I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak at the end of the debate, presumably before my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) responds. It has been a really excellent debate. However, we need to remember where the Bill, and the amendments that have been tabled, come from. They arrived in all the parties’ manifestos in 2010 as a response to the expenses disaster. All of us who lived through that know how debilitating it was and understand the enormous damage it did to the reputation of this place.
We have here a collapse of institutional self-confidence. With regard to how we can regulate ourselves and prostrate ourselves in front of our electorate, almost nothing is good enough in addressing that lack of confidence and trying to regain some of our reputation with the electorate. I suggest that the proposition coming from the Government, in the form of the Bill, and the amendments proposed to it are a continuation of that. As an institution, we are like a whipped dog that is simply cowering ever lower.
Counter-intuitively, I think that it is about time we started making the case for this institution and for how it works, as political parties that are here to support an Administration that is able to put through a credible programme of government for four or five years—now five years, by statute—and to govern effectively in the interests of the country.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) put the populist case absolutely wonderfully in her brilliant polemic, but I am afraid that a rather difficult practical case must be put in opposition to it. If we all took her principled view about our duties in this place, we would not have an Administration for four or five years who were capable of putting together a coherent programme of government and addressing the issues of the country over the lifetime of a Parliament. I know that she does not like the Whips Office—I served in the Opposition Whips Office for about five years, so in that sense I am guilty as charged—but, as Enoch Powell said, Whips are the sewers of the system; they are absolutely essential to the general health of the entire system. She criticises her colleagues for doing “grubby deals” on this and that, but that is what we have to do in order to build a coalition either within a political party or between political parties to deliver coherent government.
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I have given the example of the necessity that Liberal Democrat Members faced to jettison one of their undertakings to the electorate at the election in order to put together a coherent programme of government for the coalition. They did that honourably, and it has done them immense damage. They will hope that during this five-year period that decision will be vindicated by the fact that they can share some of the credit for the economic recovery that the country has undergone. Under my hon. Friend’s system, or under the proposals by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park, they would not be in that position—they would be open to recall.