Westminster

So, the expenses scandal may finally be coming towards a close. We can only hope so. The leaks emanating from the Kelly report suggest that MPs will only be able to claim for rent, not mortgages, on their second homes. This seems reasonable. Less sensible, however, is the proposal that MPs be banned from employing members of their family. Apart from the obvious potential for legal challenges to this proposal, it's manifestly unfair and ridiculous in equal measure. In the first place, it's not clear that MPs should be singled out in this fashion. Secondly, it creates the absurd situation in which it would, presumably, be OK for an MP to employ his mistress but decidedly not OK for him to employ his wife.

So, it seems that if you want to win a primary contest in the modern Tory party it helps to be a GP. Having selected a local GP in Totnes the Conservatives have selected another local MP in Bracknell. As Liberal Vision's Mark Littlewood says, Phil Lee may well become an admirable Member of Parliament but, from an ousider's perspective it does seem a shame that neither of the two high-profile candidates - Iain Dale and Rory Stewart were selected. Since I've complained about excessive control from the centre it may seem churlish to grumble that there are problems with the way that local parties select their candidates too. But there you have it. There are trad-offs everywhere and nothing and no system is perfect.

The other day Pete mentioned David Cameron's desire to bring in outsiders to staff his government ministries, making it a Tory version of Gordon's so-called Government Of All the Talents. One can see why this must be an appealling notion. You might share it if you were charged with assembling a government from the parliamentary Conservative party. Christ, you might think, they sent me this? Bricks without straw also ran. Now Benedict Brogan says that the Tories are thiking of creating as many as 40 new Conservative peers to stack the House of Lords with reliable Cameron votes. Again, one can see why he would want to do so even if, happily, a Conservative ministry will still be unable to command a majority in the Upper House.

This time, perhaps even the lawyers have gone too far. It's hard to recall, even in the long history of appalling gagging orders, a more disgraceful injunction than this: The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights. Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

For some time since I came of voting age I took the view that it was more important to vote (when I bothered to vote) for the party, not the man (or woman). A lot of people, perhaps even a majority of the electorate, think this way. But I  now think I was wrong and they are wrong too. Voting for the party, regardless of the inadequacies of your local candidate, is easy. Taking the time to learn which of your local constituency candidates most deserves your support takes, well, effort. But I think that effort is worthwhile. The expenses scandal may have brought some welcome clarity to this view. There are plenty of incumbent charlatans and rogues  who deserve to be turfed from office, regardless of their party affiliation.

The kerfuffle over Lord Ashcroft's purchase* of a majority stake in PoliticsHome is not something, I suspect, that mch interests anyone beyond the Westminster village. That said, I think Hopi Sen has the best take on this midget-brouhaha: The result of these expert polls was usually a story like “Westminster insiders think Clegg needs to up his game” a day after something bad happened to Nick Clegg, or “Westminster insiders think Cameron is struggling to convince” a day after a poll comes out showing Cameron struggling to convince. Well great. Now we know MPs and journalists read the newspapers and watch TV. Now, you might think this is all just fine, but it’s not.

Like James, I enjoyed Mark Lawson's column this morning. Then I would, wouldn't I? I've written before about the fatuous desire to graft* American political arrangements onto our own political structure. Lawson is right to suggest that the political and media class's obsession with The West Wing is all rather depressing. Now, like plenty of other people, I liked the West Wing, even if, in my experience, the more one knew about how Washington actually works the more preposterous the show became. Our pols, however, don't seem to have grasped that it's a fantasy and not to be taken seriously. In a sense, Aaron Sorkin offered a dangerous fantasy too: promoting the idea that politics is the answer and that good intentions and cleverness will prevail. The Best and the Brightest are enough.

Via Tom Harris, I see that the new Speaker is contemplating "modernising" the House of Commons by dropping the convention that MPs refer to one another as the "Honourable Member" and "Right Honourable" and so on. If John Bercow thinks this will do anything to help the public understand the supposedly arcane and baffling Westminster world then he's utterly mistaken. More importantly, it suggests that, in this instance at least, his understanding of the problems afflicting Westminster is sadly shallow and even juvenile. The Scottish Parliament - working on the assumption that any Westminster convention was foegeyish and "out of touch" - decided that there was no need for such antiquated formalities and, consequently, members would address one another by name.

James makes a droll case for Labour holding an open, national, primary to select the party's next leader. As I say, it's an entertaining notion, though it's not clear that Tory or Lib Dem voters have any real right to choose Gordon Brown's successor. Still, the idea of primaries seems to be on everyone's mind lately. All in the name of "reconnecting" politicians and voters. But the argument for primaries basically comes down to one thing: that's how they do it in the United States. Since much of the British political and media class finds American presidential elections much more exciting and interesting than anything that happens on our own wee island, it's hardly surprising that there should be such enthusiasm for any idea that would Americanise our politics. But this is a fantasy.

This may seem a peculiar thing to say after weeks of anger from the public and self-laceration among MPs, but I'm not talking about the fall-out from the expenses scandal. I was in Westminster for the first time in ages the other day to attend a meeting about Bangladesh in the Lords. I can't remember the number of the committee room now and I could certainly never locate it again. The Commons (or was it Lords?) staff were very helpful in helping me find it, although stricltly speaking they allowed me down a stretch of corrridor and down a staircase that was out-of-bounds. At the end of it I felt like a little boy on my first day at school. This sort of thing often happens to me when I venture into parliament.