Is it really such a terrible thing for your MP to have two jobs? | Martin Kettle

Dan Jarvis wants to be an MP and Sheffield’s mayor – and he should be able to. The separation of Westminster from devolved government is ridiculous

Gilmour Leburn sounds like a character from minor fiction, the glamorous detective in some interwar country house whodunnit perhaps. The real life Leburn, however, was a Scottish Conservative MP. His claim on a footnote in British political history rests upon a solitary fact. His early death in 1963 caused a byelection in Kinross and West Perthshire. This byelection enabled the new prime minister, the Earl of Home, who was then a member of the House of Lords, to disclaim his peerage and win a seat in the House of Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. That strange interregnum between Home’s elevation to the premiership in October 1963 and his arrival in the House of Commons in November was the last occasion when Britain was led by a prime minister who was not an MP – and even, for the period of the byelection, a prime minister who was not a member of either house of parliament. Such events feel as if they come from another world – impossible to imagine today.

Related: Labour MPs attack ruling that Dan Jarvis must quit to run for mayor

Related: Why has devolution been a disaster for gender equality? | Susanna Rustin

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