Each Speaker has to realise that if they make life difficult for the government, then the government will make life difficult for them.Each Speaker also has to deal with the long-established Clerks to the House, who advise on all matters. Time and again I have watched the clerks advise the Speaker, even when the Speaker plainly feels that they are being made to look foolish. The most glaring example in my time was when the Labour opposition had skilfully exploited the rules of procedure to delay the privatisation of British Rail. John Major's government had to get the legislation through that evening to meet a House of Lords deadline and, with real incompetence, had failed to provide a guillotine. Faced with the government in trouble, the clerks simply told the Deputy Speaker (a Labour man) not to call any more speeches and push the business through the uproar.No, the plain truth is, if MPs wish to restore confidence in the House of Commons, they will have to stand up and do it themselves.The most important measure would be to curtail the scale of prime-ministerial patronage. In the German Bundestag, the Chancellor can take office only after being elected in a secret ballot of all MPs. Six years ago, several of Helmut Kohl's new members refused to back him in a secret ballot and he only narrowly avoided the ending of his career.

Imagine if each member of the Cabinet was elected by a secret ballot of the whole House. Instead of constantly greasing up the Prime Minister, ambitious MPs would start to display some independence of spirit if they wished to prosper. We could go further and insist that MPs in the governing party should have the right to decide by secret ballot whom to nominate for cabinet positions.All legislation should be submitted to permanent committees of MPs who have chosen to specialise in that particular area. Membership of the committees should be determined not by the whips but by a process of self-nomination and precedence.One has only to imagine the scale of upheaval required to achieve anything like the above reforms to recognise that there is no prospect of anything remotely like that happening while party leaders have not just their powers of patronage but their increasing control of the selection process for parliamentary candidates.There is a way to restore the credibility of Parliament - for the voters to do it by changing the voting system so that one-party rule becomes the rare exception rather than the norm. When Tony Blair honours John Smith's commitment to allow the British people a referendum on the voting system, we will all have the chance to drive a stake through parliamentary patronage by creating a genuinely proportional voting system that denies governments an automatic majority when they have only a minority of the votes cast.Faced with a succession of hung parliaments, we will eventually be able to break the powers of patronage and perhaps even pass legislation to introduce an American-style primary system, so that the voters decide who a party's candidates are, and not a small caucus in Millbank or Conservative Central Office. Who knows? Under that system, I might even have been the Labour candidate for mayor of London.. For the past 13 years, I have lived beside a railway line, a branch line that goes from Bath down to places such as Weymouth and Portsmouth I like living beside the line because I like trains.

The trains go past the garden about once every 20 minutes, making a sudden whooshing noise, which none of us really notices much any more, so used are we to it. Most of them are little Sprinters, which all make roughly the same noise. For the past 13 years, I have lived beside a railway line, a branch line that goes from Bath down to places such as Weymouth and Portsmouth I like living beside the line because I like trains. The trains go past the garden about once every 20 minutes, making a sudden whooshing noise, which none of us really notices much any more, so used are we to it. Most of them are little Sprinters, which all make roughly the same noise. For the most part, I no more notice the trains rushing by than people notice cars going past in the street.