How do you get rid of an MP?

After a spate of scandals on both sides of the House, it seems an understatement to say that this hasn’t been Parliament’s finest hour. During a phone call in the supermarket, we are told, the humiliated MP and former Conservative minister, Owen Paterson, learned that the Prime Minister had backed off reform of the standards system, and in doing so left him to face the sanctions of the House — suspension for 30 days. Within hours, we are told, he had resigned.

Earlier in the same week, the former Labour MP for Leicester East, Claudia Webbe (pictured above) was given a suspended jail sentence for harassment. She however, shows no signs of resigning and if she loses her appeal may well face the unedifying prospect of a “recall” vote. And this week we learned that the Conservative MP for Windsor, Adam Afriyie, is facing bankruptcy, which if it materialises could force him out of the House. As has been pointed out recently in these pages, the vast majority of MPs are decent, talented and hard-working. But some get it wrong and if they do, it is not easy to get rid of them. But it is possible.

The most common way an MP can leave the Commons between sessions has been used in the case of Owen Paterson. This illustrates an interesting quirk of Parliamentary procedure. In 1624, just a few short years before a civil war was fought between Parliament and the King, the House of Commons decided on the circumstances by which an MP could leave office; resignation was not one of them. Instead, the principle among them was “taking the Chiltern Hundreds” — an acceptance of a Crown “office for profit”. The reason being that “paid office” from the Crown was considered at the time incompatible with being an MP, whose job was to scrutinise the Crown — an irony if ever there was one in the case of Paterson, ousted after being accused of accepting an “office for profit” from two companies.

The two Crown offices — the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead — are ancient institutions that have been retained solely for the purpose of enabling an MP to resign. There are two of them, just in case two members want to resign at the same time. They are used alternately. From the mid-19^th century, the practice has been that the Chancellor of the Exchequer writes to the member, omitting the letters MP after their name, informing them of their appointment, copied to the Speaker and the Party Whips. A notice is then published in the London Gazette, where official notices have appeared since 1665. It’s a piece of pageantry as colourful and splendid as Black Rod banging on the Commons’ door at the State Opening of Parliament.

Or is it? In 2011 when Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams resigned his West Belfast seat, his Unionist neighbour in Belfast North drew attention to Adam’s acceptance of an “office for profit” from the Crown and could not resist having a parting dig at his rival, saying the Prime Minister could “chalk that up as one of his achievements”. PM David Cameron continued the banterish exchange “I am not sure that Gerry Adams will be delighted to be a Baron of the Manor of Northstead, but none the less, I am pleased that tradition has been maintained”.

Adams certainly was very far from being delighted. He issued a statement: “I am an Irish republican. I have had no truck whatsoever with these antiquated and quite bizarre aspects of the British parliamentary system… I have become Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, wherever that is… I am sure the burghers of that Manor are as bemused as me.” The row was elegantly diffused by a simple alteration to the wording in Erskine May, the handbook of parliamentary practice, changing accepting the office, to being appointed to the office. Two other Sinn Fein MPs have left Parliament by the same route, in 2013 and 2018.

There are, however, other less ancient ways in which MPs can automatically leave the Commons: becoming a member of the House of Lords (Labour’s George Robertson in 1999 being the most recent example); being sentenced to more than a year in prison (since 1981); being convicted of treason (since 1870); having their election voided (overturned by an election court); being expelled by resolution of the House (very rare); being elected to certain (but not all) other elective offices; bankruptcy (in certain circumstances); and, since 2015, by a recall petition.

The former Labour MP, Claudia Webbe, may illustrate that last mechanism to get rid of an MP: recall. Between her and Paterson they give the lie to the old adage, Conservative MPs are always caught in sex scandals, Labour MPs in money scandals. Ms Webbe was sentenced to 10 weeks imprisonment, suspended for two years plus 200 hours community service, having been found guilty of harassment. This included threatening to use acid on and distribute naked pictures of a woman friend of her partner. If the appeal by Webbe fails, the Recall of MPs Act 2015 will come into play.

“Recall” was brought in by Parliament after the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, as a way of satisfying the public demand that there needed to be a way of dealing with a “rotten apple” in Parliament in between elections. Before 2015, an MP had to be sentenced for more than a year or convicted of treason to be automatically ejected from Parliament, but that tawdry expenses episode saw fraud charges brought against six Labour MPs and two Conservative members of the House of Lords by the then Director of Public Prosecutions, one Keir Starmer QC. All of those prosecuted were found guilty and lengthy sentences or supervision orders were handed down: the high regard in which MPs may formerly have been held was irretrievably damaged.

Under the Recall of MPs Act 2015, if one of three conditions is met, a recall petition is opened for six weeks in the MP’s constituency; if 10 per cent of registered electors sign it, the MP is ejected and there is a by-election. One of the conditions is to be suspended from the House of Commons for more than ten days (Paterson); another is to be sentenced to any term of imprisonment, even if suspended (Webbe); and the third is to be convicted of an offence under the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, which specifically outlawed making false parliamentary claims, passed in the wake of the expenses scandal.

Except in the rare circumstance of the offence for which the MP was convicted being grounds for disqualification, the former MP is at liberty to stand again for their party, if reselected by them, or as an independent. The only instance of a petition brought because of the third condition, conviction of expenses fraud, was the case of the Conservative MP for Brecon and Radnor, Chris Davis, in March 2019. The local Conservative Association “stood by their man” and Chris Davis was selected to stand in the resulting by-election in August 2019, which he proceeded to lose to the Liberal Democrats’ Jane Dodds. The Conservatives fielded a new candidate in the general election of December 2019 and won the seat back.

Election petitions do not always achieve the required 10 per cent of signatures. The petition in North Antrim after Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley Jr was suspended from the Commons for thirty days in 2018, did not. A sense of “what is the point” may have influenced voters. North Antrim regularly posts a Unionist majority of around 30 percentage points and entered the record books when Ian Paisley Snr recorded a majority of 94.8 per cent in a by-election in 1986. Another reason that a petition may not have effect is if it is “overtaken” by a general election. Claudia Webbe’s constituency, Leicester East, is no stranger to the process. Her predecessor, Labour’s Keith Vaz, was handed a six-month suspension from the Commons in October 2019, but the petition never came to fruition because a general election was called for December 2019.

There are also some rare circumstances by which an MP is obliged to leave their seat, one being to be ejected by resolution of the House, the last occasion being the Conservative Peter Baker in 1954. Finally, the so-called dual mandate can, in some circumstances, force a choice of office. Somewhat illogically, being elected a Police and Crime Commissioner or member of the assemblies in Northern Ireland or Wales requires the MP to choose between the two, but not being a member of the Scottish Parliament.

Nor is election as a Directly Elected Mayor grounds for disqualification. All three London Mayors were MPs when elected: the Conservative Boris Johnson and Labour’s Sadiq Khan both resigned their seats immediately on winning the mayoralty, while the first London Mayor, Ken Livingstone — then an independent — let what was left of his term as an MP run its course, but he had his mayoral salary reduced to a third while he was still taking his MP’s remuneration.

Something that may seem obvious, but often doesn’t seem to have occurred to political parties, is that succeeding in getting an MP ejected doesn’t guarantee that their party will be defeated at the subsequent by-election.

The final reason for removing an MP is if their election is voided, or overturned, by an election court. Two recent instances, the first since 1924, will illustrate the point. In the 1997 general election, as Conservative seats tumbled across the country, their minister, Gerry Malone, lost his Winchester seat to the Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten by two votes. However, it was found that there had been a technical deficiency at the count and an election court ordered a re-run. Both stood again but Oaten won the re-run, increasing his two-vote majority to 21,556.

In 2010 Labour’s Phil Woolas had his narrow (0.3 percentage points) majority in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency overturned by an election court when his Liberal Democrat opponent successfully argued that his election leaflets had breached section 106 of the Representation of the People Act. This  makes it illegal “for any person to publish any false statement of fact in relation to a candidate’s personal character or conduct”. Woolas was banned from standing for public office for three years. Labour fielded a new candidate, Debbie Abrahams, in the by-election. She won the seat with a majority of 10.2 percentage points and has held it ever since.  

What conclusions can be drawn from these often sad defenestrations? Labour is fond of making accusations of sleaze and is acutely aware of needing to keep its own house in order, so tends to drop its miscreants like stones. Despite some leading figures offering him support, the Labour Party suspended the former MP and minister Phil Woolas and refused to pay his substantial court costs. Webbe was suspended from the party on conviction and expelled on sentencing. But she was a flag-bearer for Jeremy Corbyn and no friend of Keir Starmer, who was probably happy to see her go.

The pro-Brexit Conservative leadership closed ranks around arch-Brexiteer Owen Paterson with calamitous results, but they were not so supportive of their MP Bob Roberts, who earlier this year was found to have breached Parliament’s sexual misconduct policy and was suspended for six weeks. He was “strongly rebuked” by the Conservative Party, called upon to resign by senior figures and had the parliamentary whip withdrawn. He was fortunate, though: because of a technicality of his investigation, it did not result in a recall petition and he continues to sit as an independent.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from these cases, however, is the simple one contained in St Luke’s Gospel: “If your brother does something wrong, reprove him, if he is sorry, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times a day and seven times comes back to you and says ‘I am sorry’, you must forgive him.” Saying sorry is something that MPs seem to find incredibly difficult to do.