Tributes (Speaker Martin)

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

I would like to join in the sympathies that have been expressed so far. I was fortunate to join this House four years after Lord Martin did, and we became friends. He had friends across the House, and as soon as he discovered that my grandmother came from Glasgow, we became even closer friends. He was an outstandingly collegiate person. He was an excellent member of the Chairmen’s Panel, as it was called then, and a very, very good Deputy Speaker.

As you know, Mr Speaker, I then had a brief time out of the House—I am grateful that the electorate decided to give me a break. When I came back in 2001, Michael Martin had made the journey from Deputy Speaker to Speaker, and he was incredibly kind to the new intake. He went out of his way to welcome them and showed a really strong interest in all of us. You mentioned, Mr Speaker, that he may not always have been a favourite of Front Benchers. Many of us spent much of the first decade of this century on the Opposition Front Bench. He was a friend of the Opposition Front-Bench team, because he supported us in ways he did not have to. He was understanding and patient. He built up our confidence and cut us a lot of slack, and I will never forget his kindness to me when I first joined the Front Bench in 2001. Like you, Mr Speaker, he set the bar very high when it came to making Speaker’s House available to colleagues and outside organisations, charities and friends. He used that extraordinary resource to help people and build happiness.

I was deeply upset when a tiny number of colleagues criticised Michael’s handling of expenses. His instinct was always to honour parliamentary sovereignty and to put Parliament in the driving seat when it came to sorting out the problems with the expenses regime. In many ways, he was right in that approach, and one only has to look at the performance of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority subsequently and the way in which parliamentary sovereignty has been taken away to see that he has been vindicated. I think that history will judge him very differently from how a small number of colleagues and the press judged him at the time.

I would like to remember someone who was a fundamentally decent person. He commanded respect wherever he want in this Palace among not just MPs, but members of staff. He built up vast pools of loyalty among the people who worked for him, and he was someone who was always decent and fair. I will remember him with great fondness, and my sympathies and heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to his family at this difficult time. He has been taken from us at too young an age.