[At the end of this post there are some links to sites which explain the Select Committee system, and which reinforce this blog's general message that their job ought to be to scrutinise government.]

It is of course exciting to be writing this just before the Murdoch empire is carpetted by the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. We’ll all watch and thrill to the circus as the people’s tribunes take bites out of the once-powerful.

An obvious question arises: why this inquiry when the police and judge-led inquiries are about to cover the same ground more forensically?

More to the point, why the Murdochery at all? The further a select committee ranges in its inquiries, the further it leaves behind its real job: the scrutiny of government. There are important governmental failures in the Murdoch affair, and they start at the top with the Prime Minister. One might argue that the entire political class is in question. The committee might more properly wonder whether ministerial behaviour (I mean both the political and the Civil Service branches) has been up to scratch.

The Home Affairs select commitee has had a go at some policemen – who are at least public officials – and not really distinguished itself, again in advance of proper inquiries.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it would make sense to hear these committees ask the Prime Minister how he can defend the intimacy and informality of his relations with the Murdochery. That would be right in the middle of their real turf.

More generally, we could be in real difficulty if select committees are to be seduced into thinking they are the right place for inquiring into everything which goes on in national life and which provides good theatre.

It perhaps made sense for the Treasury committee to look at state-owned banks (those are sort of public bodies). Perhaps Home Affairs should have looked at police: they certainly are public bodies. But even these are not ideal subjects.

The Treasury committee needed really to focus like a laser on whether banks are now well-regulated. The Home Affairs committee should focus on whether the police are properly regulated in their relations with the media (and as to wearing identification when they thump protestors, for instance). Culture, Media and Sport had plenty of similar stuff to get on with.

If the public has a right to see all and sundry grilled in public, then let public inquiries do that work.

Select committees explained:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/select_committee_faq.shtml

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-information-office/Brief-Guides/Select-Committees.pdf

http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/committees/select/

Martin Kettle and Julian Glover are on the money (The Guardian, 19 May 2010). Nick Clegg on constitutional reform awkwardly compensates a new governmental caution with a claim to be transformative.  And Lord Falconer was surely right to tell Eddie Mair (BBC Radio 4, PM, 19 May 2010) that this was reminiscent of one of New Labour’s “big mistakes”: the trust-busting habit of “making huge claims”.

Above all, the deputy PM has oversold his willingness or capability to “hand back power to the people”. That’s just as well: The People don’t want more power. They’re British, for goodness sake: they want the easy dissidence of the well-governed.

On the up-side, the Clegg reforms may make our democracy a little more representative. But this is nearly the opposite of what heart and soul Big Society (and even “New Politics”) people want. Phillip Blond, the Red Tory, was quick to tell the BBC Radio 4 Today programme (20 May 2010) that doing good of this sort fell way short of the new “associative” (mutualist, bottom-up) politics he fancied. When democracy is representative, it is not direct.

Nick Clegg’s reforms don’t bear comparison with the acts of political enfranchisement of the last two centuries.  And anyway, the point of those was to channel and express the fact of the masses’ power through Parliament. The upshot was the deliberate, accountable, meritocratic and controlled elitism of representative democracy. The proposals of Tony Wright’s Commons Select Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons are in that tradition, and Nick Clegg says the coalition aims to enact them. David Cameron may be as keen, th0ugh his attempted scuppering of the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee is ominous.

Here’s the beef. It helps a lot if the coalition government wants or will encourage a revived Westminster and Whitehall. But if they don’t, Parliament can do the work itself.

At this moment, the biggest problem with our representative democracy is not that The People don’t have enough authority over Parliament, it is that Parliament has given away its authority over government. We perhaps ought to reform the electoral system, but doing so won’t much alter this crisis of the constitution. We almost certainly ought not to have a second chamber which is elected, but making that change may not make a big difference either.

Actually, the “New Politics” is quite likely to rebalance things almost by mistake. Sue Cameron in the FT (11 May 2010) quotes senior mandarins (Whitehall officials) endorsing this theory. Andreas Whittam Smith gives it credence (The Independent, 14 May 2010).

The rationale works like this: (as noted by Michael White in the Guardian, 20 May 2010) under Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, power slipped from Westminster and Whitehall to Number 10 (and the broadcast media). Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service all lost power. It is quite possible that a “balanced parliament” will empower MPs because votes will be narrower and because party managers may be inclined to use the coalition as cover for allowing MPs more freedom on some issues. It is likely too that a coalition government will empower the Cabinet since that will be the most obvious way of ensuring that senior people from both parties have dipped their hands in the blood. It is possible, too, that the Civil Service will gain in power as it helps forge the political acceptability and the practical workability of policy. Notice, for instance, how the coalition’s leaders like to be photographed with Gus O’Donnell, the country’s senior civil servant.  (But again, Mr Cameron sends mixed messages: giving economic forecasting to outsiders risks enshrining the idea that the Treasury and government utterance are alike unreformably partisan.)  

Most of what needs doing can be achieved by a bold coalition of Members of Parliament rather than a coalition of their leaders. We ought to remember that the House of Commons has nearly total command, if only its members get out their Blackberries, network properly, and grasp it.

We have over-mighty Prime Ministers and party whips, but haven’t gained strong government in exchange. Those failures are consequences of MPs having forgotten that they have an obligation to ensure that representative democracy works. They need to do that by boldly and sometimes bravely defending a hierarchy of responsibilities. These obligations can be ordered in matching and mirrored pairs: to their country and constituency, and to Parliament and party. These are richly conflicted, but a sense of what is good for Parliament – for the representational part of democracy - will often be a good guide to the other dimensions.

The Homes Office is a dysfunctional self-obsessed bunker. The Foreign Office is full of clever managers of decline. The Treasury is a tight-fisted bastion of Keynesianism. That was roughtly the message a casual viewer would have gleaned from the latest series from Mr Cockerell.

The shows did reveal rather more than that, but much of the richer picture consisted in big guns of the recent past banging away at whichever of their fellows they had fallen out with.

A lot of this was dangerously like Yes, Minister, in being a chronic mis-reading of the problem facing the Civil Service.  

What we didn’t get was any proper discussion of what reforms might be needed in the way Whitehall works and how it might relate to government and the rest of Westminster.

I am clarifying my own view that what we need is strong, small, elitist Whitehall which is charged with wider and more public work than we have known.

I think Whitehall should move beyond serving the Crown by serving ministers (and hiding behind their skirts). Instead, they should become more complex. They should continue their old work of advising ministers, but they should also have divisons which formally develop alternative policy options at the behest of Parliament. They should do less of the actual work of running government.

In effect, then, the Civil Service should stay independent, but work continuously for all sorts of potential governments and none, as well as serving the present government especially in helping to formulate policy and ensuring delivery.

The point here, in part, is to open up the Civil Service to far more scrutiny. The move would make it harder for departments to become bastions of particular orthodoxies.

Just as importantly, the political parties would be put under much closer scrutiny as they develop policy. Their work would be second-guessed by official policy professionals, especially for its workability.

This would recognise that politicians are – rightly - populists who seek general directions and tone in policy but who need both help and discipline as they make specific proposals.

The Home Office was for years thought to hate punishing criminals; the Foreign Office loved Arabs and Europe; the Treasury loved Keyenes. These cliches were never quite true, but that they built up at all was a sign that Whitehall was either misunderstood or was prone to monomania and perhaps a bit of both. Not good. 

I was irritated by the Cockerell shows because they seemed to me lazy (or possibly, chronically underfunded). They trotted out old material and added some more recent rather gossipy stuff.

We needed far more.

It is very easy to sneer at politicians, even though the British version is (as Alastair Campbell tirelessly points out) pretty good. The present business of allowances and expenses will be fairly easy to sort out. But it is the tip of the iceberg.

As  The Times points out, we have a far greater problem in being sure we will be able to persuade the brightest and best into politics.

It is very important to remember that whatever else political life is, membership of the House of Commons is very insecure for almost all MPs. Very, very few of the people who hold politicians in easy contempt have the smallest idea how they would manage the emotional let alone commercial implications of that fact.

An obvious difficulty is that we cannot promise that political life will be financially rewarding, even if it is successful. What’s worse, the main promise of financial reward may come in the worse way: selling access to power when one is out of it. This is to say: we look as though we are creating a new political class of aparatchics who are for sale when they are out of power or out of Parliament.

That would be a peculiar version of the political profession.

Toying with these thoughts leads one to wonder if we should perhaps aim to encourage those politicians whose main way of making a living is not political. This approach is counter-trend. Political parties may prefer to see candidates being biddable, and dependency probably rather suits them.

But there is a deeper problem with the financially-secure MP: he or she is unlikely to be willing to be the constituency social worker – the local fixer – which many voters and commentators seem to think is the sign of an MP’s respectability and usefulness. Matthew Parris is one of the few commentators who regularly remarks on the folly of this trend. In that, he follows (the late) Sir Bernard Wetherill, a former Speaker, who wrote in The Spectator years ago on the theme.

All these are old problems. They hinge on issues which Edmund Burke made his own as he discussed the role of the member of Parliament.

We have to think of MPs as variously theatrical, ambitious, philosophical, loyal, egotistical, greedy, opinionated, professional, caring, clever, pig-headed and noble. We can’t and wouldn’t get all these qualities in each of our MPs but we have to accept that we need a fair sprinkling of these elements in our House of Commons and House of Lords.

In short, the political life has to attract chancers, and is bound to.