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Despite having never set foot in the Commons in an intermittent career as an MP, which goes back to 1983, the Sinn Fein Leader, Gerry Adams, has found it harder to get out of Parliament than it was to get in.

And, it has to be admitted, a lot of MPs rather enjoyed the rather Gilbert and Sullivan-esque contortions which followed his decision to quit the UK Parliament (insofar as he had ever been in it) to seek election to the Irish Parliament, the Dail.

Bizarrely, despite frequent talk of MPs "resigning their seat", there is, in fact, no direct way of doing so. They can die, or be expelled or be disqualified. So MPs who want to leave, by tradition, apply for a nominal office of profit under the crown - the two usually used are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. Departing MPs take turns applying for either office - and both are completely nominal, yielding no salary or privileges of any kind. And there are about 20 similarly vestigial feudal jobs which could also be applied for, should an exiting MP with a suitable sense of whimsy wish to do so....

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The origins of all this lie back in the 17th Century, in the great parliamentary clashes with the King in the build up to the Civil War. A Commons resolution in 1624 laid down that membership of the House was a sacred trust which could not be voluntarily relinquished. The strains of Parliamentary life in that era, and the far from distant prospect of being beheaded, or worse, had caused a rash of resignations - and the Commons wanted to make it harder to depart. A couple of generations later, in 1680, MPs were clearly worried that the Crown had found subtler ways of influencing them, and passed a resolution making the holding of "an office of profit under the Crown" incompatible with membership of the Commons - which created a mechanism by which MPs could self-disqualify.

And on his side of the argument, Gerry Adams can look back to the century-old insistence by Sinn Fein that it did not recognise the authority of the British Crown in Ireland - which is why Sinn Fein MPs have never taken their seats in the Commons. It is not just about having to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, but about implicitly accepting the legitimacy of British authority in Northern Ireland. This is the imbroglio which resulted in Mr Adams and his colleagues receiving pay and funding while refusing to sit in Westminster - and many MPs rather enjoy the sight of him being crowbarred into the title and dignities of a brutal medieval rent-collector, in order to exit an institution he never quite entered.

(Incidentally there's also a rather good pub quiz question struggling to get out of this little bit of history: the first woman ever elected to the Commons was Sinn Fein's Countess Constance Markiewicz, an Irish aristocrat who married a Polish count. She was elected in 1918, but never took her seat - which is why the first woman MP to take her seat was Lady Nancy Astor, after a by-election a year later.)

But some MPs are slightly alarmed by the mechanism of Mr Adams' removal. His letter of resignation was taken as an application for an office of profit under the Crown - and he was appointed forthwith to the Manor of Northstead by the Chancellor, George Osborne.

Apparently, there is a precedent, in the form of an MP called Gordon Thompson, in 1972. His letter of resignation was similarly interpreted as an application for one of these jobs - and off he went. Several MPs now want to ensure that they can't be appointed to some unwanted sinecure and removed from parliament at the whim of the Chancellor - so there may be some kind of rule tightening in due course. In the meantime, chortled Tory backbencher Richard Bacon: "We'd all better keep on the right side of George."

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