CityLife

Bell's still battling the pirates

CRUSADE: Martin Bell

ONE has various heroic images of Martin Bell: lying stricken by shrapnel as he reported for the BBC in Sarajevo, braving the verbal onslaught of Neil and Christine Hamilton on Knutsford Heath and, latterly, ascending the soapbox at a public meeting about why Hazel Blears must go.

As we chat in the muted grandeur of Manchester’s Palace Hotel, Bell lets slip the image we were denied. He was very nearly the John Sergeant-style “old bloke” on Strictly Come Dancing.

“My lady really wanted me to do it,” he says of the invitation two years ago.

“She thought that someone like Kristina Rihanoff would knock me into shape and I’d lose some necessary pounds. And I nearly did it, But I had a conflict of schedules. I had a long-standing engagement to take a party of 20 British tourists travellers round Bosnia.”

How appropriate that Bell should choose a twirl around Bosnia over a quickstep into the affections of the Saturday evening telly audience. At 71, Bell still seems more globe-trotting truth-seeker than reality TV candidate.

This is, after all, the earnest man so offended by Tory “sleaze” in 1997 that he stood against Neil Hamilton in Tatton, and overturning a Tory majority of over 20,000.

When, still wearing that white suit, the man responsible for one of the great Parliamentary upsets says that a local hero should, Tatton-style, stand against Salford MP Hazel Blears, people are likely to sit up and take notice.

Ms Blears was criticised for avoiding a capital gains tax bill of more than £13,000 on the sale of a flat in London. She later offered to repay the money.

Bell has ruled out taking another stab at becoming an independent MP himself.

But he and Terry Waite are marshalling independent candidates under a banner of probity and honesty.

Bell’s impassioned view of torrid times fuels a new book A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal And How to Save Our Democracy, published on Friday and launched in Manchester.

“I’m just an old bloke who cares about integrity in politics,” he says.

“I’ve been arguing for the past two or three years that corruption in Parliament was not occasional and particular but endemic and widespread. But even I had no idea. 

“The Telegraph stories started coming out and then I went to Somalia. I’m an ambassador for Unicef and they send me where they can’t send David Beckham or Robbie Williams. And I was in among the pirates.

“I forgot about the expenses scandal, then I came back and thought, wow, the sheer scale of it. We have our pirates, too, and the pirates’ ship is the Palace of Westminster.”

When Bell went to the Commons in 1997, the Fees Office told him he could write two cheques to himself every month – one for accommodation, the other for mileage.

He claimed the £7,000 annual rent on a cottage in Great Budworth, but not for the hanging basket outside, nor even for the dry cleaning of his white suits. There was talk of some MPs from the north east of England car-pooling but each claiming the mileage, but Bell was unaware of any widespread and routine over-claiming.

“I think things have got much worse since I left in 2001,” he says. “I date it from the assisted departure of (Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards) Elizabeth Filkin.

“A lot of the big cases she investigated and gave her most trouble were senior MPs accused of abusing their allowances, and the majority on the Committee (on Standards and Privileges) rallied round them and there would be a gap opened up between her report and the committee’s report.

Fill your boots

"When she went in February, 2002, it signalled open season for MPs…right, boys, fill your boots.”

And so Bell reports the familiar litany of flipped homes, the duck island, the moat-cleaning, the phantom mortgages, Jacqui Smith’s 88p bath plug, the MPs who didn’t just have second homes but also, it seemed, second stomachs, since they claimed up to £400 a month from the public purse for food.

“If you look at the pattern of abuse, I think you find that the Conservatives tended towards the comical and some of the Labour towards the criminal,” says Bell.

The book argues that the impact of these revelations was compounded by the fact that they came as Britain reeled from recession, and also as the war in Afghanistan was turning yet bloodier.

“Here was this huge contrast between the privilege enjoyed by the MPs and the hardships and dangers endured by the soldiers,” he says.
 

This connection between MPs lining their pockets and troops dying for their country is hugely important, Bell says.

Only after we speak does it emerge that the mole who leaked the uncensored details of MPs expenses was motivated by an angry perception that the government failed to equip troops properly.

Asked how we make things better, Bell says the recommendations of Sir Christopher Kelly’s Committee on Standards in Public Life, due soon, should be accepted in full.

Bell also advocates constitutional change to better suit our multi-party system, and open primaries so that all voters can decide the candidates put forward for election by the parties.

Bell does not want to see hundreds of independents splitting the opposition vote against the remaining expenses “miscreants” but he would like to see half a dozen independents in the Commons.

The message for that local hero in Salford is that it will be a tough fight to unseat Ms Blears.

“For the independent, there is no inherited vote. Every vote has to be won,” he says. Of Ms Blears, Bell says: “She could so easily have taken the poison out of this. Without repentance there’s no salvation. If she just said ‘I did wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I was distracted by cares of office’.

“But she’s paid the money back without even admitting she has done anything wrong. Will people relate to that?”

Martin Bell will be discussesing and signsing copies of his new book A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal And How to Save Our Democracy (published by Icon, at £11.99) at Waterstone’s in Deansgate, Manchester, on Thursday, October 1 at 7pm. Tickets are £3, redeemable against purchase of the book on the night. Tel 0161 837 3000.