Before the Budget debate, the Speaker set aside time for tributes for a parliamentary great.
Heaven knows politics is a cynical business.
Just look at the way George Osborne picked off Tory target groups with the measures in his Budget last Wednesday.
Blue-collar Tories got a cut in booze duty, blue rinse Tories got instant access to their pension pot.
The Chancellor called it a Budget for “the makers, the savers and the doers.”
Everyone does things. The alternative would have been a Budget for the dead.
Yet when Tory party chairman Grant Shapps tweeted a new party advert proclaiming cutting bingo tax and beer duty would “help hard-working people do more of the things they enjoy” he was hammered for being patronising.
Shapps is now widely expected to get the chop from his current job sometime soon, perhaps after the European Elections in May if the Tories trail in behind Ukip.
That would be unfair, not just because Shapps is a pleasant chap, but because all his ad did was bluntly state what was meant to be a more subtle message from the Budget.
Cutting bingo duty was aimed squarely at a particular sector of the electorate. A sector which does not include Shapps and Osborne or any other Cabinet minister come to that.
And politics is poorer for the lack of bingo players in Whitehall.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Before the Budget debate proper got underway on Thursday, the Speaker set aside time for tributes to Tony Benn.
A rare honour for a Parliamentarian who never held any of the Great Offices of State, granted on account of Benn’s long service as an MP more than 50 years, albeit not uninterrupted and his having been one of only two MPs to have been given the Freedom of the House.
Since Benn’s death much has been written and said about his politics divisive or doolally, radical or wrong, depending on your point of view.
But in Parliament something more important emerged.
Speakers from all sides spoke of Benn’s power of oratory, though both Angela Eagle and Ian Lavery stumbled over the word oratory (suggesting perhaps the bar is not that high) and his respect for Parliament and the democratic process.
A number of speakers quoted Benn’s statement that an MP is the only job where there is 70,000 employers and one employee. All very well quoting it, many need to remember it.
Harriet Harman reminisced that in the days before TV coverage MPs would race to the chamber to hear Benn speak.
He didn’t read from a script handed him by the Whips’ Office, his aim when he got to his feet wasn’t to be featured in a clip on the evening news. He wanted to sway people’s opinions.
Even true-blue Tory Sir Peter Tapsell admitted listening to Benn he was “sometimes in danger of being intellectually swept to some of the wilder shores of politics.”
Who among the sitting MPs can claim that today?
Not Michael Connarty who ignored the Speaker’s urging to keep his speech short but did inform the House he once named his cat Tony Benn.
It fell to son of Tony the man, not the cat and current Labour frontbencher, Hilary, to wind proceedings up.
Poignantly, Big Ben struck 12 as he spoke.
He explained that his father loved Parliament but did not idealise it.
He said: “He saw it as the means to an end: to be a voice for the movements outside these walls that seek to change the world for the better, as well as being a voice for the people who send us here and whom we have the privilege to represent.”
His speech was met by that rarity in House of Commons applause.
Clapping is one thing, the proper way for MPs to pay tribute will be to take those words to heart.
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