The strange symbolism of Big Ben struck a chord with our MPs—and made the entire country look ridiculous

On Monday, a cross-party group of MPs gathered outside on a cold, wet, summer day to witness the last time for a number of years that the chimes of ‘Big Ben’ would ring out—at least as a matter of quarter hourly routine. By doing so they—seemingly quite deliberately—sustained into a second week the curious political embolism surrounding the ‘silencing’ of the bell.

It should be a classic summer silly season story, but ‘Big Ben’ is a potent symbol of, if perhaps not the country, then certainly its politics. And our politics, if perhaps not the country, is struggling to find a new normal in the aftermath of the EU referendum. (A struggle of which June’s General Election is a symptom, not a cause.)

In this period of intense discord, of fundamental and wide-ranging disagreement over who we are, and who we want to be, the country’s signs and symbols are up for grabs. The self-described “vigil” of MPs, carried out according to Labour’s Stephen Pound “with heads bowed and hope in our hearts,” is a deliberate, wholly symbolic act of the kind that fill British public life, from the state opening of Parliament down. This one in particular, perhaps because of its extemporised, ad hoc nature, has quickly revealed itself as little more than yet another opportunity for members of Parliament to make the entire country look ridiculous.

That ‘Big Ben’ (it’s not its name but we’ll stick with it) must this week fall silent for maintenance work to be carried out has come as a surprise to both members of Parliament and to the general public. Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House of the Commons, has been convening emergency meetings with House Speaker John Bercow to see if the expensive and longstanding plans can be in some way revised or amended. More surprisingly, the Prime Minister took time out of her busy ‘being invisible’ schedule to go on television to say that it wasn’t right that the bells would fall silent for such a long time. If she didn’t actually say she was shocked by the news, then her demeanour and choice of words indicated that she was, as she urged “the Speaker... To look into this urgently so we can ensure that we can continue to hear Big Ben through those four years.”

This is bizarre. The Associated Press briefed every detail of this story in April 2016, to minimal fuss. The information was not only made public, it was made public in such a way as to make it still accessible to literally anybody with access to the internet. It doesn’t even take thirty seconds to view it. No one has any excuse for being surprised by the situation. And if they are, they have no right to complain that they didn’t know, or ask why they weren’t informed.

Bercow’s former Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans is another MP who is suddenly publicly horrified—although sadly not beyond words—by a longstanding decision of which he could easily have been aware for well over a year. He’s also, it seems, one of the many British politicians who suffers from the need to mention the Second World War at any given opportunity, and who will, should such an opportunity not manifest itself, generate one.

Despite the Grenfell fire being less than two months in the past, Evans was somehow comfortable blaming Health and Safety legislation for achieving “what nobody other than the Luftwaffe has done since the Second World War.” Skipping over the strange implications of his phrasing (the Luftwaffe achieved this “since the Second World War”? A revision of the history curriculum is surely needed?) it’s worth noting that Evans’ shock is cumulative. It’s no longer just the cessation of ‘Big Ben’ bonging that he’s reacting to. He’s also affronted at the putting out of an apparently famous “democracy lamp” that shines from the Palace whenever MPs are sitting and which was last extinguished during the Blitz.

The light referred to is, in fact the largely unknown Ayrton light, installed at Parliament in 1885 at the direct request of Queen Victoria. To term it the ‘democracy lamp’ is unutterably ridiculous. (The name does seem to have been spontaneously generated by the Telegraph over the weekend as part of its ongoing campaign to make the works in Parliament raise hackles.) The Ayrton light owes its creation to the monarch’s desire to know at a glance when either chamber, elected or unelected, was sitting. In 1885, even the elected chamber was hardly democratic. No women, and over 40 per cent of men couldn’t vote, meaning a good three-quarters of the population wasn’t enfranchised. Whatever the lamp is a symbol of—monarchical oversight?—it’s certainly not democracy, even in a nineteenth-century sense.

An anonymous MP, presumably sufficiently ashamed of their outburst to not wish to give their name to it in the Telegraph, said of the Ayrton light that “It tells people when the House is sitting. It is synonymous with informing London when legislation is taking place. This is switching off democracy.” Except it isn’t. It seems that, in any case, the House of Commons’ authorities are already looking into a replacement light for the period when the original is out of commission.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that blaming Health and Safety, however crassly, is a favourite pastime of the British right. I will admit to a private theory that the sheer, sustained rage at Health and Safety has its origins in how the passage of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act (1974) proved that Wilson’s minority administration could govern, and that it would not fall within weeks as many had assumed. I also have a firm public opinion that those who complain about Health and Safety seem oddly comfortable letting people know that their personal ethics contain a preference that someone else can die needlessly if the alternative is for them having to listen to a short lecture, wear a hat or fill out a form.

If ‘die’ in the paragraph above sounds a little extreme, then you’re obviously, as those MPs objecting to the ‘silencing’ of ‘Big Ben’ have revealed themselves to be, unfamiliar with the work of Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957), the crime novelist, translator, academic, and creator of aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In The Nine Tailors (1934), one of her most brilliant examples of detective fiction, the victim turns out to have been tied up in the bell chamber of a church tower from late December to early January. He was killed by the joyous sound of the bells ringing in the New Year—including those pulled by our hero, Lord Peter Wimsey himself.

This is not the stuff of idle fantasy—although Ms Sayers’ book was criticised on publication for being so. Human eardrums rupture at around 160 decibels. Lung rupture occurs at 200. A minute of a mere 110 decibels is enough to cause permanent hearing loss, and the process can be cumulative. ‘Big Ben’ chimes at least 118 decibels, and for between 15 and 75 seconds, every fifteen minutes, twenty four hours a day. (The law says that no one should be exposed to, on average, above 85 decibels, for reasons that should be obvious from the paragraph above.)

As those responsible for the work that is about to begin on the clock tower have noted, people will be working in, on and around the tower everyday throughout the extensive, years-long, maintenance works. Those working cannot wear protective headgear sufficient to protect them from the noise without exposing themselves to other dangers, such as not being able to hear machine tools being used by colleagues, or react to warnings or alarms. The work simply can’t be done without turning the thing off for a bit.

At its installation, much of the point of that clock, whatever we call it, was that it would always keep perfect time. It was fiendishly designed to be impervious to effects on other mechanical clocks, such as gravity. It symbolised Britain’s technological advancement, and sticking it on the Palace of Westminster emphasised its imperial dominance. Even how it works could be seen to be a metaphor for the country’s ability to resist outside influences, political or cultural. Its ability to stand alone. It’s little wonder that given the current national mood, there has been a conscious scramble to define what it’s not ringing means. Far better to blame the ever present Health and Safety bogeyman than have another meaning be imposed by events.

Leadsom is known for being such an obviously terrible Prime Ministerial candidate the Tory Party decided it would rather have even Teresa May instead, and is a fervent Leaver. Evans isn’t really known for anything at all, but is an advocate of making 23 June a public holiday called ‘British Independence Day’. (He has described the idea, which was his own, as ‘a belter.’) In the current arguments over national identity, we know who they think we are.

‘Big Ben’ has not been a constant sound above London for 157 years. It last fell silent in 2007 and had a couple of quiet years in the middle of the 1980s. In 1976 it suddenly stopped working, exactly because it had not been maintained as well as it could have been. Nigel Evans would have been 19 at the time (he lived through The Buzzcocks, rather than the Blitz) so it’s surprising he doesn’t seem to remember. Or maybe he does. Maybe he remembers the existential questions that the eerily silent Big Ben prompted about the state of the nation at that time. Perhaps he does recall how the absence of this symbol of national life can, and has, been considered ominous, an implicit criticism of the direction in which we’re heading.

Other ardent Leaver Tory MPs seem aware of the existential implications. Jacob Rees Mogg, Andrew Bridgen and Peter Bone, amongst others, have demanded that, whatever else happens, the chimes of ‘Big Ben’ must toll at midnight on 31 March 2019 as Britain leaves the EU. It will be, in Rees Mogg’s words “literally a ringing endorsement of democracy.”

Dorothy L Sayers knew what she was doing when she converted the joyous sound of New Year’s celebration into the noise of a painful, lingering and traumatic end.