Bercow is simply trying to bring an old institution into the modern era

The architects of Portcullis House must have had a sense of humour. These modern offices sit opposite Big Ben on the North side of Westminster Bridge, and their huge dark chimneys are meant to pay homage to the palatial Gothic splendour across the road. In reality, they resemble incinerator towers in a chemical works.

According to Wikipedia, the interior was designed to look and feel like a ship. It feels like a container ship for sure but I’m not sure that was the intention. When I open the insanely heavy shutters on my office windows, I look onto the glass-plated rooftop over the public spaces on the ground floor. It’s a remarkable mosaic of heavy plate glass that brings a natural light to the coffee drinkers below. Some of the glass has fractured and is held together with giant sticky tape and a material that looks like strawberry plant netting. I’m told that some of the glass has even fallen out of the roof and shattered on the cornish granite floor below. Thankfully, no-one has been killed so far.

The ground floor, if you dare risk a net full of shattered glass falling on you, is wonderful for holding al fresco meetings. At one point, the area was adorned with fig trees costing £150,000 a stump. When working, the water features near the restaurants must be diluted with poison because they attract rats.

Portcullis was commissioned in 1993 at an estimated cost of £165 million. By the time it was opened by the Queen in 2001, costs had risen to an eyewatering £235 million.

It’s a grandiose ship to work in and very comfortable. Yet I’m sure the taxpayer could have had a better deal.

Why do I raise this now?

Parliament is about to embark on the biggest heritage project the country will see in years. The same people responsible for Portcullis House will be tasked with spending hundreds of millions of pounds to patch up the ancient building. The Palace of Westminster needs the entire basic fabric renewing. Rooves, floor, electrics, lightening, plumbing – the lot. And the work is years ovderdue.

At the head of the parliamentary tree and responsible for these matters is the Clerk of the House.

The Clerk was the person overseeing security when Rupert Murdoch got a custard pie in his face and Tony Blair was pelted with purple powder by Fathers for Justice. He is the one (as far as I know the post has never been held by a woman) who let Bryan Ferry’s lad, Otis, run into the chamber, leading to his detention in the cell under the clock tower that houses Big Ben.

Until last Sunday, the head Clerk was Sir Robert Rogers, a bearded and kindly man who looked very much like Jimmy Edwards from the TV series Whack-O!. I liked him a lot. He was an expert in Old Norse, medieval Welsh and Anglo Saxon. In his spare time, he was a sailor and a shooter as well as being a dab hand at playing the church organ. If that wasn’t enough, Sir Robert co-authored the best selling book ‘How Parliament Works’.

Until entering Westminster, I had never met anyone like Sir Robert. He has a beaming smile and an enormous beard, or ‘skeg’, as it is known in Old Norse.

Somewhere in a secret forest there is a Wagnerian castle like Hogwarts, where you train to be a parliamentary Clerk. Their demeanour and language is like nothing a person brought up in Kidderminster has ever seen or heard. I remember the first parliamentary question I handed in to the Table Office. “Is this ok?” I nervously asked standing at the side of the table clerk’s desk. “Inelegantly drafted but in order” was the weary but accurate reply.

When they sit in the chamber, Clerks wear horse hair wigs and black cloaks. They are the cleverest people in the land. Without them, our democracy would be in chaos. They are special people who know how to add order to our disorderly democracy. Even now, after thirteen years in the Commons I feel inadequate when asking their advice. They are always polite and exact in their response, answering every question factually and literally. Over the years I’ve learned to ask the right questions. Instead of saying “can I do Y” I say “what steps do I take in order to achieve X”. Question one would elicit a one-word answer, question two a bewildering series of complex options. I admire them all, even when they’re reminding me of my own, inadequate education.

Sir Robert was the Clerk of Clerks, the Clerks’ clerk.

Part of the motivation for writing this article is because I inelegantly criticised the conduct of the clerks to the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne earlier in the week. Peter challenged me to justify a Twitter statement that the conduct of the clerks was undermining a democratically elected Speaker. I believe that for Robert Rogers to publicly oppose a Speaker’s reforms is improper. And though every journalist would deny it, I believe too that over the summer months, the clerk’s office has been leaking like a sieve.

It’s not difficult to see how Sir Robert felt threatened by a modern speaker who seeks to split the role of the head Clerk. He would probably have recited the Old Lay of Biarki, whilst stroking his skeg. “The towers are tumbling, the castle-gates tremble” for the poor Clerks, because John Bercow hired a female Antipodean to mend the glass in Portcullis House.

To understand the series of events that lead to Sir Robert appearing on broadcast television to challenge the authority of the Speaker, you have to take a crash course in Old Norse poetry. I’ve spent the week reading The Lay of Ingiald. It’s quite beautiful, heroic and dripping in status-conscious sadness and anxiety

Go from the grey-beard! No longer make game of me,

ye deedless swains in the Danish court!

No outcast is the old man before you:

oft hoary hair hideth a hardy mind.

I formerly followed Fróthi for years,

sate in the high-seat, and was served before others;

but now I sit nameless and unknown in the hall,

I like a fish at ebb-tide finding a waterhole.

I formerly sate on soft cushions;

now in a corner I sit, crowded by every one.

Fain out of doors would they drive the grey-beard…

What I’m saying to LabourList readers is this: Does a modern political party really think that an expert in parliamentary procedure is also the person best suited to running a international tourist attraction that is also one of the biggest targets for global terrorists and political extremists?

Surely the Speaker, who has little managerial power outside the chamber, is right to bring our organisation up to scrathch. Far from his actions being a “power grab” or disrespectful to tradition, surely all he is trying to do is run a very old institution with roles more suited to the modern age.