MPs can tell whips to get stuffed over Syria airstrikes but there is a price to pay

Jeremy tries to bully the shadow cabinet over Syria. The shadow cabinet majority bullies him back. Jeremy invokes rank-and-file support by text message and a dubious online survey. The shadow colleagues are supported at an angry meeting of backbench MPs. Who is right on this one?

Not the policy, discussed here yesterday. Honest women and men can honestly differ as to what’s right or wrong in extending RAF bombing of Isis-held Iraq (by invitation) to Syria. Today’s Guardian editorial aligns this newspaper with the Corbynistas, assorted Tory columnists, Stop the War, the Daily Mail (and me). Awkward or what?

No, I mean the constitutional propriety: who calls the shots when MPs vote at the end of a Commons division? In our overhasty times, there’s a lack of collective memory here, reinforced by widespread unfamiliarity with both the conventions, the rules (different things) and the realities of politics.

Three quick points:

1) Labour has dug itself into a serious hole, but its current mood of crisis can pass if both sides give it time to heal. “Keep Calm and Carry On”, is always a good motto.

2) The Tories have problems too, not least the fate of Lord Feldman, its talented chairman ensnared in the “Tatler Tory” affair. Give them some room on page one.

3) The voters are watching all these shenanigans and will not be greatly impressed, whatever view they take of bombing Syria. In the end they decide, not grandstanding MPs or comic plotters in the leader’s office.

So who is right? The classic starting point is always the famous letter written in 1774 to his Bristol (then England’s second city) constituents – read it here, it’s short and brilliant by the Whig politician and Tory hero Edmund Burke, about the duties of an elected representative. He should listen respectfully to the electorate’s view, to work hard for them. “But he owes you not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

I still think that Burke gets to the heart of the matter, as in much else, including Napoleon, whose rise to military dictatorship he predicted before anyone had heard of Lieutenant Bonaparte (Burke died in 1797). MPs are not delegates, either from their constituency activists, always a pretty rum self-selected crowd, or from the wider electorate.