One year ago this week I made the rather rash decision to seek election to the Legislative Council.

For a variety of reasons my bid for membership of the world’s oldest continuous parliament was spectacularly unsuccessful.

But standing for MLC was an enlightening experience and having done so I feel moderately qualified to comment on the future of Tynwald’s second chamber.

This remains one of the great unresolved questions of Manx politics, albeit that the architecture of parliament is of limited interest to hardworking families and other categories of honest voter.

The public may not be bothered, but the debate around the role of LegCo does involve important principles of democracy and accountability.

Unlike the House of Keys, the Legislative Council has never been popularly elected.

Yet it used to be the dominant chamber and the seat of government, chaired by the Lieutenant Governor when he was effectively the island’s chief executive, sitting alongside other crown appointments.

Over time the Governor and most of the other crown positions were replaced by members elected by the House of Keys, generally retiring MHKs but latterly drawn increasingly from outside of Tynwald.

In the post-colonial era the Legislative Council has looked like an anachronism, resented by many MHKs and an easy target for those keen to display their credentials as democrats.

It has now become fashionable to regard the council as lacking in all democratic legitimacy, for the simple and simplistic reason that it is not directly elected by the public.

According to this view MLCs are not entitled to play any part in government, and in parliament they must always give way to the superior beings of the Keys.

Such crude prejudice ignores the many examples, both here and elsewhere, of indirectly elected bodies and posts that are accepted as democratically valid.

Indeed, the authority for MHKs to act in executive roles, as ministers or members of departments, comes not from their own constituents but from Tynwald, the Chief Minister or the Council of Ministers.

Election to the House of Keys empowers members to serve as constituency representatives and parliamentarians, but it does not give them a direct mandate to govern. If it did you could argue the government should be led by the most popular MHKs in terms of number of votes cast at the polls, in which case the Chief Minister would be Dr Alex Allinson.

The public has long been confused over the critical distinction between parliament and government. It seems that some Members of Tynwald also struggle to spot the difference.

By insisting upon the concentration of power within the House of Keys, opponents of LegCo have actually strengthened the case for a robust second chamber to act as a counter balance to that power, and to safeguard parliamentary functions.

Among the most important of these functions is the independent scrutiny of the executive, which should mean challenging and testing government on policy as well as examining the detail of legislation.

Arguably, scrutiny is compromised in the Isle of Man because so many members of parliament also belong to government, either as ministers or department members.

It is surely harder to achieve a credible external perspective on the system when you are an insider and part of a network of patronage. However strong the integrity of the scrutinisers, the public perception will always tend to be of the club inspecting itself.

So why not take more members out of government positions in order for them to be dedicated to fully independent scrutiny?

This was recommended by Lord Lisvane, but defenders of the status quo warned the creation of two clearly separate camps within Tynwald would lead to oppositional politics, alien to the Manx tradition of collaboration and consensus.

The fear is that in such an adversarial climate members could hijack scrutiny bodies as vehicles for their own ambition, and misuse them to score points against rivals rather than pursue the truth.

Even now, it is evident that investigatory committees can prove useful platforms for career advancement.

And here, patient reader, is where the ’undemocratic’ Legislative Council could come to the rescue of parliamentary democracy.

As MLCs are effectively barred from ministerial office, they are ideally placed to lead the scrutiny function, because they cannot have the ulterior motive of seeking the jobs of the ministers who are the subjects of their inquiries.

As political eunuchs they are more likely to be recognised as impartial and non-partisan than all those vigorous MHKs jostling for promotion and glory.

In an ideal world MLCs would chair all of Tynwald’s major scrutiny committees and make up the bulk of their membership.

They would be prohibited from involvement with government, not because of any supposed democratic illegitimacy, but because that would conflict with their committee responsibilities.

Thus the Legislative Council, having once been the seat of executive power, would become the home of parliamentary scrutiny, holding the government to account on behalf of the people.

Instead of languishing in semi-redundancy, the second chamber would gain a clear new purpose of obvious value and relevance to the public.

The House of Keys would not like this division of roles, however. As busy and ambitious representatives of the people MHKs will always want the chance to shine on the scrutiny stage as well as dominating the executive. But they can’t have it both ways, can they?