Parliament

MP’s best friendship lies lost in the Commons

As the Brexit vote looms closer, the whips are on a hunt for MPs. Not so much to discover how they’ll be voting, though, but to find the owner of a lost ring. A message went out to MPs from their whips this morning saying that ‘a silver ring with the inscription “forever best friends” has been found in the toilet in the voting lobby’. Mr S wonders what sort of an MP has a ‘forever best friend’ – and whether the ring was in fact discarded after the forever friendship was shattered by Brexit tensions. There are more than enough candidates for that…

Has Speaker Bercow outstayed his welcome?

John Bercow has been an excellent, reforming Speaker of the House of Commons. He has supercharged backbenchers with greater use of urgent questions, for instance, and has also made Parliament more family-friendly. His pomposity while chairing Prime Minister’s Questions – the endless chiding about what the public might think of MPs’ behaviour, often accompanied with tedious jokes about certain members needing to take ‘a soothing medicament’ – was something even the MPs in question could forgive, given they had a Speaker who was making the legislature bolder. But in the past few months, there has been a shift in the Parliamentary mood. Yes, Bercow still has many supporters on the

The unbearable pointlessness of Parliament

Christmas books pages usually invite columnists to nominate their publishing event of the year. Well, here’s a corker: The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, published by the House of Lords Citizenship and Civic Engagement committee. That obscure body has 12 members and takes itself seriously. The Ties that Bind was the fruit of hearings it held into ‘civic engagement through the prism of the civic journey each one of us who lives in Britain will undertake’. Its 168 luxuriant pages of red and black print, published ‘by the Authority of the House of Lords’, has nine chapters, bullet points, footnotes, boxes, appendices and a

Paper chasers

Christmas books pages usually invite columnists to nominate their publishing event of the year. Well, here’s a corker: The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, published by the House of Lords Citizenship and Civic Engagement committee. That obscure body has 12 members and takes itself seriously. The Ties that Bind was the fruit of hearings it held into ‘civic engagement through the prism of the civic journey each one of us who lives in Britain will undertake’. Its 168 luxuriant pages of red and black print, published ‘by the Authority of the House of Lords’, has nine chapters, bullet points, footnotes, boxes, appendices and a

Order, order | 13 December 2017

Diet nannies will spend Christmas telling us ‘you are what you eat’ but in the House of Commons ‘you are where you sit’. Are you a Tory Whips’ stooge or a Dominic Grieve groupie aching to block Brexit, a braw new blue Scot or an English provincial plodder without hope of advancement? Parliament-watchers discern plenty about your political leanings from where you park your posterior. Each side of the Commons chamber has five green-leather benches that are divided by a gangway. On the government side of the chamber, all MPs are Conservatives except for a couple who have had the Whip withdrawn. On the opposition side, the lower four benches

Lloyd Evans

Burning questions

A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body into a human fireball on College Green, opposite parliament. Her political cause is unclear. Her personal hopes are plainly set out: death and posthumous fame. Everything is ready. Kat douses herself in unleaded petrol (it’s not a carbon-neutral protest), and as the flames engulf her flesh she emits a blood-curdler from her solar plexus. ‘The

What happens next?

Parliament is in deadlock over Brexit. So what can we expect in the coming days and weeks after the vote? These are the scenarios currently being war-gamed. May’s deal passes A political shock: Theresa May squeaks over the line after convincing Brexiteers that it was her deal or no Brexit — and Remainers that it was her deal or a no-deal Brexit. The DUP then rains on May’s parade. Seething over the backstop, it declares that the confidence and supply agreement is over for good. This scenario could involve delaying the initial vote in the hope this gives MPs time to come around. It passes on a second vote Theresa

James Forsyth

Brexit’s crunch point

Unless Theresa May delays the vote, 11 December 2018 might be about to become one of the most important in recent British history; more important even than 23 June 2016. If MPs vote down Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, as nearly all ministers expect them to, they will set Britain on course for either the softest possible Brexit or a second referendum. In the process, they may well split the Tory party. Theresa May’s strategy has been to play chicken with Parliament. Her team saw virtue in intransigence and calculated that at the last moment MPs would get out of her way. They thought that fear of no deal would bring

Why aren’t there more women MPs?

It’s 100 years today since women were able to stand for Parliament, and the Women and Equalities Committee marked it with a hearing on the barriers to getting more female MPs. It has only been in the past few years that the total number of women ever elected into Parliament has passed the number of men currently sitting on the green benches, and 32 per cent of MPs are women. This puts the UK at 48 in the world rankings for gender representation in its Parliament, which isn’t great. I was one of those giving evidence to the Committee this morning, using research I’ve conducted for my book, Why We

Can Parliament really end its toxic culture of bullying and harassment?

How could the sort of bullying and sexual harassment detailed in Dame Laura Cox’s report on the treatment of House of Commons staff really have gone on for so long? There were policies in place for dealing with complaints, and on paper everything looked as though it was working well to prevent the rise of the ‘serial offenders’ that Cox refers to. This was the very defence initially mounted by the parliamentary authorities themselves when the allegations first came to light in the press earlier this year, but Cox’s report shows how structures and cultures can be very different indeed. The problem, she writes, was largely one of culture so

Portrait of the Week – 6 September 2018

Home Mark Carney kindly said he would stay on as governor of the Bank of England if it helped the government ‘smooth’ the Brexit transition. Lord King of Lothbury, Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England, said that ‘incompetent’ preparation for Brexit had left Britain without a credible bargaining position. Paul Pester announced his resignation as chief executive of TSB after seven years, following the computing failure at the bank. Chris Evans announced on air that he would be leaving the Radio 2 breakfast show at the end of the year; he is to host Virgin Radio’s equivalent. David Watkin, the architectural historian, died aged 77. Lord

How ordinary people are priced out of Parliament by the most expensive job interview on earth

Could you afford to go into politics? Chances are that the answer is no, unless you’ve got a spare £10,000 knocking around. In a survey that is being published later this week, I’ve found that candidates in general elections are having to stump up tens of thousands of pounds of their own money just to stand. This is not the money spent on campaigning, which is funded by the parties and donors to individual campaigns. It’s the personal expenditure that comes with having to take up to two years off work to campaign, moving to the constituency if you are not local, travelling around the constituency, attending events and so

The Tories only have themselves to blame for the ‘upskirting’ row

How embarrassing for Tory MPs: one of their own has managed to block the unblockable: a bill creating a new criminal offence of ‘upskirting’. Plenty of Conservatives have turned on the culprit, Christopher Chope, both in WhatsApp groups and in public, to show that they do not have the same views as him. To be fair to Chope (and it is hard, especially for a magazine that prefers its motto of ‘firm but unfair’), he wasn’t suggesting that upskirting was in some way OK. He is part of a group of MPs with the odd hobby of objecting to Private Members’ Bills on principle because they don’t think that MPs

MPs in mess over new data protection laws

MPs are frantically deleting casework emails after being mistakenly advised that new regulations mean they have to clear the data that they hold on constituents. The General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect on 25 May, and is the reason your own inbox will be flooded by companies who’ve been sending you unsolicited emails for years who are now asking if you want them to stay in touch. It also has an impact on parliamentarians, who retain years’ worth of correspondence about constituency matters. Recent briefings from the Commons authorities and political parties have left office staff and MPs confused about what they are allowed to keep, with one briefing

MPs are making the refit of Parliament all about them. It isn’t.

Theresa May likes to avoid awkward rows at all costs: that much we already know. Today’s papers carry two stories showing this: she is said to be abandoning plans to give a Brexit speech just in case it causes further divisions in her Cabinet, and is also racking up what The Times estimates is a £230 million bill by delaying the refurbishment of Parliament. Both the Cabinet and Parliament are dangerously unstable, with chunks falling from them every day. The latter, though, has been here a long time, is one of the most famous buildings in the world, and attracts vast numbers of tourists. Philip Hammond and Greg Clark don’t

A guide to Parliament’s Brexit tribes

There’s relief in No 10 today after Theresa May and Jean Claude Juncker finally reached deal on the Irish border, EU citizens’ rights and the so-called Brexit bill. The European Commission have subsequently recommended that ‘sufficient progress’ has been achieved in time for this month’s EU council meeting – and that the Brexit talks should move on to trade in the new year. In order to get to this point, May has agreed a £40bn Brexit bill, time-limited ECJ role and a promise of no hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. However, for the government the hard work is only just beginning. The second round of negotiations is

Legal challenge

Last week the Daily Telegraph’s front page showed the 15 Tory MPs who had voted against the government under the headline ‘The Brexit Mutineers’. One of the first things pointed out was that two thirds of the group were lawyers. (In fact, only nine of the 15 are barristers or solicitors; a tenth is the son of a High Court judge, but in the hereditary meritocracy in which we live, that counts as the same thing.) This seemed to be taken as a point in their favour — who wouldn’t want our politicians to be sensible lawyers? Certainly, it contrasted with the disdain shown for journalist-politicians, like Michael Gove or

Twenty years on, Brass Eye is still the best – as this film of unreleased material proves

‘Drug use among children has for many an education and with obvious alarm for both parents on the increase almost yearly.’ Try reading that again. Maybe in the style of Huw Edwards. By all means, try it a third time but it’ll only give you a headache. It has the appearance of sense. It makes the same noises as normal sentence. But it’s not normal. It’s a Brass Eye sentence. Last night, at the Curzon cinema in Soho, 20 years after Chris Morris’s comedy masterpiece was first broadcast, there was a sell-out crowd who wanted more. And another sell-out crowd at 9.15. They were there to see Oxide Ghosts – 60

Portrait of the Week – 2 November 2017

Home A great ferment of accusations of sexual impropriety was made against people in Parliament and out of it. Bex Bailey, a Labour party worker, said she was raped, not by an MP, at a party event in 2011 and a senior Labour official discouraged her from reporting it. Jared O’Mara MP had the Labour whip withdrawn while claims were investigated that he had called a woman he met ‘an ugly bitch’. Tulip Siddiq, a Labour MP, said that cases of sexual misconduct cases at Westminster could run into hundreds. Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, was even driven to apologise publicly for putting his hand on the knee of

Rod Liddle

So what attracted you to that powerful man?

Somewhere towards the end of the 1980s I was suddenly promoted three grades upwards in my job at the BBC; a bit like going from the middle of the old fourth division to the top of the Championship. Yay. The immediate consequences were more money, more power and almost endless opportunities for sexual intercourse. Women who had hitherto been averagely amiable work colleagues became much friendlier — and in a very different way. It was as if I’d been transformed overnight from Marty Feldman into Orlando Bloom. What a delightful period of my life that was. I was happily reminded of it when the actor Martin Clunes stepped into the