Well... what do you know.....
n his LBC interview Keir Starmer challenged Rishi Sunak to force Nadine Dorries out of the House of Commons because she has said she wants to resign anyway and she appears to have given up doing any work in her capacity as an MP.
When asked about this, No 10 has always said that this is a matter for parliament, not the government, and the conventional view is that removing an MP in these circumstances is extremely difficult. A recall election can only be held if an inquiry concludes that an MP has committed a serious breach of the rules, and in the Dorries case Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, has indicated that he does not think an inquiry is justified.
But an article has been published today making the point that the Commons could just bypass the parliamentary standards machinery and vote for a motion saying Dorries should be expelled. Significantly, the article appears not in the Guardian, or in another leftish paper, but on ConservativeHome, the website for Tory members. And it has been written by Henry Hill, the ConHome deputy editor.
Hill says that if MPs were to vote on a motion like this, it would probably pass, and he suggests there might even be some advantages from such a vote for Sunak. “There would be worse ways to restore his credibility as a new broom after the debacle of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours,” Hill writes.
In truth, Sunak is unlikely to see things this way, not least because Dorries is a Daily Mail columnist (one job she is actually doing) and the chances of No 10 declaring war on someone on Paul Dacre’s payroll are close to nil. But Hill argues that a vote of this kind could be good for the Commons. He says:
In the course of decades of reforms, the Commons has never divested itself of the power to expel, nor (that I know of) has it been seriously proposed that it do so. There thus seems to be little dispute that this is a power the House ought to have – and thus, by extension, to use on occasion.
Moreover, inactivity sets its own precedent, and the availability of expulsion makes the failure to do so a choice. How hollow will all the condemnation of Dorries ring, from all sides, should the electorate ever realise that the politicians have to hand a simple means to remedy the problem – but are choosing not to use it?