A backbencher who always made the most of it

MOSTLY, these sort of columns are devoted to the great ones of politics - or rather, the ordinary ones who happen to occupy great jobs. Today, though, I'd like to remember a humble backbencher, Robert Adley, who died yesterday. His life in politics was more significant and unusual than the careers of many ministers.

Did I say humble backbencher? Wrong, actually. If Robert ever felt humility, he didn't let it show. When he bowled up to you in some Commons corridor, he exuded cheerful and total self-confidence. He was known mostly as an obsessive expert on railways, but his enthusiasm embraced the Palestinian cause, Chinese politics and the anti-apartheid movement. It stopped rather short of Baroness Thatcher.

As with any successful backbencher, the Adley story is a tale of particulars, of bees in the bonnet. On page 22 of this paper today, Tony Bevins records the bravery of Mr Adley's campaign to keep channels of communication open to the various Middle East groups connected with terrorism. He was often working with the covert encouragement of the Foreign Office. A Jew by birth, he came to regard Yitzhak Shamir as 'the godfather of post-war terrorism'.

Many thought he got the Middle East badly wrong. I thought he was too pro-Chinese, and mostly wrong about Hong Kong. But you rarely got shades of grey with Mr Adley.

His political monument will be erected if, or when, the current government back-tracks on rail privatisation. He was revolted by the prospect - the phrase is not too strong - and battled obsessively against it. In July last year, when the White Paper was published, he acidly asked ministers to remember 'that 16,000 trains are run daily by British Rail, and that for most of the passengers they are an essential part of daily life - and that a few more Sock Shops on platforms and a few gaudy carriages will be no substitute for an essential service'.

Later, he took to warning colleagues that privatisation would be a 'poll tax on wheels'. As chairman of the Transport Select Committee, he manoeuvred brilliantly to achieve a unanimous report on the subject that ripped apart many of the department's proposals as impractical. He was too ill to attend the press conference for its publication, but his case will be no less forceful delivered posthumously. Some of those who worked with him think Mr Adley's death was brought on by the emotional stress of his campaign against privatisation. It would seem an appropriate outcome if, having been killed by privatisation, he then succeeded in killing it.

But the true significance of Robert Adley's career is not really about any of these specific bees - not about rail privatisation, steam trains, the Middle East or China. The true significance was the buzzing noise itself, his perpetual and enthusiastic engagement in politics, his determination to change things. He was a 'mere' backbencher. But he had strong views and found ways to make them count: some ministers have spent most of their adult lives working their way up political careers without having achieved as much. His very presence altered, however subtly, the distinctive flavour of the Commons and the Conservative Party.

In that he was the antithesis of the permanent backbench majority, the army of the mediocre - of the place-seekers, the crawlers, the imbibers of the received wisdom and its regurgitators, the clapped-out and the ground-down, the self-hating cynics and all the other weak spirits who haunt Westminster. Neil Kinnock, confronted by a sharp-edged question about Europe, once publicly dismissed Mr Adley as 'a jerk'. He never showed worse judgement.

How many other Adleys are there? I don't only mean rebels (Mr Adley began his parliamentary career as a loyalist, and could be as partisan a Tory as any). I mean free and enthusiastic spirits who have a strong, positive view about the importance of their role as parliamentarians. There are perhaps 20 or 30 at best. Not enough, anyway.

This has probably always been so: golden ages are mostly romantic fantasies. But there does seem to be a trend against older MPs entering parliament with some experience of life, and in favour of younger, professional politicians who have planned their moves from university and have barely held a non-political job. They are the ones who move from trade union research departments, local authorities or Tory Central Office to win nominations for safe seats. These professional politicians are relevant to the case since, all too often, they seem to regard the House of Commons as simply a step on the ladder to ministerial power, and of minimal importance in itself.

This careerism is deluded, because the statistics show that the vast majority of MPs who define their success or failure in terms of ministerial office are bound to be disappointed. It is lazy, because it seems to excuse them from the harder and more creative task of making their membership of the Commons matter.

But above all, it is deeply damaging to a parliamentary democracy. It tends to produce a tightly disciplined and predictable chamber that drives efficient party machines, but which fails to reflect our diverse and colourfully heterogeneous society. Thus the Commons drifts away from the country it is supposed to represent. This is more damaging to our parliamentary democracy than anything coming from Europe. Robert Adley, a turbulent man, was a living rebuke to the notion of a passive or conformist Commons. May he rest, as he didn't live, in peace.