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The real disgrace, though, is Bell's belief that he is so much better - morally, practically, even oratorically - than everybody else, writes Siôn Simon
(A Labour Party insider gives an appraisal of Martin Bell's character)
HUMBUGS of the world, rejoice! The Prince of Smugness has written a book. An Accidental MP, currently being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, is Martin Bell's account of life as an independent MP. It is interlaced with his pensées about parliament, government and the state of democracy. I have read only the serialisation, but that was enough.
Having become so familiar as a BBC war correspondent, Mr Bell's public image is virtually unassailable. In an age which tends to revile even the most austere print journalists, the television news reporter is hardly viewed as belonging to the same profession, but as an altogether higher and more serious being. The television foreign correspondent - who is seen to risk death and discomfort in order to carry truth from troubled lands - has an almost shaman-like status in these post-religious, post-ideological times.
It would take a pen far mightier than mine to put Mr Bell into perspective. But I shall try. The cult of the foreign correspondent is misleading. At its best, war reporting is brave and admirable, but of recent years there has grown a strand which is sentimental and self-indulgent, preferring to wallow in the misery of a situation rather than to analyse its causes. A typical example was the British television news reporter who concluded his report by saying, "In the end, it comes down to how much we care". Of course, that is the opposite of the truth. It never comes down to how much we care; always to what we can do.
The journalistic inadequacy of that viewpoint is overwhelming. After bravery, news-sense and a general impressionistic gift, the two indispensable qualities of a foreign correspondent are a general analytical intelligence, and, ideally, some political nous. The best have a surfeit of the latter; most get by with plenty of the former; the worst have neither.
Which brings me back to Mr Bell. The "It comes down to how much we care" school of foreign correspondence is also a microcosmic manifesto for the worst kind of gesture politics. And, sure enough, that is what Mr Bell chose as his Westminster specialism. First, though, I should say a word about hypocrisy.
Mr Bell's parliamentary raison d'être is that he is completely independent. Having been elected to Tatton because of popular protest against Mr Hamilton, he is apparently above and beyond party politics; a cleaner, truer, better man than the cringing compromisers who surround him. I shall return to the smug, complacent arrogance of this sentiment, which radiates from every thread of his white suit as he struts about the palace of Westminster.
But for the moment, I want to point out that, at least in its genesis, Mr Bell's independence was a sham. He was put up to standing in Tatton by the Labour machine, and his campaign - supposedly thronged with Summer Holiday-style happy staffers caught up in the marvellousness of it all - was actually run by Labour aparatchiks. It was an elaborate con-trick in which Mr Bell was the willing, complicit and duplicitous stooge of the Millbank machine. Having been working at Millbank myself at the time, I know this for a fact. It was a great joke. We used to laugh about it. As, presumably, did Mr Bell.
Then there is the matter of the white suits. It may sound like a piffling thing that Mr Bell's suits are monotonously pale, but it is not. For a man in public life always to sport exactly the same kind of clothing is to make a monumental statement. The very act of doing so is in itself enormously self-regarding. But when the suits are white, and thus, in winter, extremely distinctive, the attention-seeking intention is unmistakable. And, sure enough, wherever he goes, people stop and nudge each other and say: "Look, there's that Martin Bell in his trademark white suit, never wears anything else." The white-knight-saviour-of-truth symbolism hardly needs stating. At least Tom Wolfe (the other famous white-suiter) has integrity. Mr Bell tries to have it both ways by wearing the white suit of the egomaniac, and yet shambles around in it pretending to be humble.
The real disgrace, though, is Bell's belief that he is so much better - morally, practically, even oratorically - than everybody else at Westminster. Instead, he eulogises the coming dawn of the new Independents, who will be elected as antidotes to "party discipline": "They will be democrats. They may not be great parliamentarians, ambitious for office and accomplished at the Dispatch Box, but they will have had a life outside the feverish precincts of Westminster. They will not play the party game, but will treat their opponents and rivals with courtesy. They will aim to make a difference, and if they fail, they will fail while daring greatly."
On the surface, that may seem like an attractive prospectus. But, in fact, it is nothing but cant, pomposity and gall. It's the "all you have to do is care" school of famine reporting brought home and writ large - the worst kind of cheap, populist button-pressing, which denigrates the political process about which Mr Bell knows and understands next to nothing. And it presupposes that he, himself, serves any useful purpose.
Which, of course, he doesn't. Except for ejecting Mr Hamilton from parliament, Mr Bell has contributed nothing to British public life. He simply stands in the middle of the mêlée shouting smug yah-boos at the party political compromisers he despises, while they actually do things. While Mr Bell prances holier-than-thou around Westminster, it is those very same contemptible Phineas Finns who get on with the difficult and, yes, often demeaning business of government and opposition.
Ultimately, Mr Bell is damned by the unqualified delight he derives from being an MP. He says it's the best thing that's ever happened to him. Yet parliament with no prospect of power for doing good is an empty, vacuous, awful place. Only the most pompous, self-obsessed maniac could enjoy it. For the decent, honourable practitioner, politics without power - without co-operation, compromise of sublimation of individual viewpoints to the common good - would be a miserable living death and an appalling indulgence. Whatever their failings, honest, worthy, moral politicians genuinely want to change the world. Martin Bell doesn't even change his suits.
(This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph in August 2000)
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