was one of the last MPs for the seat of Old Sarum, the most glaring example of ‘pocket boroughs’ in the old electoral system before its reformation in 1832.
Old Sarum deserves its notorious reputation. Pocket boroughs were, literally, bought by wealthy proprietors, who were then able to make sure that the MPs were men who supported their interests. The Earl of Caledon bought Old Sarum in 1802. Just outside Salisbury, it was mostly a collection of old ditches and ramparts from a long-abandoned medieval settlement. In the borough, there were only three houses. You might think that living in the constituency would grant you the right to vote, but you would be wrong.
The Earl believed in ‘one man, one vote’ – just so long as that man was him. Attached to the borough were eleven ‘burgages’, which gave the holder the right to vote, and the Earl decided who held the burgages. These were granted to his friends and family, and in 1812, Caledon decided to elect his cousin, James Alexander, as one of the MPs. He knew the level of commitment he wanted from his Members, noting that if he decided to sell the borough, ‘I am sure they would cheerfully resign.’
Alexander lived down to the Earl’s expectations. He hardly ever spoke in Parliament, always voted with the government, supported the suspension of habeas corpus and defended the property tax. Caledon was so satisfied with his cousin that he exchanged estates with Alexander so that the MP took over the nominations. Unsurprisingly, he always elected himself. Although he has been justifiably forgotten by history, we feel that James Alexander deserves a special mention here: a crap MP for a crap constituency.
34. William Beresford
(1797/8–1883) Conservative, Harwich 1841–7, North Essex 1847–65
Short-tempered and ‘given to profanity’, Major William Beresford was not one of the more attractive personalities to hold high office. However, it was his foul play, and not his foul mouth, that eventually brought him down. A Conservative minister in 1852, his job was to help organize the election campaign that year. But he carried his Cabinet responsibilities as Secretary of State for War a little too far, approaching the election campaign with an aggression that would have been commendable in a general. Although the Great Reform Act of 1832 had ended the worst instances of electoral corruption, it was still possible to bribe your way into Parliament, often by the simple means of buying voters a drink and a slap-up meal. ‘Canvassing’ usually took place in the local pub.
The election was closely fought, and Beresford was keen to pick up as many seats as possible. One campaign he followed closely was in Derby, for which he gave some very specific instructions. He wrote to one of his agents to find ‘a good and safe man’ to send to Derby and to go to a particular tavern. There, he directed him to send a card to a local contact, which ‘would be enough’ to set certain matters in motion. A special committee of inquiry found that the man sent by Beresford had helped implement an organized system of bribery to help swing the election.
Although the committee could not prove conclusively that Beresford knew about the bribery, they did find ‘a reckless indifference to consequences, which they cannot too highly censure’. History failed to record which profanity he used when he received their verdict, but he never held high office again. It is still frowned upon to wear a rosette in a pub during elections.
33. Derek Conway
(b.1953) Conservative, Shrewsbury & Atcham 1983–97, Old Bexley & Sidcup 2001–
Imagine that you are one of Derek Conway’s constituents. Plop onto the mat; Derek has sent you a Christmas card! And being from a senior Tory MP, it goes straight onto the mantelpiece. How nice of Derek to put his office staff on his Christmas card, you think. Perhaps he is thanking them for their hard work during the year. There’s that nice Colette, his secretary. Then you remember Frederick whom you met once, and who Derek said was his researcher. And there’s Henry next to him, apparently another researcher. You open the card: ‘Merry Christmas from the Conways!’
Many MPs employ members of their family, but few as brazenly as Conway. The Daily Telegraph reported that tax-payers paid members of Conway’s immediate family a total of more than £260,000 over a six-year period. However, it was found that Henry and Freddie were full-time students for some of the time they were employed, and the Commons Committee for Standards and Privileges began an investigation. In 2008, it concluded that Conway had ‘overpaid his younger son, Freddie’ and had ‘awarded him excessive bonuses’, despite the fact that he appeared to have been ‘all but invisible during the period of his employment’. The sums involved were eye-watering. Young Freddie ‘earned’ up to £11,773 a year, plus bonuses, for almost three years. In total, he was paid £45,163 in gross salary, in addition to picking up pension contributions of about £4,500, which isn’t bad considering he was meant to be studying geography at Newcastle University at the time. In 2009, the same committee found that Conway had also overpaid his son Henry. He was ordered to pay back thousands of pounds. Conway is standing down at the next election.
32. Peter Baker
(1921–66) Conservative, South Norfolk 1950–4
Peter Baker was expelled from Parliament in 1954. His crime, forgery, was not particularly heinous, and we mention him here only because we think it time for him to lose his distinction of being the last MP to be expelled from the House of Commons. Surely it is time for more?
31. Christopher Perne
(d.c.1566) Bossiney 1555, Plympton Erle 1558, St Ives 1559, Grampound 1563
Perne is proof that Parliament has always had its fair share of madmen, and even some kleptomaniacs. He first gained a seat in the Commons through his Protestant connections during the reign of Edward VI. But when Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne, he was involved in Henry Dudley’s plot to replace her with her sister Princess Elizabeth, and was arrested and temporarily excluded from Parliament.
He was also excluded from the Royal Court, and told not to ‘come near [it] by the space of seven miles, upon pain of forfeiture of £500’. This odd instruction may be connected to reports of Perne having taken up ‘picking’, or pickpocketing. In 1563, when still an MP, he was ‘taken into a great mishap’ and began to act in a ‘lewd manner’. He was found stealing ‘gold buttons’, presumably from the clothing of wealthy colleagues, and was ‘committed to the Marshalsea for pickery, without any notice given to the House’. Marshalsea Prison (later made famous by Charles Dickens) was not a nice place, and there Perne went mad. In 1566, he was declared a ‘lunatick’, and a new election writ was moved for his seat. There is no record of his death or later life.
30. Nicholas Ridley
(1929–93) Conservative, Cirencester & Tewkesbury 1959–92
When, in 1972, the then Prime Minister Edward Heath decided to change the direction of his government’s economic policy, he knew he would lose a number of ministers in protest. He was prepared to dismiss most of them, but seemingly calculated that the brilliant but abrasive Nicholas Ridley would be, to paraphrase Lyndon
