Why a Member of Parliament can’t resign, and how they do it anyway

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Since we’ve seen a handful of MPs resign from the House of Commons lately, this might be a nice time to talk about what an MP has to do to escape MPdom. Because like everything else in Britain, it’s wrapped up in tradition and more complicated than you’d think.

Officially speaking, MPs can’t resign. A 1624 law locks them into their jobs unless they’re expelled, disqualified, or dead. Since relatively few politicians are willing to squeeze their feet into those uncomfortable shoes–I’m not a politician, but the dead part would make me hesitate–and since over the course of a long and complicated history some MPs were deeply committed to getting out of the job, a workaround was invented: they can be appointed to one of two “paid offices of the Crown. These are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.” 

The small print says that accepting either position disqualifies them as MPs. So without dying or being expelled, they get to push open the fire exit without setting off alarms. Neither position is paid, but they do become the recipients of a shitload of capital letters. 

Irrelevant photo: roses in a nearby town.

What does a former MP have to do if they’re  appointed to one of those positions?

Nothing. The jobs are long past their best-before date and have been kept alive only to allow MPs an exit that doesn’t involve death, expulsion, or uncomfortable shoes, although MPs–especially those of the female variety–are free to wear uncomfortable shoes if they so choose. I disapprove, but hey, who asks me? They’re not my feet.

 

What are the Chiltern Hundreds?

The hundreds are divisions of government and taxation–or at least they were back in the Anglo-Saxon long ago. In terms of size they stand somewhere between a village and a shire.

What’s a shire? 

It’s the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a county.

The Britannica says the hundred was probably an Anglo-Saxon area of a hundred hides, with a hide being the amount of land it took to support a family. Each hundred would have a court to settle  criminal cases and disputes between neighbors. Originally, everyone who lived within the hundred would be expected to attend, but gradually they came under the control of the lords. By the time you get into the medieval period, if a crime was committed, the hundreds were collectively responsible unless they could cough up the perpetrator, or someone who’d pass for the perpetrator.

The hundreds weren’t formally abolished until 1894, although by then they’d pretty well lost all relevance.

 

A bit more history

I’m not clear on whether the 1624 resolution established the rule against resignation or built an escape hatch. Parliament’s website seems to be arguing both sides. On the one hand, it says many MPs saw serving in Parliament as an obligation, not an honor or opportunity to be chased after. So members weren’t encouraged to step down. On the other hand, Parliament didn’t usually stay in session for more than a few weeks, so ”a procedure for resignation was hardly necessary.”

Take your pick. 

It goes on to say that if an MP accepted a paid office from the crown, he (and at this point he would’ve been a he) could no longer be expected “to scrutinise the actions of the Crown or the Crown’s government,” so he’d have to step down.

Did I say “step down”? It was nothing so gentle: “All Offenders herein shall be expelled this House.”

So take that, you offenders.

Once upon a time, lots of crown stewardships roamed the land and could be used this way. They paid actual money and had actual responsibilities. Only two survive and they exist only as a back door out of the House of Commons. You can think of them as a nearly extinct species. They only surviving pair are preserved in the zoo that is the Parliament.  

 

Are there any other ways out of the job?

Yup, and although some are appealing and some are not. An MP can bail out of Commons:

  • By becoming a member of the House of Lords. 
    • A couple of the MPs who left with Boris Johnson were hoping for that promotion, and when their names were crossed off the list felt–okay, I’m speculating here, but it looks to the casual observer like they felt cheated. Here they’d been expecting a job that pays £332 plus travel expenses and access to subsidized restaurants on any day they show up, plus the occasional loan of an ermine robe, and then they’re told they didn’t get the job? Hey, that’s hard on the old ego. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-do-house-of-lords-expenses-work/ 
  • By becoming a police and crime commissioner or a member of the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly, or a non-Commonwealth legislature (except the Houses of the Oireachtas of the Republic of Ireland). 
    • The Houses of the Oireachtas? That’s Ireland’s parliament. Exactly why you can be a member of that and not be disqualified as a British MP is way over my head.
  • By being “sentenced to be imprisoned or detained indefinitely for more than a year in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, or the Republic of Ireland; or if they are convicted of treason.”
    • Sometimes, you know, you’re better off just showing up at the goddamn job you already have, no matter how much you hate it. 
  • By going bankrupt, but only under some circumstances.
    • Please don’t ask which circumstances or why those and not others.  
  • Or, as we’ve seen, by accepting “one of a number of offices which are incompatible with membership of the House of Commons.”

So on the off chance that you wake up some morning and find that against your will and despite all your protestations you’ve been made a Member of Parliament, don’t despair. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence. The Chiltern Hundreds would be happy to act as your host, for however short a time.

How do members of the House of Lords resign? By writing a nice little note to the Clerk of Parliaments and then going out for a cup of tea. Or, of course, they can get their mothers to write the note: “Please accept Lord Supper-Dish’s apologies for withdrawing from the House of Lords. His time is currently occupied helping the police with their inquiries.”

But once the door slams behind the ex-lords, they’ll find that champagne’s more expensive on the mean streets of the real world than it is in the Lords’ subsidized eating and drinking establishments. The transition’s a tough one.

*

And having nothing to do with any of that, if you’ve read or will be reading my new novel, A Decent World, it would really help if you’d leave a review on Goodreads of Amazon. Or if you have a blog and want to review it yourself, that’d be great. Anything that makes it visible, from social media to graffiti, helps.

Except possibly the graffiti.

28 thoughts on “Why a Member of Parliament can’t resign, and how they do it anyway”

  2. Well darn it ! Over here, Congress persons are free to resign but refuse to do it. And it seems there is no other way to drive them out unless enough sensible people bother to vote. Though it begins to look as if some of them (the congresspersons) may kill each other anyway, once their differences go beyond slap fights and name calling. One can but hope…At least in a junior high setting they could be expelled.

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    • In the spirit of total irrelevance, your comment made me realize how odd my capitalization is in the heading for this post. I’ll have to go back and fix it. The caps on Member of Parliament sucked me in and I capped why as well. So since I can’t fix the membership of either Parliament or Congress, I’ll change the W to lower case.

      See? The world’s a better place already.

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    • Oh, hell, I’m out of my skull. (In my defense, it’s not yet 7 a.m.) The capitalization is fine. I was looking at the header above the comment box, which starts with “Comment on Why….” On the post itself, it’s just “Why….”

      Go back to sleep, Ellen.

      Thanks, Mary.

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      • As usual wordpress won’t let me just “like” but I feel you need to know I do. In fact, in this past week several sane political commentators have mentioned that our government seems to be moving toward a Parliamentary System “without any of the advantages.”
        The cat on my lap sends purrs to your kitties.

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        • The cats who are ignoring me (they’re good at that) send purrs back. Or would if they were around, so I’ll remind them of their manners later (ahem–as if; your cat will understand, I’m sure) and in the meantime speak for them. I’m envious that yours is paying you a bit of attention.

          I’m not sure what that means about a parliamentary system without the advantages. I’ve been around both systems long enough now to see the downsides of them both. The parliamentary system allows the party in power to actually get things done, but that can be a complete disaster as well as an advantage. That reminds me that the US system is, in theory at least, full of counterweights, which can lead to an inability to get anything done.

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  4. The “Hundertschaft” or “Zent” (from centum) is a historical administrative unity / eine Verwaltungseinheit, of the HRRDN. There may be a connection with the Franconian Gaueinteilung. I find it pretty damn impressive that this survived in the UK up to the end of the 19th century, while it surely played no (major) role on the continent since the days of the Stauffen or so.
    Also astounding for me is that one can resign from a position in the House of Lords just so. One would think that this way they would loose the title too.

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    • That reminds me of the aristocrat during the French Revolution who resigned, or at least tried to resign, his title, becomes Citoyen Somethingorother–Liberte, I think. I don’t know what happened to him later in life–whether he got his title out of the pawn shop and started wearing it again.

      It is odd that the hundred survived in England, but so much utterly useless bits of history are passed down. You know the whole rigamarole that goes on when the king or queen addresses Parliament? Someone called Black Rod, who wears clothes that were in style before our earliest ancestors learned to breathe air, knocks on the door of the Commons chamber. The Commons door’s opened, then slammed in his (or more recently, I think, her) face before the monarch can be invited in. They go through this every time. Because that’s how they do it. So an administrative unit that’s no longer in use? Of course its preserved.

      I should say that I know next to no German, so I’m limping well behind you in that first paragraph. Sorry.

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      • Excuses – Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, the Reich from 800 to 1806. On the continent these Franconians used “Zente” as admin units, Hundertschaft, a hundred. Survived the “Zentgericht”, strange bastard thing. In the middle of a Zent is usually a church, today usually a rather odd one in the middle of nowhere – but it is the oldest you can find & holds a lot of rights, hence plays a major role in ecclesiasticis. These Zente are older than many dioceses. And of course older than any other political, administrative order – Gaue, Grafschaften, Markgrafschaften – of the Reich. (Please no boot clicking. We don’t do that any more, since 8th of May 1945.)
        Maybe these Angeln & Sachsen imported this to the island(s) ?

        Black Rod ? I always thought this is another super-something from Marvel. Or an adult film star ? Shoddy Roddy down the corner … sorry, I digress.

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        • Black Rod does sound like the kind of movie you really, really want to clear out of your head. Let’s move on.

          I expect you’re right about the hundred having been imported with the Germanic tribes. So much of the Anglo-Saxon history in England has been lost, but it’d be interesting to know how the concept changed from whatever they brought with them to what they passed on, however unwillingly, to the Normans.

          The image of those churches in the middle of nowhere is haunting.

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    • Good question. My best guess is that either (a) she thought it would get her back on the list or (b) she threw a hissy fit. Then she realized that if she resigned she wouldn’t be an MP anymore and the party would be over. All told, it doesn’t seem to have been a well thought-through political move.

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    • In the House of Lords, I don’t think so. They just aren’t there. In the Commons they’re more likely to be noticed, and I seem to remember reading that Nadine Dorries, who said she’d resign and then didn’t, hasn’t been showing up. That has been noticed–and all the more so since she did that I’m leaving/I’m staying thing. No one’s disqualified her and if there’s a mechanism to do that for nonattendance I don’t know of it. It does seem like a reasonable thing to do with an MP who doesn’t show up, but things don’t often work that way.

      That probably won’t surprise you.

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  8. The dual mandate with the the Irish Parliament – disentangling the Republic from the UK left a lot of loose ends, one of which was that Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland continued to stand for the Westminster Parliament. Most would not take the oath of allegiance to become fully participating MPs but took on the constituency work (and the salary and expenses)*. Also, I’m guessing that the UK was hoping to accommodate remaining Unionists in the Republic, clinging to the original compromise that kept Ireland in the Commonwealth and nominally with the then King as head of state, as in Canada, Australia and so on (the same sort of thinking that kept the common travel area and allows citizens of the Republic to vote here if they live in the UK – it would just be too awkward to enforce a strict either/or principle).

    *In the crucial vote of confidence in 1979 that brought down Callaghan’s government, one old-school Irish nationalist MP, who had taken his seat, made a point of coming to London to (as he put it) “abstain in person”.

    And the French aristocrat was “Philippe Égalité”, from the Orleanist branch of the Bourbons. He supported the Revolution, but that didn’t save him from the guillotine. His son Louis Philippe became King when the last of the Bourbons was chased out for being too reactionary – but Louis Philippe was in turn chased out in the upheavals of 1848.

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    • Thanks for all of that. You’re extremely handy to have around. Tempted as I am to comment on all of it, just because it seems like the sort of thing I should do (and because it’s, all of it, interesting), I’ll leave it alone and just say that I love the idea of abstaining in person.

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