The Gangway Gang

As on Ukraine, so on the real agenda merely behind, if behind, the spat between Theresa May and Michael Gove, it has fallen to Dennis Skinner to say what everyone knows to be the case.

That is often the role of elders, although of course he has always been like that. In the House of Commons, he has been like that for 44 years and counting. Yet he is consistently treated a joke.

Before anyone chips in, I certainly do not agree with him about everything. But see below on some of the close alliances that he manages to maintain despite disagreements on the issues of which some of you are probably thinking.

As for his quips, admittedly some better than others, at each State Opening of Parliament and on many another occasion, he represents an ostensibly irreverent, undeniably irascible, utterly indispensable tradition of Radicals, populists and republicans.

That tradition is as old as anything else in these Islands. It is as much a safeguard of our liberty and democracy as is the Crown, and as is the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes. No more so. But no less so, either.

That Skinner should have become an expected and celebrated aspect of the event is entirely as it should be, and not at all a betrayal or even a dilution of the position of which he is only the latest in a long, long line of occupants.

Related to his working-class strand is a decidedly posh one, of Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, Michael Foot, and, beyond the House, figures ranging from Foot's nephew Paul, to Auberon Waugh, to Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop.

Paul Foot identified as a Trotskyist, and he was even a member of the SWP. But beyond his party card, he showed not the slightest sign of being anything other than an upper or upper-middle-class Radical, predating Marx by an enormously long way.

Such are distrustful of those who exercise authority, but are profoundly convinced of its inherent value, and are therefore determined that those who hold office be held to account and found worthy of their eminence.

Thus was Paul Foot like the rest of the Private Eye boys, at least back in the day. Like his uncle and several other relatives. Like Benn. Like Dalyell. Like figures from different backgrounds, such as Alan Watkins and Michael Wharton (Peter Simple). Radicals and reactionaries are often closer to each other than either is to the conventionally and conveniently defined centre.

Both in its Common Room and its dead common room aspects, there is the unshaking and unshakable sense that if Ministers, MPs and others are not good enough, then they damn well ought to be, and there is a positive duty to call them out for not being.

Parliament, especially, is worthy only of those who are worthy of Parliament, and Ministerial office is worthy only of those who are worthy of Ministerial office. That is because of those institutions' capacity to do harm in the wrong hands. But it is also because of those institutions' capacity, and therefore duty, to do good in the right hands.

Skinner has devoted his adult life to Parliament, just as Foot and Benn did. Next year, he will seek re-election at the age of 82. He remains on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, being put there by his fellow MPs.

It was three of the other working-class warriors who sat on the bench below the gangway with him - Ronnie Campbell (who still does), Dennis Canavan and the late Bob Parry - who flew to Baghdad to secure the release of British hostages in 1990.

In April 1992, Parry, whom the "anti-totalitarian" Oliver Kamm describes as "among the thickest parliamentarians I can recall", was arrested in Tiananmen Square for unfurling a banner in protest against the 1989 massacre there.

He, Canavan and Campbell were all pro-life Catholics, a stance which Campbell maintains, just as he, like other resolutely working-class figures such as Joe Benton and George Mudie, voted to uphold the traditional definition of marriage. All a long way from Skinner's views, yet Campbell speaks of Skinner as a lost Leader.

The Irish Catholic heritage does of course coalesce very well with English, Scots or Welsh Radicalism in many cases.

Parry turned up to vote against Maastricht one day after he had had quadruple heart bypass surgery. He had discharged himself for the purpose. His Liverpool constituency neighbour, Eric Heffer, turned up to speak against the first Gulf War in the final stages of terminal stomach cancer, and to vote against it in a wheelchair. 

It is quite easy to imagine Steve Rotheram doing that, as it is to imagine him or, say, Ian Lavery staging a Baghdad-like mission.

Heffer straddled the two wings of the Radical, populist, republican tradition, in that he could have passed at times for Skinner, or for another of that brotherhood, yet, in a shining example of the vanished world of worker-intellectualism, this joiner son of a boot-maker, who had himself left school at 14, had a personal library of some 12,000 books. That's right. Twelve thousand.

That said, Skinner is better-read than he often lets on, in the way that Benn was possibly a touch less so than his accent and demeanour could sometimes lead one to assume.

Yet both belonged to, and Skinner continues to make felt by everything from State Opening one-liners to searing questions of swanky Cabinet Ministers, the tradition of Radicals, populists and republicans.

That is as old as anything else in these Islands, and it is as much a safeguard of our liberty and democracy as anything else is. No more so. But no less so, either.