The day I received Doing Politics, the business, innovation and skills select committee tried to block Vince Cable’s choice to head the Office of Fair Access. Select committee scrutiny of public appointments was one of Tony Wright’s achievements, yet Westminster gossip that day said that Tory members had been ‘nobbled’ by a prime minister who opposed Cable’s decision; the old ways had triumphed over the new. As Wright makes clear in these essays, democracy is as much about culture as process.

Nonetheless, today’s parliament, with a speaker who reflects a changing culture that Wright helped to bring about, is more assertive, less deferential, and more uncomfortable for the executive than its predecessors.
Elected in 1992, Wright never took advice on what it would be helpful or timely to say. From his innocent and prophetic shock on being told how to maximise his expenses, to the accidental curtailment of his ministerial career, he spoke truth to power. There was no seat on the green benches but his belief in the importance of politics as played out in parliament in shaping choices for our society and holding the powerful to account flourished. When a desperate Gordon Brown wanted to seize the agenda of democratic reform he turned to the long-standing chair of the public administration select committee whose arguments for change had been ignored for so long.
Enabling parliament to hold the executive to account has benefited all parties, but Wright is no political neutral. He believes in change and rejects a more cynical view of political change: ‘focus groups make no converts’. Born into a Labour culture, inspired by the Guild Socialism of GDH Cole and the reformism of Tony Crosland, and an early outrider for New Labour, his advocacy of liberal socialism and pluralism, like his other slow burn causes, may have their best years ahead.

Wright has said things 10 years before others were prepared to. As early as 2000, the gap between New Labour’s promise and its practice was set out in the New Statesman: ‘I thought the project was to make our ideas into the dominant ideas of the society, in an enterprise of advocacy and persuasion and example, not to take the dominant ideas we found lying around after the Thatcher years and make them into our ideas.’

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John Denham MP is former secretary of state for communities and local government

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Doing Politics by Tony Wright
Biteback Publishing | 320pp | £9.99