It’s been a long time since I’ve envied MPs. No matter what the naysayers claim, it is an extremely demanding job. The hours are ferocious, which makes the salary – when viewed as an hourly rate – rather modest. Even Sundays aren’t sacrosanct. The public tends to take the view that an MP has no entitlement to a private life. Moreover, while all political careers may not end in failure, almost all of them do.

But there is no shortage of willing candidates. People will leave a great job to fight a seat, lose money to buy a house in a new constituency, give up almost every weekend to campaign and burst with happiness when elected. It’s both a vocation and a sickness – once you get bitten by the bug, it is all but impossible to resist the call of the ballot paper.

I’ll admit it: a life of sitting around my office waiting for interminable votes, answering letters from lunatics, trying to get street lights fixed and smiling sweetly when confronted with someone asinine isn’t for me. That has been the case for a while. What has changed is that I no longer feel guilty about it. Public service is admirable. However, much of what MPs do is a complete waste of time.

I don’t blame them; I blame the system.

There is an arms race in personal service. Only a few decades ago Alan Clark could boast of giving his constituency a very wide berth, his visits occasional blots on an otherwise agreeable year. Where once MPs would send a card acknowledging receipt of a letter, today MPs send painstakingly crafted replies to every piece of correspondence. It may be that these are in fact pro forma and produced by someone else (which makes them all but worthless), but the expectation is that an MP will reply promptly and at length to every missive sent their way, no matter how mad or irrelevant to their role as a legislator.

Yes, a legislator. Contrary to increasingly widespread opinion, MPs are not town planners or social workers. Their job is to scrutinise the activities of government and to consider public policy. Every knuckleheaded request to sort out something that is the proper responsibility of someone else eats into their ability to do that.

(Incidentally, the total unwillingness of many voters to accept that MPs are not ultimately responsible for everything is further evidence that localism is doomed to failure.)

Then we have the Commons chamber. It’s still awe-inspiring. But it’s more awful than awesome in its workings. The overwhelming majority of speeches are utterly pointless and change not one vote. Speaker Bercow doesn’t get everything right, but he is quite correct to clamp down on waffle. Yet Gordon Brown was allowed to yak on for the best part of half an hour during a recent debate on phone hacking - to what useful purpose?

And which MPs are holding the front benches to account fearlessly? Broadly speaking, it’s only the has-beens and the mavericks. Everyone else is either on the payroll or wants to be. So time and again select committees divide along party lines and oral questions are so supine as to make Nicolae Ceausescu blush.

Even a high turnover of bodies, as we saw in 2010, hasn’t fixed anything. This is a systemic problem.

The time has come for electors to look again at what they really want from their MP. A neighbour’s imposing hedge is a matter for the council. And maybe, just maybe, an American-style separation of the legislature and the executive would enable the former adequately to hold the latter to account.    

Tags: Alan Clark, Executive, House of Commons, Legislative Process, Legislature, MPs