Snp

He may be a national treasure, but it’s safe to say that Dennis Skinner’s annual crack during the Queen’s Speech have been a bit lame of late. The veteran MP always makes a joke in the silence as Black Rod enters the Commons chamber. Last year we had ‘Coalition’s last stand,’ in 2013: ‘Royal Mail for sale. Queen’s head privatised.’ In 2012 we were treated to the particularly laboured: ‘Jubilee Year, double-dip recession, what a start!’ Skinner is currently involved in a turf war with the SNP over the seat in the Commons he claims he has occupied for the last 44 years. ‘That’s 44 years too long,’ say the charming

During the election campaign the Telegraph reported that Nicola Sturgeon wanted David Cameron to remain Prime Minister, after a memo was leaked to them which included an account of a private conversation between Sturgeon and the French Ambassador. Naturally, the SNP leader was furious and demanded an inquiry. The Cabinet Office has now finished their investigation and concluded that the former Scotland Secretary Alistair Carmichael and his spad Euan Roddin were responsible for the leak. When asked about the leak at the time, Carmichael said that ‘The first I heard of this was when I received a phone call from a journalist’: Interestingly, the Cabinet Office has confirmed that the memo did exist and the civil servant believes it was an accurate representation of Sturgeon’s conversation:

Of all the MPs to pick a fight with, Dennis Skinner is not high on Mr S’s list. Still, that hasn’t stopped the new SNP intake from spending their first week in Parliament battling the 83-year-old Labour MP. The Scottish Nationalists have been trying to take over the bench where Labour’s awkward squad likes to sit. This bench is where Skinner has sat for the past 40 years and he has no plans to sit anywhere else any time soon. Things have got so bad between the parties over the turf war that they held a crisis talk yesterday: During the meeting MailOnline claim that Labour accused the SNP of ‘bullying’ Skinner. While they failed to agree on everything, it’s

While new MPs are sitting through tedious induction classes to teach them the rules of the House of Commons such as never clap in the chamber or call another member ‘you’, down the road another political institution is laying down the law. The Kennington Tandoori has been a home-from-home to politicians for decades, with numerous plots and shenanigans traced back to its darkened doors. Though if the sign that has just gone up in their window is anything to go by, the owners of the curry house are not quite as strict as the men in tights: As for rule no.4, Mr S is unsure how happy the last Scottish Lib Dem MP

Just when Mr S thought it was safe to go to his local watering hole now the 56 Scottish SNP MPs have chosen Parliament’s sports and social as their pub of choice, it turns out that the SNP invasion has gone global. Word reaches Steerpike that the presence of the Scottish Nationalists cannot be escaped even outside of the UK. In fact, the revolution has reached as far as Japan: Well, whisky does tend to be a uniting force.

With 190 women elected last week and the number of ethnic minority MPs hitting record levels, Parliament is slowly beginning to look a little bit like modern Britain. Settling in, one male MP, proudly wearing a green new members’ badge, was sitting on the Terrace on his first night in the Commons. He proceeded to use his iPad to conduct a noisy bedtime video call with his wife and young children back in his distant constituency. The sweet scene did not amuse everyone however, with one member of the Tory old guard nosily tutting and harrumphing about a total lack of ‘decorum’ displayed by new Nationalist MPs. There are plenty of

On Monday when 56 SNP MPs descended on Westminster, the youngest of the new intake Mhairi Black gushed that everyone had been so nice. Two days in, and cross-party relations have begun to cool. Carol Monaghan, the MP for Glasgow North West, claims that Simon Burns, the Tory MP for Chelmsford, scolded her as well as her fellow SNP politicians for their bad etiquette: However, Burns has clarified the situation to Mr S: ‘I was giving a talk about how to debate in chamber. If you agree you say ‘hear, hear’ and I mentioned that in recent years an unfortunate habit of clapping has occurred and that is deplorable. The talk was to everyone, not just the SNP,

Ahead of the arrival of 56 SNP MPs in Westminster yesterday, Alex Salmond offered his new colleagues some advice in a recent interview. He said: ‘Make your voice heard, represent your constituents, and stay out the Strangers Bar’. So far, so good. In fact, Salmond will no doubt be glad to hear that his fellow MPs have taken his advice and stayed out of the Strangers bar. Instead, they have opted to make Parliament’s sports and social bar their new base. Word reaches Steerpike that a few members of staff had their noses put out of joint last night when the lesser frequented bar was unexpectedly busy. ‘It was packed full of the SNP gang – on a Monday,’

Most of the new SNP MPs celebrated their party’s amazing result in the general election today with a photo call outside Parliament. They certainly looked an impressive bloc of parliamentarians, illustrating just how different this Parliament will look and feel from the last. But one of the interesting questions is how much freedom will these new MPs have to pursue their own interests, or whether they will be expected to operate as a bloc, and not outside the bloc. Many backbench MPs take up personal campaigns on a matter affecting constituents, or a small issue where they hope they can effect a change in the law. Some do this when