The Professor Will See You Now

Illustration: Tracy Worrall

4 min read15 July

In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. Here: roles

In 1955 the Sunday Dispatch ran a competition in which it asked readers what characteristics were required for the perfect MP. Entrants had to select six, in the right order, from a list of 20 potential characteristics. A judging panel of three MPs decided the ‘correct’ answer: “sincerity” (in first place); followed by “regular attendance at Parliament”; “regular visits to the constituency”; “good health”; “has children”; and “loyal to party”. The competition was won by a Mr Fred Mair, from Hatfield, Hertfordshire. He took home a whopping £5,000, worth over £160,000 today.

A common characteristic of this sort of newspaper competition is that the editor’s decision is final and no correspondence would be entered into. But, if you were allowed to write in, it might have been to point out that the premise of the competition was flawed – because there is no single correct way to be an MP. It’s a position with flexibility. You’re an MP, but what sort of an MP?

Or, as the 10-year-old son of one of those first elected in 2001 asked him: “Well, it’s very nice, but what do you do?”

Donald Searing’s magisterial work on the House of Commons in the 1970s, Westminster’s World, identified four distinct types of backbenchers: “Policy Advocates”, “Ministerial Aspirants”, “Constituency Members”, and “Parliament Men”. The labels are self-explanatory, even if the phrasing of the last reflects the time of the research. While some MPs channelled Walt Whitman and contained multitudes, most had a predominant role that fitted into one of these categories.

It’s easy enough to identify all four of those archetypes in the MPs returning to the House and I’d put good money on all of them being in the huge new intake, too.

The proportions are probably different, though. All the evidence is that the Policy Advocates have been growing in number for years, while the number of Parliament Men or Women – already the least common category in Searing’s study – has been in long-term decline.

The 10-year-old son of one of those first elected in 2001 asked him: ‘Well, it’s very nice, but what do you do?’

Perhaps the biggest change is the rise of the constituency role, which has grown dramatically. While there are MPs who see their primary role as being a constituency MP – that is, one of Searing’s Constituency Members – no MP can now afford to take the detached attitude to the constituency that was commonplace then.

Another fascinating study from a decade or so ago presented a sample of voters with a list of eight things that MPs could be doing – three of which were related to the constituency, five of which were to do with Westminster – and asked them to pick the ones that most mattered.

The public was overwhelmingly constituency-focused: of the eight bits of the job listed, two of them were chosen as the most important by a massive 83 per cent of the public: they were “taking up and responding to issues and problems raised by constituents”, and “being active in the constituency”.

That might come as no surprise; a desire for MPs who work the parish pump hard is ever-present in surveys.

What was innovative about this study, though, was that it then also asked the same questions to MPs. It found that they prioritised the same things. Those exact same two parts of the job were chosen as “most important” by 74 per cent of MPs.

Analysing all of the eight tasks of the job together, there was a slightly greater emphasis on the part of voters towards constituency work than that reported by MPs, but not much; what was most striking about the findings wasn’t the differences but the similarities.

Further reading: D Searing, Westminster’s World (1994); R Campbell and J Lovenduski, What Should MPs Do? Public and Parliamentarians’ Views Compared, Parliamentary Affairs (2015)

Philip Cowley is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London

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