Foreign Affairs Committee

Charles Walker Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

I agree entirely. One is tempted to say that if the hon. Member for Ilford South did not exist, we would have to invent him. I am not quite sure what the formula for the invention would be, but one would have to invent him none the less.

I agree with the hon. Member for Dudley North; at the kernel of this decision is the discomfort that both hon. Gentlemen subject to this motion have created within the Labour party regarding the Leader of the Opposition’s stance on the antisemitism question, and their refusal to be silenced on it. That is true not just of these two hon. Gentlemen, but of many colleagues on the Opposition Benches.

Any student of history could tell us that the vindictive left—I put the Leader of the Opposition very much in that camp—will chase people out, even if the office that they hold is to bring the biscuits to the constituency meeting on a bi-monthly basis. They want to have their nasty little fingers—their spiteful little fingers—on every single lever. I feel very sorry for the shadow Leader of the House, because she is nothing at all to do with that. She is rather the Labour version of my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire, sent to do a job merely by dint of position rather than by instinct or by nature. She is none of the things that I am talking about.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Since in what feels like the dying days of this Parliament we live in a political free-for-all, with Ministers not voting on three-line Whips and colleagues not voting in the Division Lobby for the motions that they move, is it really such a big deal if we allow these two Opposition Members to continue on their Select Committee? After all, all the existing rules of politics have now been broken, so let us just break a few more.

[Simon Hoare]

I am not entirely sure that I understand the point that my hon. Friend is making. If he is encouraging me to endorse the proposition that there should be an early dissolution of this Parliament, then he will find me in the No Lobby, I am afraid. If he is saying that the hon. Gentlemen who are the subject of this motion should remain in post, then I agree with him, but if not, then I disagree with him wholeheartedly.

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend’s analysis is entirely right. We live in strange political times, and let us just make them a little stranger.

[Simon Hoare]

I have to say that there are times when I have cursed the man who wished that we all lived in interesting times. I think that some rather calm, boring times would suit the House very well indeed.

As I say, this is a very vindictive motion, and it speaks to the heart of today’s Labour party. Never mind the quantum of expertise; never mind the demonstrable levels of interest; never mind the heights of respect that an individual is met with across the House and within the media—if they do not pass the intellectual purity test, or rather the anti-intellectual purity test; if they do not pass the ideological test; if they do not know in the original Russian all the words of the eighth verse of “I Love the Member for Islington North” and can sing it backwards in the bath, they fail and they are out. This motion is effectively a Muscovite approach to the gulags. It is trying to send the hon. Members for Dudley North and for Ilford South to some Siberian wasteland of ex-Select Committee members. It is nothing to do with the good that they have done, nothing to do with—