidant of someone who had been a victim. Needless to say, no one felt able to speak on the record for fear of harming their career prospects. Like all dysfunctional institutions, from boarding schools to prisons, Westminster appears to have normalised codes of behaviour that elsewhere would mark their practitioners as weirdos. There is a distinct argot – "going forward", "let me be clear" and whatnot – and they presumably teach you to do those silly choppy hand gestures the minute you get sent there in the belief that flapping like a partially restrained seal passes for rhetoric. But as in the aforementioned institutions, Westminster ways have long since parted company with those of more functional wider society. To watch prime minister's questions is to behold the interactions of creatures so bizarre and unknowable to normal people that the BBC really ought to get David Attenborough to provide the voiceover. To hear them defend each other's property deals even as they shower one-penny-off-a-pint vouchers on the bingo-winged masses is to fall victim to some sort of cosmic joke in which we are the punchline. Even as politicians preach about the dangers of later pub opening hours for the feckless electorate, many of their number get notoriously drunk and handsy in bars that – unbelievably, no matter how many times I type it – are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. Occasionally the police are called to these watering holes. But then if you give not-very-hardworking people more than a whole quid off the things they enjoy, you can hardly act surprised when they abuse it. Perhaps we voters might feel better about ourselves if we decided that we were not enabling a bunch of shysters and sad cases to get lecherous and pissed at our expense, but were actually funding a valuable historical archive project. We should start thinking of Westminster as of a piece with those museums where people in 18th-century peasant dress are working the old farm machinery, or struggling actors are going around talking about ague and trying to ignore the schoolchildren flicking chewing gum balls at their dirndls. Instead of droning on about our hallowed democracy to parties of visitors who can smell the bullshit from the age of eight, Westminster guides should be administered with a truth serum before taking tours. "There is a bafflingly important but unattractive man who didn't get laid until he was 35," they might point out, "and there's the researcher who has never worked anywhere normal and is going to have his hand on her leg at 9.32pm tonight. And over there is someone whose Louis Quatorze patio furniture you paid for." In the end, the overwhelming sense of Westminster the public now has is one of entitlement, so it's no surprise to find that it is sexual as well as financial. If the mother of parliaments' denizens truly wish to address that – and to be honest, you can hardly detect a meaningful appetite for change – then many MPs might consider taking a tour themselves in one of their lengthy parliamentary recesses. (I think they're about to break up for summer.) For example, those keen on some no-strings sex – and why not, after all? – might consider levelling the playing field and trying to pick up people whose career they cannot influence, in bars not subsidised by – or closed to – ordinary taxpayers. They might, in short, consider one of their fabled "fact-finding missions" to Britain 2014, a very long way indeed from perfect, to be sure, but somewhere closer to acceptable than the place they've been hanging out. |