Forty years later, as members of the Labour Party began to sing in celebration of a one-vote victory in the House of Commons, a Conservative minister, Michael Heseltine, seized the mace and “waved it aggressively toward the Labour benches,” The Guardian reported at the time.
Mr. Heseltine, now a member of the House of Lords, told the BBC earlier this year that he was “appalled” by a parliamentary maneuver done by the Labour lawmakers.
“I picked up the mace, offered it to the Labour benches and said, ‘You have abused the authority of the House, you better have the symbol as well,’” he said. “And then I put it down again.”
And in 1988, a Scottish member of the Labour Party, Ron Brown, picked up the mace during a debate on a poll tax — and unintentionally dropped it, doing damage worth about 1,500 pounds, which he paid for.
In each instance, Mr. Travers said, grabbing the mace was “considered grave disorder,” because “anybody who picks up or touches the mace is kind of rebelling against the underlying function of the House of Commons.”
Why grab the mace now?
After months of bitter negotiations with the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May had planned to have Parliament vote on her deal to withdraw Britain from the bloc on Tuesday. Facing a humiliating defeat, she delayed the vote on Monday, disrupting the process and infuriating members of Parliament.
Mrs. May is at odds with members of her own party, the Conservatives, as well as the opposition Labour Party, to which Mr. Russell-Moyle belongs. After his ejection from the House of Commons on Monday, he tweeted that he had grabbed the mace in protest of how her government has handled the withdrawal process, known as Brexit.
Source : Nytimes
