aka - it's a riot being the MP for Middlesbrough
Britain's 'laziest' MP: Sir Stuart Bell, who represents Middlesbrough
The Hon Sir Stuart Bell, MP, knight of the realm, freeman of the City of London, chevalier of France's coveted Legion d'Honneur, did not get where he is today by listening to his constituents. No, no.
Champagne socialist Sir Stuart, 73, who sits for Middlesbrough in the Labour party interest, may have been born to a mining family. He may have started working life as a colliery clerk in County Durham and may once have been a city councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne.
But yesterday we learned how far he has travelled, in all senses, since those youthful days. Sir Stuart, who is said to maintain a pied a terre in Paris, admitted that he had not held an advice ‘surgery' for his constituents since, ooh, 1997.
Nor did he maintain an office in his North-East England constituency. He was willing, he vouchsafed, to meet the electors of Middlesbrough. But before any such face-to-face encounter could be undertaken, they must obtain an appointment from Sir Stuart's well-staffed Westminster office.
Tug your forelocks, little people. Sir Stuart will see you now. Be grateful. But do be quick, won't you? You may be heading back to Teesside on the National Express coach but your lord and master is off in the other direction. He has the Eurostar to catch for another of his long weekends on the banks of the Seine.
Sir Stuart's absence from his constituency, where he has a majority of 8,000, has something of a Victorian feel to it. You can imagine him gracing the pages of an Anthony Trollope novel, a whiskered, waist-coated powerbroker who takes a room at a local inn during the fortnight of general election campaigns but otherwise spurns the company of the voters.
But this is the 21st century and, furthermore, the post-expenses era. Westminster has just been through one of the most torrid periods of self-examination in history. In recent months the Commons, or so we thought, had improved itself. Did Sir Stuart not notice?
Seemingly not. Middlesbrough's Evening Gazette newspaper has done fine work. As Sir Stuart's local newspaper, the Gazette and its reporters must have long had to put up with his airs and graces. Finally, perhaps, something snapped. Journalists from the paper conducted an experiment and, pretending to be hard-pressed constituents, tried to contact the MP.
Over the course of two months they placed 100 telephone calls to Sir Stuart's published contact numbers. Never was Sir Stuart's telephone answered by a person. Each time a message was left on his machine. Never was a call returned. Pretty plainly, Sir Stuart could not give a stuff.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1XQgte1nR
