The new recall power being used against Ian Paisley won’t work and doesn’t improve our democracy

Do you remember when David Cameron and Nick Clegg seemed fresh faced, untainted by “politics as usual”, and made plausible promises to clean up politics? As opposition leaders they hoped to outflank Gordon Brown after the MPs’ expenses scandal.

“The right to sack MPs who have broken the rules” was promised in the Lib Dem manifesto in 2010. The Conservative manifesto demanded “a power of ‘recall’ to allow electors to kick out MPs”. As deputy prime minister Clegg tried to draw up a law, and found – on this question as on student finance and so many other things – that promises are easy to make in opposition but harder to implement in government.

Cameron weakened Clegg’s proposed law, saying voters could use the recall power only after a committee of MPs had found the miscreant guilty of “serious wrongdoing”. Clegg called this “MPs marking their own homework”. Cameron didn’t agree, which meant the Recall of MPs Act wasn’t passed until 2016, when the Tories had their own majority.

Now it is being used for the first time. Ian Paisley Jr, son of the Ian Paisley who redeemed a lifetime of saying No by finally saying Yes to a settlement in Northern Ireland, faces a petition of his constituents to force him to stand down as MP.

I am not here to defend Mr Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party member who inherited his North Antrim seat from his father. He failed to declare family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government worth £50,000 before lobbying the British government on the Sri Lankans’ behalf. He has apologised profusely and has been suspended from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days. That seems lenient to me, although it could have serious consequences for the government, depriving it of one DUP vote in the Commons battles over Brexit over the next three months.

My point is that the recall power is ineffective and may even contribute to making our democracy worse. The petition against Paisley may succeed in forcing him from office. It has to be signed by 10 per cent of the electorate in North Antrim to trigger a by-election.

Incidentally, the procedure is confidential. The petition is available to be signed at three locations in the constituency for six weeks, but officials will not say how many have signed it unless the total hits the magic number 7,543.

It’s like the system for triggering a vote of confidence in the Conservative Party leader. Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee representing Tory backbenchers, will make an announcement if he has received letters from 48 Tory MPs (15 per cent of the total) demanding such a vote. Until then, he is a cross between a Trappist monk and the Delphic oracle.

Anyway, it is more likely that the threshold will be reached in Paisley’s case than in Theresa May’s (and in her case she would probably win the subsequent vote of confidence). But if Paisley were to be forced out, he would stand in the by-election and he would almost certainly be returned to parliament again.

He won 59 per cent of the vote in North Antrim at the general election last year, with his nearest rival, the Sinn Fein candidate, on just 16 per cent, which makes it one of the safest seats in the country. In theory, the DUP could disown him and run a candidate against him, but, of all the surprising things that could happen in Northern Irish politics, that is a long way down the list.

So what would the recall mechanism achieve, apart from possibly strengthening Paisley’s mandate from his constituents?

At the time, I argued that a recall power is bad idea. It would have been even worse if Clegg had got his way, allowing petitions to be set up by constituents at any time. That would allow any defeated candidate to dream up excuses to refight elections indefinitely.

It would be like infecting politics with the worst side of Twitter. Twitter is wonderful and democratic and all that, but it has also given a voice to the angry, unpleasant and ignorant sides of people’s natures.

As it is, the recall law simply adds a pointless procedure to the range of punishments available. The Committee on Standards can suspend an MP, as it did Paisley. If an MP breaks the law and is sentenced to more than a year in jail, they are automatically disqualified. If those sanctions are too soft, let us toughen them instead of inventing new ones.

In any case, we already have a recall power. It is called a general election. Frequent elections are the best guarantee of democratic accountability. That’s why I think people demanding a stronger power of recall are pursuing the wrong priority. They ought to be trying to reduce the five-year gap between elections.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act is a terrible piece of legislation, another bit of counter-productive tinkering with the genius of the uncodified British constitution. But the worst thing about it was George Osborne’s last-minute amendment to change “four years” to “five”.

If we care about the quality of our democracy, let us have four-year parliaments and not waste our time on recall petitions.