The Spectator’s Notes | 13 November 2010

Poor Phil Woolas. How could he reasonably have expected that, for lying about his Liberal opponent, Elwyn Watkins, in the general election, he could be thrown out of Parliament? It is as if a reporter were sacked from the Daily Mail for writing unkind stories about the royal family. It goes against the natural order of things. But the real outrage here is not Mr Woolas’s personal fate. It would not have mattered, for example, if his own Labour party had taken against his lies and deselected him. The real outrage is the power of the judiciary. It is judges who have overturned the result of the poll at Oldham East and Saddleworth, invoking the Representation of the People Act 1983. As with the row about MPs’ expenses and the establishment of IPSA to oversee their allowances in future, people have forgotten that they elect MPs to make laws on their behalf.