The Mace

In April 1653, when dismissing the Rump Parliament, Oliver Cromwell ended an angry castigation of his fellow MPs with the words: "Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!" The "shining bauble" was of course the Mace.

This is how Cromwell is quoted on the Brit Politics website, which goes to the trouble of reporting the speech in full and is therefore likely, I feel, to have got the exact words. Other sources report it as "Take away that fool's bauble", and the quote is probably most often reduced to "Remove that bauble!" Even Wikipedia mentions Cromwell referring to the mace as a "fool's bauble".

In 1930, Labour MP John Beckett was suspended from the House of Commons for showing disrespect to the Mace by trying to leave the chamber with it as a protest against the suspension of another member. It was wrested from his grip at the door.

In 1976, Labour MPs on the government side started to sing The Red Flag (the traditional anthem of the Labour Party) during a heated debate on the controversial Bill that would nationalise large parts of the UK aerospace and shipbuilding industries. This prompted Michael Heseltine – then Shadow Industry Secretary, under Margaret Thatcher – to seize the Mace and brandish it above his head (or, according to some reports, towards the government front bench). It was this action that earned him the nickname 'Tarzan', leading to memorable portrayals on Spitting Image and in the Guardian cartoon series If ...

In 1988, Ron Brown, the Labour MP for Leith, picked up the mace during a debate on the so–called poll tax and threw it to the floor, in protest at the government's proposals. The mace was damaged, and Brown was ordered to pay £1,500 towards the cost of repairs.

In 2009, after the Transport Secretary announced that Gordon Brown's government had decided to approve a new runway at Heathrow Airport without a vote in the Commons, Labour MP John McDonnell picked up the Mace and dropped it onto an empty bench. McDonnell, whose Hayes and Harlington constituency includes Heathrow, was 'named' by the Deputy Speaker and suspended from the Commons for five days; he was later appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer by Jeremy Corbyn.