Travels with Members: A Clerk in Parliament, From Wilson to Blair by Bill Proctor is a memoir that is a cracking tale of life and what it is like to work in the House of Commons at the latter end of the last century. MPs at their individual and collective best (and occasionally at their worst) in Westminster and around the world. This is a rare insight into Parliament behind the cameras.
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About the book
Bill Proctor describes the generally happy and fruitful, but occasionally fragile, relationship between the professionally neutral Officers of the House of Commons and their properly partisan Members, an account which involves many hundreds of hearings, and many scores of reports, but also much travel in Europe. This has included chasing revolutionaries in the Caribbean, resisting the charms of hookers from Arusha to Boston, strap-hanging by air to Hanoi, pushing wheelchairs across Manhattan, consuming much of the KGB’s company vodka, and carrying birthday cards across the green line in Cyprus. There are not many books out there that can describe what has gone on behind closed doors (we are not counting the ones written by the former PMs).
About the author
Before he joined the staff at the House of Commons, Bill Proctor was educated at Bristol Cathedral School and Keele University, where he was President of the Student Union. During his spare time, he was a copy boy before becoming a cub reporter on the Bristol Evening Post. After he graduated from university, he briefly taught politics at Manchester University. He worked in the House of Commons for thirty-six years at the latter end of the last century. He served in various procedural offices, and as clerk of the committees on Science & Technology, Transport, Foreign Affairs, and the Treasury, as well as secretary of the House of Commons Commission. He wrote the 1978 report of the Procedure Committee, rightly described by the Guardian as an agenda for the rest of the century, which became the blueprint for changes which transformed the Commons during subsequent decades, not least of which was the system of departmental committees in both Houses which are now the most effective means for holding governments of all colours to account.
He was secretary of the first United Kingdom delegation to the European Parliament in 1973 and subsequently spent much time at the peripatetic assembly of NATO parliamentarians and in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe. On the whole, he preferred that original version of European cooperation to the behemoth arising in Brussels. He carried the bags of select committee members to all five continents but often could neither decipher his notes nor even find them amidst the socks on his return.
Final thoughts
Travels with Members: A Clerk in Parliament, From Wilson to Blair by Bill Proctor is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how our government works (and doesn’t) from the point of view of the Clerk – the politically neutral employees of the House of Commons who keep the wheels of government turning. There is an air of mystery that surrounds the politics of the UK, and I am happy to see a lid lifted on it. While the old boys would like to think that they project an air of superiority, it is clear that they are capable of making mistakes like the rest of us. As time goes on, I expect we will see a lot more books like this that describe the inner workings of how the British Parliament works and what it is like to be of the people who help to steer the boat of UK policy.