Whether England still swings like a pendulum do, as Roger Miller sang in the sixties, we don’t know, but it definitely marches to a different drummer. And that leads us to today’s new question for TriviaPark.com, which concerns a high-falutin’ and quintessentially English…
Job search
Every now and then someone applies for the post of ‘steward and bailiff of the Manor of Northstead’ in Yorkshire, England. Why would they do so?
- In order to get out of doing something else
- In order to join Mind Your Manors, a British reality TV show
- In order to qualify for membership in the House of Lords
- In order to set the decrepit Manor to rights at last
Under a parliamentary rule famous for its inconvenience, yet in effect continuously since 1623, sitting members of the British House of Commons are not allowed to resign their seats. However, a sitting MP who is appointed to a Crown office can — indeed, must — give up his or her Commons seat. As a result, two obsolete Crown appointments, though entailing no actual duties, continue to exist solely to provide a sanctioned escape hatch. ‘Steward and bailiff of the Manor of Northstead’, which is in ruins and under water, is one of these; the other, even grander-sounding, is ‘steward and bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham’ in Buckinghamshire. The House of Commons having more than 500 seats, occasions for leaving such as a better job, sickness or scandal arise quite frequently. In the first decade of the 21st century, the procedural device of appointment to either of the two sinecures (offices without duties) was employed about a dozen times, including by Tony Blair when he resigned the Prime Ministership and left the Commons in 2007 to represent the United Nations diplomatically in the Middle East.
