Our love of hierarchy means little will change

I first set eyes on Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1970.

We were both involved in student protests in our respective universities and I’d been invited from Liverpool University to give a talk to him and his fellow protesters on the campus in Edinburgh.

At around the same time Michael Martin, who had become an apprentice sheet metal worker at 15, was working as a committed trades union representative in Glasgow, fighting for better pay and conditions for his members.

What happened? How did these two men, transported into parliament by their high-profile left-wing political activities, end up presiding over what Gordon Brown yesterday called a “gentlemen’s club”?

Neither MP appears to have any record for criticising the place. What was it about the medieval practices in the Commons they joined that they found so irresistible?

And that goes for all the other student radicals and trades unionists who have washed through parliament in our lifetimes. They have all found a way of making it work for them and simply fitting in.

Sure, people have grumbled, but there has never been an act of wholesale defiance against the way the place operates. To a large extent, the lobby journalists down the years have allowed themselves to go along with it all. And still do.

After the defenestration of the Speaker, I awake to a new dawn, but with an overwhelming sense that not a lot will change. Is anyone likely to say boo if Speaker Martin drifts off to a well-plumped life in the Lords, to continue living, in part, at the taxpayer’s expense?

The fact is, we are not a nation of revolution. We like hierarchy. We wallow in tradition. The Houses of Parliament bask in both. For now, until they prove otherwise, they remain a “gentlemen’s club” – in that, Mr Brown is right.

And despite the pledge of new and independent administrative systems, the “now” is unlikely to end any time soon.