By Paul Goodman MP.
After I was first elected in 2001, I was put on the Work and Pensions Select Committee. There I found a strikingly young, unflappably bright, upwardly mobile, superbly connected (in New Labour terms) unwaveringly smiling and very cool - in both senses of the word - Labour MP: James Purnell.
He was a first-rate Committee member - not just sharp but actually imaginative, a rare quality; always prepared to let the Government know it could do much better, seldom willing to put his vote where his mouth or pen were by siding with us - which was smart of him, in terms of his own career at least.
So we came in at the same time, and travelled together for a while. But he was really going places (like the Cabinet, for example), and our paths swiftly diverged. Now we're both going at the same time.
Enough has been written about Purnell already to leave me with only one point worth making. It's additional to Matthew Parris's column this morning which argues, I suspect rightly, that Purnell has had enough not just of Brown's Labour in particular, but of the Commons in general - of the sense that politicians now operate in a culture which presumes guilt before innocence.
Tough, I hear you say. And tough especially in the post-expenses afterwash. If politicians can't take the heat, they should get out of the Parliamentary kitchen - and make way for others.
I agree. And so be it. But that leads me to the point I want to make. What's set to change in the Commons of the near future isn't quality, but turnover.
My rough assessment, for what it's worth, is that the quality of the next Conservative Parliamentary intake is higher than ours was in 2001. But the turnover of all intakes, past and present, is going to be quicker, as technology speeds both events and scrutiny. The brightest and best - well, the most ambitious, at any rate - will tend to get in fast, scramble up the ladder of Ministerial office as quickly as they can, and get out faster. They'll be unwilling, on the whole, to hang around the Commons, entering the details of their new private interests in the Register. They'll leave to make money.
And experience will go with them. I concede that a few experienced people are duffers. But on the whole experience isn't so much over-valued as under-rated. Experience is the voice in the Commons that says: "We tried that - and it didn't work"; or, better still: "It didn't work, but it could with a few adjustments".
In short, experience is older people. Any country needs its balance of older and younger. So does the Commons. By the way, I see that Purnell claims not to be giving up politics altogether; that he intends to hang around in think-tankery and the media. Now who would I be to criticise him for that?
