Why parliament is demeaned by pies and lies

PIEGATE - has Scottish politics really come to this? A minister is obliged to apologise and is "severely reprimanded" for being late to answer questions in parliament, delayed - by pie and beans in the MSPs’ canteen.

The First Minister is angry. There are front-page headlines. There is analysis on television. Is it not all so pathetically petty? And has not pomposity added to the sense of pantomime farce?

Yet the career of Frank McAveety, the minister of culture, commissar for the people’s art and tsar of all sport, dangles this weekend on nothing more than the skin of a mutton pie.

His offences? First was the failure to appear at parliamentary Question Time on Thursday. And then there was the terminological inexactitude when he did show up: that he had been "unavoidably detained at an arts council book awards ceremony". Ah, the ever-conscientious minister, always on the job. Well, erm, not quite.

When pressed by an opposition MSP for a ruling on the untruth, George Reid, the Presiding Officer, appeared to dither, caught momentarily between the absurdity of the situation and potentially serious consequence. He then made lofty reference to the spirit of "solidarity and forgiveness" and waived the appeal aside. Thus was Mr McAveety spared.

Newspaper columnists couldn’t resist the fun. Articles yesterday brimmed with references to the Mince Pie Minister, through Porky Pies, to the forced eating of Humble Pie.

A fierce, though subsidiary, debate has broken out over a telling detail of the culture minister’s gastronomic preferences. It will not have escaped close observers of contemporary political etiquette that the aforementioned canteen dish was not the standard pie, beans and chips, but pie, beans and roast potatoes.

The political press corps is now divided as to whether this nuanced difference adequately shields the minister from charges of a breach of his colleagues’ recent strictures on obesity in Scotland and poor lifestyle choices. Was this a Smart, Successful Scotland choice? Or, in letting fall a preference for roast potatoes, not chips, has he betrayed a hankering for the bourgeois lifestyle, incompatible with social inclusion?

Anyway, while the jury deliberates, on with the show. On top of a wholehearted apology to the parliament, Mr McAveety is reported to have been reprimanded by the First Minister and given a "final warning", this being viewed as the latest in a series of embarrassing gaffes (Mr McAveety’s that is, not the First Minister’s). Mr McConnell, said an official spokesman, "made it clear to the minister that he feels his behaviour today falls below the standards he expects of his ministers and must not happen again." Words, surely, to scorch a mutton pie crust at 100 paces.

Any reasonable person would dismiss all this as unbelievably petty were there not in this incident an unsettling ambiguity: that something so astonishingly inconsequential as this is at the same time subversive in its ridiculousness. In the minister’s lateness and his garbled apology and excuse, the mickey was being taken out of the Presiding Officer, the First Minister and the parliament. The problem for all three in the Great Pie Debacle is that it conveys the sense - however subconscious - that it is they who are seen not to matter much. That is the subversion in the telling minutiae of Mr McAveety’s behaviour. If parliamentary Question Time is considered less important than pie and beans, and that the parliament can then be told an untruth, subsequently excused by an invocation of "solidarity and forgiveness", why should its affairs much matter to anyone? One could argue that it is such a small matter that the minister can be excused a cavalier touch in his observances. But is no-show at Question Time really such a little matter? And if the little lies start getting excused, where is the line drawn in punishing big ones?

Mr McAveety’s behaviour showed a disrespect for parliament. A disrespect, too, for the job he does and the office he holds. Whether it is that the job is too big for him, or too small, matters less than the conviction among both MSPs and the public that he is just not suited to it. His year in office as culture minister has not been marked by any success of significance, but rather a series of misjudgments, delays, deferred decisions and, most recently in the case of Scottish Opera, bungling. This impression of incompetence was buttressed by the First Minister’s leak of proposals to "save" Scottish Opera, an incident that left Mr McAveety scrambling to rebuild what relations he had with the company.

He now claims that "our intervention has stopped the company from finding itself in a situation where it couldn’t meet its debts". That the company was in such a position in the first place was the result of persistent core underfunding, a truth that has been spelt out in independent reports to the Executive. As for his "intervention" saving the company, it has, if anything, triggered an implosion in cohesion, purpose, commitment and morale. That this fate has befallen Scotland’s premier arts organisation on his watch cannot but raise questions as to the minister’s competence and his commitment to the arts.

Then there is the National Culture Plan and the establishment of a Cultural Commission. Few developments in the Scottish arts have created a greater sense of weariness and ennui. It heralds yet more committees, yet more lofty statements - and yet more confusing and conflicting priorities. The arts sector does not need more committees. It craves commitment, leadership and decision. And it has a declining confidence that either will emerge from Mr McAveety.

What, if anything, is the impact on the parliament of this ridiculous affair? The First Minister and MSPs have rarely passed up on an opportunity to attack "the cynical media" for not conferring upon its deliberations the dignity and deference that is due. But time and again it is the actions and behaviours of ministers that display a disrespect for parliament and a lack of dignity.

And small behaviours can betray great truths. They reveal, more than any number of sonorous, on-the-record speeches heaving with jargon and clich, what people really think, and what their priorities truly are.

How telling, also, that the parliament has come the hard way to an understanding of why protocol and procedure might matter after all. When the "devolution model" was being drafted in the mid-1990s, much store was placed over getting rid of the stuffy formalities of Westminster; that the Edinburgh parliament would be so much more modern, sophisticated and user-friendly, uncluttered with archaic proceduralism.

Certainly, there was clutter that needed to be shed. But the Scottish parliament has gone overboard on this matey informality. That does not create a problem per se. The problem that has arisen is that blanket de- cluttering has been blind to the respect for both the institution of the parliament as well as procedure that such rules encourage.

And it has been blind, too, to the atrophy of courtesy and manners that the abandonment of formal rules can encourage. Those who made such play of scrapping the procedures that buttress good behaviour and reinforce respect for the institution can hardly complain if they end up with ministers who put pie and beans before parliament - and who can lie with impunity.