THE voice hoarsened, the finger jabbed, and months and months of private frustration and resentment came pouring out. There is an emotional release in losing it. But Speaker Martin was about to lose a great deal more.
The moment Michael Martin sealed his fate as the first Speaker in 300 years to be kicked out of office came 13 days ago, on 11 March. Labour MP Kate Hoey had questioned whether the House authorities were right to ask police to investigate who had lea
ked details of MPs' expenses to the Daily Telegraph. Speaker Martin has been mocked often for his inarticulacy during his nine-year period in office, but, rising from his seat to answer Hoey, his response verbally cut her to shreds. He had heard Hoey's "pearls of wisdom" on the midnight hour on Sky News. "It's easy to talk then," he noted dryly. "Is it the case that an employee of this House should be able to hand over any private data to any organisation of his or her choosing?" he asked.
Martin was trying to draw a line in the sand. The loathed press – which, in the view of his friends, had been 'racist' in its "anti-Scottish" mockery of him – should be cut down to size. Parliament should assert its authority. And so, in seeking to win a battle between the media and Parliament, Martin failed to realise the bigger picture of exploding public anger about MPs' abuse of the system. Last week, it did for him. Labour MP and close friend Jim Sheridan declared: "The thing with Kate Hoey was a combination of the pressure that the man and his family have been put under. We are all human. We have good days and bad days. That was a bad day."
The encounter sealed in the minds of Martin's parliamentary critics the growing feeling that he would never be the man to lead them through this unprecedented crisis. And – crucially – even his political allies last weekend declared privately that he would now have to go. Martin himself appeared unaware of the changing mood.
The Whit recess, which began last Thursday, was around the corner. Despite a public call last Sunday from Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg calling for Martin to quit, he calculated that, with a public apology on Monday, he still had the support from the majority of MPs to see it through.
It was a dreadful miscalculation. His apology last Monday met with scenes of unprecedented rebellion from all sides of the House. Martin had entirely misjudged their mood. Even Labour friends and colleagues in Glasgow had by now agreed that the Speaker needed to go. But up in his grand residence in the Palace of Westminster, Martin simply had yet to get the message.
On Monday evening, he continued to tell friends that he was determined to see it through. It appears to have taken a phone call either later that night or early on Tuesday morning with Gordon Brown to finally seal his fate. One ally of Martin's said: "Gordon didn't put pressure on him. He has been supportive of him, but what Gordon said to him was that we just can't resist the pressure any longer and it is very difficult to find a way to avoid that."
The uncomfortable truth was that a motion of no confidence from Conservative MP Douglas Carswell, which had so far received no more than a handful of signatures, was about to gain a lot more support. MPs were effectively waiting before signing it, hoping that Martin would do the decent thing. Martin could also see that, if he continued to resist, Brown would have been put in the appalling dilemma of whether to continue to defend a friend who had lost support from everywhere else. The game was up.
Martin consulted his wife, Mary. As is often the case where embattled politicians are facing the end, it is the personal, private details which often see them go over the top. The couple have grandchildren on whom they dote. The furore hadn't left much time for them to travel to the Ayrshire coast to visit family. When he finally spoke to friends before making his resignation statement on Tuesday morning, he told them he was now "content". Retirement beckoned.
Friends are continuing this weekend to insist that Martin has been unfairly dealt with. Sheridan added: "He has been put under the kind of pressure that no other Speaker before him has had to endure and he got bad advice over the expenses thing. The establishment has never liked him and they've always been out to get him. They've had a go at his accent and how he walked. They've have had a go at his wife. They have tried everything to get an angle."
Others disagree. Former colleagues within the Speakers' office talk of how Fees Office staff were "sent to Coventry" by Martin for daring to cross him. They claim Martin ignored or insulted anyone who disagreed with him, while promoting "incompetents" who had proved their loyalty. One senior former official declared: "The great saying was that 'I think things can be swept under the carpet' – but none of us knew what was being swept under the carpet."
The official added: "There are some people saying that the Speaker is a genial, amiable, nice man, who has been hard done by. But he can be absolutely beastly to the people that he works very closely with – if they were to say something that he doesn't agree with or doesn't want to hear.
"He was just so ill-prepared for the job. He had no experience of running anything. The decisions by the staff of the Fees Office were all a manifestation of their fear of crossing the Speaker."
Martin can now enjoy a peaceful retirement in the Lords where there will still be plenty of friends who will assure him that he was hounded out of office on the back of a media frenzy. The unprecedented crisis in British democracy he leaves behind is now someone else's job to fix.
