Coronavirus should have forced parliament to shut down a week ago - MPs have to lead by example

If such a step is implemented, people might actually realise they need to take action

Not even at the height of the Theresa May/Jeremy Corbyn years have the green benches been so empty for Prime Minister’s Questions. Only those on the order paper were allowed in, plus the front benches of all parties, and they sat two metres apart.

Corbyn asked all the right questions, and got most of the right answers. Though some simply can’t be answered. There is no precedent for any of this.

But none of it should have happened. What good is it, seeing MPs sitting two metres apart, when you’ve also seen the packed platforms on the Victoria line, which commuters – and MPs are commuters – are still using to get to the office?

On Wednesday morning, Neil Ferguson, the scientist whose research for Imperial College forced the government to move through the gears of its action plan faster than anticipated, said he himself had coronavirus. “There is a lot of Covid-19 in Westminster,” he said, on Twitter, live from his own self-isolation.

And still they come, more than a week after one of their number, Nadine Dorries, announced she too had been diagnosed with it. There are still signs up on her office door, reading “Covid-19: Do Not Enter”.

At the start of PMQs, the speaker Lindsay Hoyle took a moment to point out the house is “following the advice of Public Health England”. Which it may well be, but the advice is one thing, the example is quite another.

On Wednesday morning, Sir Peter Bottomley, 75 years old and Westminster’s “father of the house”, said the following: “If the House of Commons were empty people would say, “Why aren’t we there?’ We should be reducing contact by degree but we shouldn’t panic and disappear.”

They are words to make you weep. Even now, even after all the examples from all around the world, of all the towering evidence that is made available, the spirit of stoicism, that we must carry on, that we will not be cowed, will not die, even though it is so catastrophically wrongheaded.

No, Sir Peter. People would not say, “why aren’t they there?” The point is that you are there, and people are saying, “Why ARE they there?” Why is the prime minister telling the country to “work from home if you can”, to avoid non-essential contact, and yet the MPs are carrying on as normal?

Members of parliament are not the only people who think their job is essential. Everybody thinks that. And, to be blunt, most members of parliament are very, very non-essential indeed.

On Tuesday night, the House of Commons finished with what is called an ‘adjournment debate’, as it always does. They last a very short amount of time, and they usually pertain to some entirely parochial matter like a planned new link road in some MP’s constituency.

These debates are usually attended by around three people, one of whom is always an obscure Northern Irish DUP MP called Jim Shannon who, for reasons best known to himself, takes perverse pride in being the first person to intervene in every single adjournment debate that is ever held.

On Tuesday night, as chance would have it, the MP to be granted the adjournment debate was Jim Shannon himself, and MP after MP lined up to intervene on him. How they laughed and laughed to themselves at the hilarity of it all.

This was about as non-essential not just as politics get, but as any line of work can possibly be. By Friday, these MPs will have taken themselves from a place that arguably the country’s leading expert on coronavirus has said has “a lot of Covid-19”, and where, in all likelihood he has caught it himself, to return to every corner of the land.

It is not yet two weeks since the prime minister held a press conference in 10 Downing Street and bragged, entirely inaccurately as it turned out, that he had “been to a hospital where there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody”.

Already those words have aged like an open oyster under the summer sun.

“Future generations will look back and judge us,” Corbyn told the prime minister, over the despatch box at PMQs. Which they will. But future generations are a problem for another year.

Already, nobody can understand why the House of Commons is failing by example, why MPs are taking the precise opposite of the advice the prime minister has issued, which nobody understands.

The most urgent problem the country faces is that pubs and bars and trains are all packed with people, against the advice they’ve been given.

If people could perhaps look at Westminster and see that there was no one there, they might start listening. But if MPs are too self-important to listen to the advice they themselves are issuing, don’t be surprised when it turns out everybody else is too.