Let’s give credit where it’s due and celebrate one of the mavericks of the House of Commons.

He’s a little eccentric and if he’s blessed with a brain the size of a planet he might just have an ego to match. But he’s frequently championed unfashionable causes – and eventually been proved right.

I’m talking of course about John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley.

It’s fair to say Mr Hemming marches to the beat of a different drum. As a Birmingham councillor he led the Liberal Democrat group and eventually became deputy leader of the city council, but since becoming an MP in 2005 he’s made little effort to climb up the greasy poll and earn a spot on the party’s front bench (except for his short-lived leadership bid in 2006).

Instead, he’s focused on leading campaigns, often on esoteric issues which he brings into the mainstream.

What prompted this column was the news that headteachers are to receive new guidance on when they are allowed to authorise pupil absence – so that it is easier for parents to get permission to take children out of school during term time.

Mr Hemming is chairman of a campaign group called Parents Want a Say, founded to fight against new restrictions on term-time absence introduced in September 2013.

The battle is far from won. Heads will still grant permission only in “exceptional circumstances”, while Mr Hemming and the parents backing the campaign really want the right to take a holiday at the time of their choosing (on the grounds that travel firms hike up prices during the official school holidays).

But it’s a start. It shows that the issue is on the Government’s radar.

And it’s a cause he’s backed more or less on his own at Westminster. There aren’t many MPs willing to stand up and say that parents should have the right to fly their children off for a fortnight in Malaga during term time.

But this isn’t the first time Mr Hemming has taken a stance that goes against the grain, and either won the argument or at least got people to take him seriously.

Perhaps the best example dates back to before he became an MP. As a councillor, Mr Hemming warned that massive election fraud was taking place in Birmingham.

It was hard to believe. Election-rigging happened in other countries – not here in the UK, surely?

West Midlands Police were so unimpressed that they named the inquiry into his complaints “Operation Gripe”.

But it turned out that he was right. In 2005, election Court Judge Richard Mawrey found six councillors guilty of carrying out “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud – one had the finding reversed on appeal – and said of Mr Hemming: “His evidence was largely inadmissible hearsay. He possesses an inability to give a straight answer to a straight question which would be the envy of a national politician appearing on the Today programme.

“But when all that is said and done, Mr Hemming was right and his critics were wrong.

“He said that there was massive, Birmingham-wide electoral fraud by the Labour Party and there was, in fact, massive Birmingham-wide fraud by the Labour Party.

“He may have played the part of Cassandra but, like Cassandra, his prophesies were true. He emerges from the case with credit, which is more than can be said for those police officers who treated his complaints as no more than Operation Gripe.”

Mr Hemming has also been a critic of the family law courts, claiming that decisions were being made about child welfare – often taking children away from parents – in secret, with parents denied proper representation, and without the welfare of the child properly taken into account.

In 2008 he came under fire from Justice Nicholas Wall, who claimed he was “willing to scatter unfounded allegations of professional impropriety and malpractice without any evidence to support them.”

And yet, in 2009 the Labour government announced family courts across England and Wales were being opened up to journalists as part of a government bid to boost public confidence in the system.

And in January this year, rules were changed so that judgments in the family courts and the Court of Protection must always be publicised unless there are “compelling reasons” not to.

Then there was his claim that the UK lacked sufficient gas storage facilities – and could actually run out of gas in a cold winter.

He was widely mocked, until Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister at the time, admitted the UK’s winter gas supply was “uncomfortably tight”

As Mr Hemming says: “When I started off on voting fraud, they said it wasn’t true.

“With the family courts, they said ‘he’s completely nuts’. But all I did was listen to people.”

I’m sure not everyone will like me saying this – not least the Labour candidate hoping to win Mr Hemming’s seat at the next election (which she may well do). But it’s good to have an MP who isn’t afraid to look a little nutty on occasion.