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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I’m Ruth Fox.

Mark D’Arcy: And I’m Mark D’Arcy. And coming up this week:

Ruth Fox: Andy Burnham heads for Parliament. What will happen when he gets there?

Mark D’Arcy: We talk to politics professor and Commons rebellion expert Philip Cowley about how Labour MPs will weigh up the prospects for a change in leader.

Ruth Fox: And we’ve got a new crop of private members’ bills on assisted dying, hospice funding, and helping children and parents in their early years.

Mark D’Arcy: But first, Ruth, it’s been a bumper week for parliamentary by-elections. Not only has there been that big [00:01:00] by-election in Makerfield, but there’ve been two by-elections in Scotland as well. And in particular, there’s been a stonking gain for the Conservatives in Aberdeen South. This is, I think, the first Conservative by-election gain in Scotland since roughly the Cretaceous period. And for Kemi Badenoch and her MPs, looking at polling that suggests that they could be the third or even the fourth party after the next election on current polling ratings, this is something of a shot in the arm, isn’t it?

Ruth Fox: It is. I mean, it’s 1967, not quite the Cretaceous period, 1967 since the Conservatives won a by-election in Scotland, so Yes, it is a significant gain. They’ve put on 25 percentage points. They got just short of half the vote, 49½ percent. I think we could describe it as the sort of anti-net zero vote in Aberdeen. Clear run on energy policy as the decisive issue, but a good result. Not replicated in the other by-election, Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, where the SNP hung on.

Mark D’Arcy: This is a by-election that [00:02:00] was occasioned by Stephen Flynn, the former Westminster leader of the SNP MPs, deciding to move on to the Scottish Parliament, possibly intending to do a Burnham and challenge at some point for the leadership. So this is quite an interesting moment from a number of points of view. But for the Conservatives, it’s a rare glimpse of clear blue sky at a time when storm clouds have been rather gathering over them.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And as we’re going to come on to talk about Labour, just worth noting also that Labour came fourth in both seats.

Mark D’Arcy: Aberdeen South certainly is a seat that they used to hold, and I’m old enough to remember Dame Anne Begg being the Labour MP there for quite a long time. But Makerfield: Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election, and he won it very, very well indeed. Far better indeed than a lot of constituency-based opinion polls had suggested. There was a story running not long before that if he won, he would win basically because the right-wing vote was split between Reform and Rupert Lowe’s party, Restore, which seemed to be [00:03:00] polling, according to those polls at least, reasonably well in Makerfield. That did not come to pass. He took 55% of the vote in a seat where Reform had done pretty well historically. It was Reform’s sixth best seat at the last general election, sixth closest near miss anyway, behind Labour. And it was also a seat where they had all but swept the board in the local elections just back in May, and suddenly Andy Burnham comes in and he wins it so convincingly. And the political ramifications of that for Labour MPs eyeing a Reform challenge for their seats, this is where the herd instinct comes in, I think. Labour MPs look at him and think, he can beat Reform, can Keir Starmer?

Ruth Fox: Yes. Also just worth noting that the turnout was higher than the general election. Still not breaking through 60%, but you know, high turnout is a good thing, which we support and would like to see more of, but it was higher. So yes, if you’re Andy Burnham, this is probably as good a result as you could have hoped for. You got more than 50% of the vote on a higher turnout. Your victory was not as a result of the split on the [00:04:00] right. You know, you were clearly further forward than that. What happens next?

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed, what happens next? So, Phil, how do you think Labour MPs will be reading this result as they sit on the green benches next week?

Philip Cowley: So I think Makerfield was really interesting because it’s the nearest thing British politics has produced recently to a sort of medieval trial by combat. This was, you know, Andy Burnham was proving himself in this seat. He took a huge gamble, and it was a huge gamble. It’s probably not the seat he would have wanted to fight given actually just how strong Reform were there, that it could easily have gone wrong. It didn’t go wrong. He managed both to hold off the Reform challenge, and particularly squeeze other parties and get this very resounding victory. And you’ve got at Westminster 400 MPs very worried about their own seats. One of the things that I think is remarkable at the moment, given what happened in the local elections, I mean, normally you have, if the party’s doing badly in the polls, you have MPs in marginal seats worried about what’s going to happen in the next election, particularly worried about it. This time, almost all of them are worried about what could happen. [00:05:00] So you’ve got 400 very concerned MPs, it almost doesn’t matter what their majority is on paper, and looking for some sort of salvation, and along comes someone who seems to offer it. Now, I don’t actually think there’s an awful lot of logic behind that position. Just because a popular local mayor does well in an area for which he’s popular does not mean that will scale up. It does not mean that he will be popular as Prime Minister. Doesn’t mean he’ll be a good Prime Minister. But if you are a Labour MP worried about your seat, and for the last two years, bluntly, you’ve been looking at the polls very nervously and your local election results, suddenly someone comes along who seems to be able to win, and clearly who wants the top job at the same time, and I think there will be an awful lot of momentum behind Andy Burnham when Parliament resumes.

Mark D’Arcy: So how does he cash in on that momentum, this idea that if you touch the hem of his garment, your electoral threat will disappear? Or how does Andy Burnham come into Westminster? I mean, you can [00:06:00] imagine some choreography here where he stages a triumphant arrival at Westminster next week. He’s got a new media boss, Grace Pritchard, who used to work for Ed Miliband, who doubtless as we speak is orchestrating his triumphant arrival at St Stephen’s entrance and possibly contemplating the best moment for him to make a speech in the Chamber of the Commons not that long after.

Philip Cowley: Well, exactly. I mean, I think there are probably multiple moments, right? So we’ve already seen speeches in Makerfield. Then there’ll be, I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if they stick a helicopter up in the sky as his train or his car goes down to Westminster.

Mark D’Arcy: A drone at least.

Philip Cowley: But there will also be a St Stephen’s Entrance press conference, I suspect. There’ll be that first moment he enters the chamber, which he’s not just going to wander in on a whim. That will be chosen very carefully. Lots of hear-hearing. There won’t be, at least formally, a maiden speech, because he’s not entitled to one as a returning MP, but there will be presumably a first Burnham speech. With the caveat, however, that I suspect things could move very quickly over the next week, and some of this [00:07:00] choreography might depend on things that are going on behind the scenes. So for example, if it really becomes clear that Keir Starmer is intending to stay and fight in a leadership election – which Keir Starmer has said he is going to do, but which I think many people are thinking is just the sort of thing prime ministers say, and that actually when push comes to shove, it will be made quite clear to him that he’s going to lose and he’ll retire with what grace remains – the choreography of a contest will be very different to if Keir Starmer does privately let it be known that he’s going, at which point the pressure will be on to try to make sure that nobody else challenges Andy Burnham. Because the Burnham camp ideally, and I think quite a lot of Labour MPs, would like there to be effectively no contest.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, we can imagine if these things are not resolved in the next few days and we don’t get any clarity, I mean, Andy Burnham arrives in the House of Commons, he’s going to have to enter, bow to the chair. He’s going to have to be escorted to the Speaker’s table, past Keir Starmer on the front bench to [00:08:00] meet the Speaker, then head to the back benches. Interesting to see who sits around him and who’s the coterie of people there. Or the alternative is actually, you know, next week the Government starts to crumble from under Keir Starmer. I can’t imagine Andy Burnham taking up the front bench next week that quickly, but it could be fairly soon.

Philip Cowley: My view of this has long been actually that if Andy Burnham won in Makerfield, and this was before I thought he’d win as well as he did, if he won in Makerfield, there would be no contest. It would be sort of Burnham by acclaim. I mean, to shift from the metaphor of medieval tribal comment, it’d be like one of those sort of Greek myths of, you know, you stick your hand in the fiery furnace, and if you survive unscathed, you are a god. I mean, it’ll be a bit like that, right? And he doesn’t want a contest. There’ll be an awful lot of Labour MPs who don’t actually want a contest because it will go on for months. And there’ll be a real move to get Burnham by acclaim. And bluntly, I could see there being a new prime minister next week. I mean, I don’t think that would be that surprising. When these [00:09:00] things move, they move very quickly and there will be real pressure on people to get this over with as soon as possible.

Mark D’Arcy: Who are the key figures in this behind-the-scenes action? I imagine the Chief Whip, Jonathan Reynolds, would be there. I imagine Jessica Morden, the Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party. It’s the equivalent of the Conservative “men in grey suits” who visit the Prime Minister with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded revolver, as Graham Brady did so many times during his career in the last parliament to finish off Conservative leaders. So you may see that scenario being played out in a kind of Labour contest. I’m not quite sure though, is it “the men in polyester shirts”? I’m not quite sure what the metaphor would be.

Philip Cowley: The men with bad ties and cheap suits. I think that’s right. I mean, I think the Number 10 operation will be doing its own sort of head count. One of the things that I think often happens with leadership contests is we bring in eggheads from universities, and I’m not necessarily sure I count in this case, to explain the rules, to explain the formal rules. And often in leadership contests it’s not the rules that matter, it’s [00:10:00] about power. It’s pure power. If you go back and look at many of the leadership contests or defenestrations over the last 20 or 30 years, both in government and out of government, they’ve not been triggered by the rules, they’ve been a collapse of power. Under Boris Johnson, for example, the government literally disintegrating from under him. It wasn’t anything to do with the formal structure of the rules, it was that it was quite clear he could not... And that’s true in quite a lot of parties, and I think it will be true this time too, unless I am misreading the mood in the Parliamentary Labour Party, which is quite possible. But if I’m not, then I think what will happen is it will become quite clear to the Prime Minister, even if he wants to be stubborn and fight it, that he will struggle to form a government. There will be resignations from the Cabinet down. It will be made quite clear to him, look, if there’s a leadership contest, you will lose this leadership contest. I mean, almost all the opinion polls of Labour members, which we may come on to discuss in a minute because I’m slightly sceptical of them, but of all the polls of Labour members, I think bar one, they’ve shown that Andy Burnham would beat Keir Starmer in a head-to-head. [00:11:00] You know, the number of Labour MPs I suspect that are prepared to come out and nominate Andy Burnham would be way in excess of the 81 required.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, as you say, he might be gone very quickly, but perhaps Burnham might quite like a little bit of an interval to get himself organised before he moves in. You know, not measuring the drapes at Number 10, but getting the advisers in place and the machine around him. So maybe he and Sir Keir Starmer might organise some kind of measured departure timetable that’s weeks rather than months, but which gives everyone a chance to catch their breath.

Philip Cowley: Of all the outcomes, I think the single most likely is that at some point in the next week, Keir Starmer accepts reality. And there is then, as there was say for example with Theresa May, a sort of fairly structured process which would allow for a leadership contest, but which probably then doesn’t happen, but that gives a little bit of breathing space for Andy Burnham and then he becomes Prime Minister. That, to me seems the single most likely outcome of what’s going on. But saying that, with lots of other [00:12:00] potential outcomes floating around at the same time.

Ruth Fox: I have that dreadful phrase, “the first hundred days” in my mind, Mark, that if Andy Burnham is coming in, he’s going to want to make a big impression. He’s going to want to be very different in tone and announcements to what happened in the first hundred days of the Labour government back in the summer of 2024, where many people felt it all just fell apart in that early period. He’s going to want to make a very, very different impression on the country. And for that he needs to have a clear team and he needs to have a plan. And if he hasn’t got that yet, then he might just need a few weeks to prepare to orchestrate it. And frankly, you think about the last few weeks he’s had, campaigning is exhausting. Campaigning in this by-election must be absolutely really exhausting. So he just might need a little bit of time to recover and have an opportunity to make a good start.

Philip Cowley: Reality will bite and when it does, I suspect he will stand down.

Mark D’Arcy: So if Keir Starmer wanted to [00:13:00] fight on, he would automatically be on the ballot paper. He wouldn’t need 81 MPs to nominate him. If, on the other hand, Keir Starmer doesn’t go, either you get an Andy Burnham coronation or an alternative candidate would have to emerge and get themselves nominated. I’m old enough to remember Gordon Brown back in the day, succeeding Tony Blair, managing to get so many nominations that he crowded out the possibility of any other alternative being nominated. So what would happen, do you think, with Andy Burnham in that scenario? Would, Wes Streeting or I don’t know who, John Healey or someone else pop out the woodwork and try and, contest the leadership.

Philip Cowley: I mean, in one sense, because you need 81, which is 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party that provides 80% of other MPs who could easily nominate other candidates, it’s not that impossible to imagine. But I think the Burnham camp will try to do something very similar to Gordon Brown, either make it arithmetically impossible, or if not, at least just give the impression of this unstoppable momentum. At which point, if you think, if you are a sort of ambitious [00:14:00] MP, maybe you’ve got your doubt about Andy Burnham, but you’re pretty sure he is going to win. Are you the 81st person nominating Wes Streeting at that point, or do you suddenly decide that discretion is the better part of valour? It is really clear. Quite literally, just before coming on to do this discussion, I saw a quote from the Burnham team saying, it’s in nobody’s interest to have a contest. By which I took, it’s not in Andy’s interest to have a contest. There is, I think, a case for a leadership contest, and you can actually pray in aid Gordon Brown at this point. One of Gordon Brown’s problems when he came into office was he hadn’t really decided what he wanted to do and he hadn’t had to be tested in a contest and bluntly, if I was being critical of Andy Burnham, which so soon after such a tremendous by-election achievement seems a little bit unfair, but if I was being critical of Andy Burnham, I would say that his policy position is maybe somewhat vague in a few areas. And it would be maybe nice for the Labour Party, the country, to have a better [00:15:00] idea of what Andy Burnham stood for.

Mark D’Arcy: I think the one policy position he could take that would really put MPs off at the moment was the policy of having an election to gain him a fresh mandate, because that would mean quite a number of them not returning to Westminster quite soon. So giving off the idea that Andy Burnham would seek a new mandate immediately, is almost the one thing that he absolutely has to make clear.

Philip Cowley: But even, and this is an area which I know is of interest to all three of us, Andy Burnham is on record previously as saying he would get rid of party whips. He doesn’t think party whips are good, they’re not good for democracy, they should be scrapped. But is that still his position? That’s all well and good to say that when you are the Mayor of Manchester, it’s much tougher if you’re Prime Minister. Are you really going to try and run a government without whip? Because I bet you aren’t. And it’ll be quite nice to know the answer to some of these questions. So I understand from the perspective of the Labour Party, there will be a desire to get this over and done with as quickly as possible, but actually maybe, from the perspective of the country knowing a bit more about this man who has come back to Westminster, from the way he presents it some distant land miles [00:16:00] away from the rest of us, it would be nice to know what he stood for.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And it’s critical questions that have been raised in the last few weeks, isn’t it? Where does he stand on defence spending, for example, and what are the implications for that in terms of therefore welfare spending or tax rises? We just don’t know. Going back to your point about his fantastical rise, I do find it just very strange that there are 400 MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party, it is a huge number, and yet nobody within that group seems to think that any of them have either the skills or the political nous or the communication skills or the strategy or the policy commitments necessary to be Prime Minister. And they’re reaching to the far north of Manchester to pull Andy Burnham back to Westminster, a place he has, as you say, he has decried. My criticism of Keir Starmer is that he’s so critical of Westminster and yet does very little to engage with it or to change it. And as you say, Andy [00:17:00] Burnham has been critical of the culture of Westminster and has spoken of it being a freeing exercise when he left 10 years ago and went to be mayor and he was free of the Westminster bubble in the Westminster culture. And we are no nearer knowing after this by-election what it is that he might do. It’s not quite a blank sheet, but it’s not far off.

Philip Cowley: No, I think that’s right. And it might be that, over the next couple of weeks, some of this, if they go through a process of trying to pry Keir Starmer’s hands off the Downing Street door as he clings on, maybe some of this will become clearer. But at the moment there is no policy programme. There was a reference the other day to accepting the broad direction of the last Labour manifesto, that you couldn’t shift away from that too much. But as, Mark said, even on questions like, is there going to be an election any time soon, it would be nice to know the answer.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed. And inextricably intertwined with all this is the question of personnel. Because you then get on to people thinking to [00:18:00] themselves, aha, who’s Andy Burnham’s Chancellor going to be? Is he really going to continue with Rachel Reeves? If not, who’s an alternative Chancellor? How about John Healey, experienced former minister, but then you’d have to probably accept that his departing shot as Defence Secretary, that you need to provide an awful lot more money for defence, and he as Chancellor would then be the person trying to find that. Do you look for a change in the net zero policy? Can you keep Ed Miliband on board if you do that? There are all sorts of questions and factions intertwined in all those questions the incoming leader would then have to address.

Philip Cowley: Yes. And, even lower down the food chain, of course, you’ve also got, and it’s one of the problems of having such a huge parliamentary party, you’ve got those members of the 2024 intake in particular who’ve so far found no advancement of the ministerial ladder and have maybe begun to think this isn’t going to happen for them under Keir Starmer who are suddenly hopeful that a new leader comes in and their talents will be…

Mark D’Arcy: Some of the old stagers, Meg Hillier, people like that, as well, people who’ve been [00:19:00] around for a very long time who somehow found themselves out.

Philip Cowley: And indeed some people who at times have been thorns in Keir’s side over the last two years. So absolutely, there’s all sorts of personnel issues within Westminster. In the very short term, the role of the MP here is that they are effectively the single most important gatekeeper as to whether there is a challenge and who can get to stand. And that’s a role which although the leadership contest itself is now broader, it is almost entirely, I mean it’s not just the 81 MPs, but they are the primary gatekeeper and that is the key question for our MPs I think over the next couple of days.

Mark D’Arcy: But just supposing we get on to the unlikely scenario from your point of view, which is that there is an actual leadership contest and it’s Sir Keir Starmer versus Andy Burnham. First of all, you’ve got the very unusual position of a group outside Parliament deciding whether the existing Prime Minister continues in office. And secondly, you’ve got a situation where Labour’s very individual, shall we [00:20:00] say, electoral system comes into play. And it’s not just the members, it’s affiliated organisations, it’s hustings stretching through the summer, it’s a result being announced at the party conference. So how do you think that plays out?

Philip Cowley: I think that’s a really good point because although we have had leadership contests for prime ministers before, and indeed we’ve had leadership contests where the party membership have been involved in the contest, that has only happened so far in the Conservative Party. And in the Conservative Party the decision about whether the incumbent stays or goes is taken purely by MPs and I think it has two consequences actually. One of them is, as you say, this is now the first time that people outside of Westminster, apart from a general election, but within the party are deciding whether this person stays or goes. And once the contest is triggered, the majority of votes are not MPs’. So the decision overwhelmingly rests with party members and members of the affiliated organisations. The second thing that’s interesting about this and will be novel is the duration of that [00:21:00] contest. So if you think back to those Tory contests or indeed the previous contest, like Margaret Thatcher in ’89 or ’90 or John Major in ’94, they were pretty short. They were pretty brutal, but they were pretty short. This would be a two-month, the timetable is decided by the NEC, but a sort two-month process in which the incumbent Prime Minister is desperately trying to fight to hang on.

Mark D’Arcy: Presumably attending hustings and having to debate.

Philip Cowley: And presumably going to hustings and all sorts of things. I just think it a brilliant, quite strange event, the likes of which we will not have sought. The second thing that is different, and this is mostly overlooked about Labour’s leadership rules, is that in the Conservative Party, it is Conservative Party members who then have the final say. In the Labour Party, it is Labour Party members and members of the affiliated organisations that have paid the political levy, mostly union members who paid the political levy. And there are far more of the latter than there are the former, we don’t know the exact numbers, but there were just shy of a million people who had the chance to [00:22:00] vote in the deputy leadership contest last year. And we think Labour Party membership is about 250,000. So about three quarters of the people who will then be making the decision about whether the Prime Minister stays in office and who the next one is, if there is a contest, are not actually Labour Party members. Now, it is normally said, and it is correct to say, that these people [a] don’t usually turn out in great numbers, so they probably don’t affect many results, and [b] when they do vote, they seem to vote largely as Labour Party members would. But not always. And that was not true of Ed and David Milliband, for example, where the affiliated members voted differently to the party members, and [b] whilst they normally turn out in relatively small numbers, that could be because previously they’ve never had the chance to vote for the Prime Minister. This time, for the first time you will have an electorate of about a million people choosing if he stays, the term fights it, whether the Prime Minister stay in office, and then choosing who replaces him.

Mark D’Arcy: You’d imagine the unions and other affiliated [00:23:00] organisations would be very keen to get their members to make sure they voted.

Philip Cowley: And data protection rules prevent the information about these people being handed directly to the party and the candidates. So the only people that are able to communicate with these affiliated members are members of the union. So the union sends out stuff and in some cases bluntly makes it quite clear who they want, affiliated members, and it makes it quite clear who they want them to vote for. We also know almost nothing about them because they’re not polled. Most of these polls that you see, which say Andy Burnham will beat Keir Starmer in a contest, don’t poll affiliated members because they’re very difficult to reach. One or two of them have a derisory number included, but very small. And I think this is the bit of the contest, which, if it comes to it, and I don’t think it will, but if it comes to it, it could be really quite interesting because it’s perfectly plausible that these people are not ideological soulmates of Labour Party members at all.

Ruth Fox: Whether there is a contest comes down to the stubbornness of Keir Starmer as to whether he’s [00:24:00] absolutely determined no matter what to fight on and whether or not he can keep enough ministers on board to sustain at least the appearance of a functioning government for the period of time during the contest. Both of which are big questions. But as I recall, Phil, when you were on the podcast last, I think it was shortly after, or it might have been during, the general election campaign, you were saying about Keir Starmer, you described him as the Robert Redford of politics, which was a quite extraordinary claim. And that was because he’d had such a successful political life and that almost nobody had ever said no to him. It’s turned out rather differently in office, hasn’t it?

Philip Cowley: Yes, I think from my memory of that conversation, the point I was making was that he wasn’t actually very good at engaging in arguments because he’d had this sort of gilded career and reached the top quite so quickly. And I do think actually a lot of the last two years have [00:25:00] demonstrated that one of his weaknesses, weirdly for a former barrister, was his inability to argue and construct political arguments that would carry people through. I suppose if we’re carrying on with the Robert Redford analogy, I think it is Robert Redford who’s in, is it Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid?

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Philip Cowley: Isn’t that the one where they all get gunned down at the end in a blaze of glory?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I mean there are several scenarios here, aren’t there? They’re not quite sure which one will apply. Back in the eighties there was the Margaret Thatcher scenario where she sat down individually with Cabinet members and one by one they told her that it was time to go and the game was up for her. And so she duly announced, having said, I fight on, I fight to win, she duly announced that she wasn’t going to contest a further ballot for the Tory leadership. A bit later on we get the Theresa May scenario where she realises off her own bat that the game’s up and she simply can’t make her government work anymore and announces an orderly timetable for her departure. And then there’s the Boris Johnson scenario where he kept fighting on, he dug in his heels, he wasn’t going to go. There were operations save Big Dog to try and keep him in office. And his government essentially [00:26:00] disintegrated under him. He couldn’t find ministers to serve. They kept resigning. Nadhim Zahawi was his chancellor for less than 48 hours before resigning because he couldn’t make it work. So you have all those different scenarios. Which one do you think you might see with Keir Starmer? Maybe another one that we haven’t thought of?

Philip Cowley: I suspect you might see something that is pretty close to all three of them combined. You may not get to the point of people actually resigning en masse, but I think they will make it clear they are going to resign in large enough numbers to go. And actually with all three of those, although they are very different in some way, they are also good examples of the point I was trying to make earlier, which is that the formal rules had nothing to do with this, right? Margaret Thatcher won that first round of the contest. We don’t know what would’ve happened in the second round of the contest. She didn’t lose, she accepted political reality and went out. And again, I’m old enough to remember this, back in the nineties before the first volume of her memoirs came out, there was at some point a rumour that it was going to be called “Undefeated” on the basis that she wasn’t [00:27:00] even. She didn’t go down that route in the end, not quite, that being glorious, but there was a story that it was going to be called “Undefeated” on the grounds that she never was actually defeated. And political reality just kicks in the end. I still think that is what’s going to happen here. Keir Starmer I don’t think has the political authority to fight for two months with ministers resigning all over the place. There’s a sort of linked point, but one that I think is really interesting. The local elections, which triggered all of this, nothing happened in those local elections that was not blindingly obvious in the opinion polls leading up to those local elections or indeed in the local by-elections leading up to those local elections. And if anything, you can argue Labour actually did slightly better in those local elections than they might have done based on some of the polling evidence. They were still catastrophic, but maybe not quite as catastrophic as was imagined. Yet, as soon as those local elections actually happened, as soon as the sort of reality of those elections kicked in, Keir Starmer’s authority drained. And we know that because before [00:28:00] the local elections, he was able to block Andy Burnham from standing in a by-election, and after the local elections he was not, he just didn’t have the authority to do it any more. And I think that the idea that he’s going to be able to run on for two months fighting a leadership election with his government disintegrating all around him is just for the birds.

Ruth Fox: There’s two elements here, isn’t there? There’s the premiership and there’s Labour leadership. So if Andy Burnham is able to take over as Prime Minister in the next couple of weeks, he doesn’t actually need to be Labour leader necessarily. Keir Starmer decides to go, he goes to the Palace and advises the King that the person who should be appointed in his place is Andy Burnham. But what happens in relation to the Labour leadership?

Philip Cowley: I suppose it is constitutionally possible, not least if Keir, someone was wanting to be really grumpy and unhelpful, to do these things in such a way that the timetables didn’t mesh. And you are right. Keir Starmer [00:29:00] could go tomorrow, right before the Labour Party has had the chance to formally resolve anything, and say, I think you should call on this, guy. technically I suppose you could recommend somebody else, but in practice that would even be even more of a sort of left field move of one, which I’m not sure we should put out there as an idea, because I think it could be so messy that, let’s not go there. But yes, it would technically be possible for him to go to the Palace and recommend someone who’s not actually Labour Party leader yet. And then leave. But then at that point, the Labour Party would just catch up, I think eventually. So I don’t think it will be a huge problem. It is of course possible for the Prime Minister not to be the leader of the party, that would also be possible. Actually I suspect because the timetable is resolved by the NEC, if it was like really clear that it was going to be Andy Burnham, they could do it very quickly.

Mark D’Arcy: Of course, while this is going on, the rest of the world doesn’t stop. The British Prime Minister, whoever it is, has to attend a NATO summit. There are other summits to go [00:30:00] to, the EU Summit that they might be in attendance at. There are Estimates to vote on the floor of the House of Commons, billions and billions of government expenditure to be ratified by MPs at a moment when it might not be clear quite who the government actually is. So there are all sorts of things going on in the background. That’s leaving aside all the issues of war in peace in the Gulf and Ukraine, that might suddenly need to have the full attention of a British Prime Minister.

Philip Cowley: Those are other reasons why I think there will be an awful lot of pressure to avoid a contest and get this resolved as quickly as possible.

Ruth Fox: And can I ask you, Phil, because you are the doyen of looking at backbench rebellions in Parliament. It seems to me that one of the key questions for Andy Burnham is how does he manage the parliamentary party and do it better than Keir Starmer has managed to, if he’s indeed taking over? Because it’s pretty fractious. He’ll enjoy a honeymoon period, no doubt. But he’s going to have to face these same difficult decisions that are going to create problems and [00:31:00] divisions within the parliamentary party. So when you start to think about what that looks like and who are the kind of characters, the skill sets that are needed to, for example, be Chief Whip, I mean we know Jonathan Reynolds hasn’t enjoyed being Chief Whip, didn’t want to be Chief Whip. There was a view that he’s got a very inexperienced whips office. Andy Burnham’s, really, it’s a key appointment that he needs to think about that quite differently, I think.

Philip Cowley: Will Andy Burnham enjoy a honeymoon with the PLP? Maybe, although I have to say previous experience of when a Prime Minister has changed midterm is that honeymoon can be pretty short lived.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Ask Major.

Philip Cowley: Gordon Brown’s first rebellion happened before he even got back from the Palace. So I’m not sure to be. And because we are two years in, and two years in which backbenchers have learned they can exercise authority, they’re not just going to shut up and go back in the box. I also don’t think you can try, it runs counter to his philosophy, at least as his express philosophy, as we said [00:32:00] earlier of getting rid of the whips, you can’t just try the discipline tactics either. Those worked a little bit at the beginning of this Parliament, again with very inexperienced MPs, but they’re not going to work any more. You’ve also got the problem that there will be all sorts of personnel changes associated with this government. And that will create a couple of groups of malcontent MPs. There’ll be those who are currently in office who then end up on the backbenches and who know where the bodies are buried, and know some of the issues and the problems. And they’ll be bitter, particularly if they’ve been sacked by him. There will be those who are currently not promoted and hope they’re going to be promoted and then still aren’t promoted, and then suddenly they realise they really are stuck on the backbenches forever. And across all of that, I think there’s going to be a third group, which is, if the Burnham electoral magic, which he demonstrated in Makerfield, doesn’t translate across the country, then the fundamental thing that has spooked a lot of Labour MPs, which is they’re about to lose their seats, that will kick in very [00:33:00] quickly. Even if there’s a small electoral honeymoon, if it fades quickly and Reform carry on doing reasonably well, that will also cause problems. The counter argument, which I think is worth saying, is that the PLP has been difficult at times over the last two years, it’s dug its heels in on other things, but I don’t think it’s unleadable. I do think part of the problem sometimes has been that the political direction from the government has not been well thought through, or very coherent at times. I don’t think Labour MPs, it’s not like you’ve got 400 members of the Campaign Group there. Most of them are still willing to take difficult decisions if they think those difficult decisions have a real justification if they can justify them to themselves and their constituents. With a bit of leadership from Number 10, I suspect things weren’t maybe quite as bad as they’ve been. But certainly if you got into any half serious spending cuts on things like welfare, you have exactly the same problems that you had.

Ruth Fox: One, of course, [00:34:00] of the consequences, Mark, for Parliament or for the House of Commons specifically of all of this, is going to be more churn on, for example, select committees. We could see select committee chairs perhaps elevated to ministerial office. We could see people possibly coming out of ministerial office and then trying to get themselves select committee chairs, possibly their own departments or others. Again, it’s just another really frustrating period for Parliament and for the Commons in terms of continuity and sort of development of a sense of collegiality on a committee and as pursuing its objectives

Mark D’Arcy: “Events., dear boy, events.” Phil, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and I on the pod.

Philip Cowley: Thanks for having me.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Phil.

Mark D’Arcy: And with that, Ruth, let’s take a quick break.

And we are back. And Ruth, it may not be very high in Andy Burnham’s in tray, but there is quite an interesting crop of private members’ bills both in the Commons and in the Lords now on the table fed into the private members’ bill system. Not least among them, of course, the second coming of the assisted dying bill.[00:35:00]

Ruth Fox: Yes. Lauren Edwards, the Labour MP who came second in the ballot, has as expected brought forward the Terminally Ill Adults [End of Life] Bill again.

Mark D’Arcy: In exactly the same form as it left the House of Commons the last time around.

Ruth Fox: Yes, apparently. So this essentially is Kim Leadbeater’s bill as it left the Commons after third reading. It’s the same bill.

Mark D’Arcy: The significance of that is that it’s Parliament-Actable. If the Commons passes that Bill unamended and the Lords then either filibusters it again or amends it, then it can automatically become law without further reference to their Lordships.

Ruth Fox: It could. There’s a long way to go before we get to that. And I think, it is probably worth Mark thinking about the early hurdles. The first hurdle I think is the government. Actually, if it is going to be an Andy Burnham government, big question mark at this point, but, that looks like the direction of travel. If it is, is he going to want this to get on to the statute book? Is he going to want to have months and months of this, let’s face it, fairly toxic debate, [00:36:00] creating disunity in the Labour parliamentary party? Because you certainly see when you look at the sort of social media posts and the media commentary around this, even just the last few days.

Mark D’Arcy: The temperature goes up.

Ruth Fox: Yes, absolutely. So he may well want to kick it to a Royal Commission or some kind of inquiry that can look in detail at it and persuade MPs that’s a better approach for this moment. But if not, she will have her second reading of the bill on Friday 11 September.

Mark D’Arcy: And interestingly, there was a Petitions Committee debate a little while ago now, in which Sir Alan Campbell, the Leader of the House, was a lot less enthused by the prospect of a second run through of this issue than perhaps others in the government might have been earlier on. Because we don’t know whether Sir Alan will even be the Leader of the House, if there’s, for example, an Andy Burnham government in, all the personnel may change. There may be a different Health Secretary. There may be a different Justice Secretary. Who knows? But at the moment, at least if he’s in charge, he doesn’t sound as if he’s [00:37:00] minded to give the kind of procedural leg up to the bill that Kim Leadbeater received, so finding extra time, making sure the bill wasn’t interfered with by other bills.

Ruth Fox: Yes. This debate took place earlier this month, I think it was 8 June. And my impression, what I took away from the debate, was that he was trying to pour a bit of a bucket of cold water over this and possibly try and put off any Labour MPs in the ballot or indeed any MP in the ballot from bringing the bill back. But obviously he hasn’t persuaded Lauren Edwards of that because he said lessons need to be learned about how we take public opinion with us and build consensus, which as we have heard, takes time. But he also acknowledged that where the Lord’s behave as they have in overriding the elected house, if they’re considered to be preventing legislation from completing all its stages, he said pressure builds to revisit those rules and conventions.

Mark D’Arcy: And that was quite an interesting remark. I think one of the things to remember about Sir Alan was that he was Chief Whip during the first phase of Kim Leadbeater’s bill [00:38:00] and would’ve been exactly the person who saw the tensions it created amongst Labour MPs in the House of Commons. And I think that informs a lot of what he said here. He’s looking at this very much from the perspective of a party manager, and thinking, do we really want to go there again? Now they are going there again. One of the differences though this time is that, Lauren Edward’s bill is second in line. It’s not the first bill. The first bill is actually one presented by the Conservative Sir Desmond Swayne.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So that’s the Infants, Parents and Carers Bill. And it will have its second reading the week, before Lauren Edwards’. So it’ll be 4 September. So when Parliament comes back after the summer recess, now we don’t have a lot of detail. The bills, they were introduced to the House this week, so we really only have the short titles of these. But on the order paper, there was a little bit of detail about some of them. And for his bill it said it would make provision about support for infants, parents, and carers of infants, and prospective [00:39:00] parents and carers, including provision relating to assessment of needs and to reporting requirements relating to such support. Now my reading of that is, this is about the thousand days agenda that Andrea Leadsom, particularly in previous parliaments, was a big leader of this idea of supporting babies and infants in their early days as a way of giving them the best start in life potentially. Depending upon what Sir Desmond has in mind here, there may be some quite significant financial implications. And if there are, the government then is on the hook for the price of that and would have to provide the bill with a money resolution.

Mark D’Arcy: And would it do? And this is where you get into quite complicated areas for governments. Do they really want backbench MPs from opposition parties setting policy agendas for them by legislation? Most governments don’t like that. So you can see a government thinking, do we want to stop this? Now, this is very much in the motherhood and apple pie category of [00:40:00] a lot of things an awful lot of Labour MPs would actually agree with. But do they want it necessarily being done in this way, in a way that perhaps a government can’t control, especially when there might be quite runaway cost implications involved in this? And it’s typical, a sort of argument that you get in government is, if you start identifying needs, you then have to meet them. And it might be rather pricey, Minister.

Ruth Fox: Yes. He will get a debate, he will get an opportunity for a vote and we’ll see what happens. I think from the perspective of the assisted dying bill, the following week, an interesting question is what happens immediately after Sir Desmond Swayne’s Bill is considered on that first sitting Friday, on 4 September.

Mark D’Arcy: Because there’ll be other bills on the agenda that the House may well get to. And pass possibly.

Ruth Fox: Yes, there are two, and I think they’re interesting for different reasons. So the bill from Lincoln Jopp, again, a Conservative MP who came 10th in the ballot and who [00:41:00] is against, he voted against assisted dying. His bill is about Northern Ireland Troubles [Criminal Investigations etc] Bill, that’s the title. So essentially he wants to require the Secretary of State to publish proposals relating to the circumstances in which new criminal investigations, prosecutions, inquests, or inquiries in respect of troubles-related conduct carried out in Northern Ireland may be commenced.

Mark D’Arcy: Now, this of course, is the issue which the former armed forces Minister All Carns spoke about in his very powerful resignation statement earlier this week about the prosecutions for historic offences of British army personnel who may have been serving in Northern Ireland in the early seventies as compared to the fact that a lot of IRA bombers got off scot-free as a result of the Good Friday Agreement.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And there’s legislation going through the House at the moment, carried over from the last session, in relation to this. And this is one of the things that Al Carns was concerned about, that he was basically saying that he had expressed serious reservations [00:42:00] and concerns about the legislation and its implications in government. And he’s now speaking out publicly outside government on it. So we’ll have to see. But one imagines that the government’s position on that is against, they would be opposed to it and therefore a whip will be standing up to oppose it, to prevent it being waived through second reading and onto committee.

Mark D’Arcy: Another possible way of dealing with it is for a government minister to get up and give an assurance that such a statement would be published and you don’t really need a full dress bill going through all its stages in the Commons and then the Lords to achieve that aim. So were a minister to stand up and give acceptable assurances to Mr Jopp, that might be it.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We’ll see. There’s another bill then that same day. And this is one from the Liberal Democrat MP Munira Wilson, who’s also against the assisted dying bill when it was put to a vote last session. Her bill is called Child-like Sexual Abuse Dolls [Offences] Bill. And this is to make certain acts involving child-like sexual abuse dolls [00:43:00] an offence, to make provision for the seizure and forfeiture of such items. Now that’s a very difficult bill I would’ve thought for the Government to stand up and oppose. And interestingly, three of the signatures on her bill worth thinking about Alex Davies-Jones and Jess Phillips, who both, if you remember, resigned from the Government a few weeks ago in the aftermath of the local devolved election results. Jess Phillips, of course, longtime campaigner and minister concerned about abuse of women. Alex Davies-Jones, also in the Ministry of Justice, dealing with those issues. And she herself has spoken out about wanting more and quicker action on these things. So a pretty tricky Bill I think to stand up and oppose again.

Mark D’Arcy: It might be one as you say, where a Minister could get up and say, we’re going to build this into the next criminal justice bill. So at that point the Minister might ask them to just withdraw and they will get their policy objectives quite soon.

Ruth Fox: On the other hand, depending upon where we are and who knows [00:44:00] what’s happening in government, and it could be fairly chaotic at that point, if there is a contest and this is going to Labour Party conference, we might not have clarity. And quite understandably the MP who’s got this opportunity in the ballot might not be willing to give way.

Mark D’Arcy: Absolutely, you may be being invited to buy a pig in a poke there. So potentially you’ve got a situation where there could be three bills in committee by the end. It seems unlikely to me. But you could have a situation where there are three bills in committee, and they would all have priority because they were passed on the first day through second reading. They would then all have priority and then have to be dealt with in committee before the assisted dying bill could be considered, assuming it was to clear Second Reading itself and second sitting private-member’s-bill Friday. This is all sounding impossibly techy, I know, but the rules really matter here and the rules create all sorts of trip wires. So just imagine that happened. You have three different committees that all had to sit in succession, because you normally only have one private member’s bill committee at a time. So would you find that opponents of [00:45:00] assisted dying suddenly developed an intense interest in the first thousand days of a child’s life and started putting in lots of constructive amendments? Most private member’s bill committees have just one sitting. The assisted dying bill committee I think had 23 or something like that. But just suppose you managed to spin out the bill committee on Desmond Swayne’s bill for two, three, four days. And then you have a couple of days where people are talking about Northern Ireland criminal liability for ex-service personnel. And then after that everybody develops a sudden interest in sharpening the exact law on child sex dolls [yuck]. But maybe there’s a long discussion of that and so it’s quite a long time before the assisted dying bill could get into committee even if it were passed. So that’s one potential way that you could game the system to get in the way of the assisted dying bill, because it’s not this time in the commanding heights of the system. It’s not the first bill up, getting automatic priorities straight through.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think it’s probably unlikely. I think the campaigners and people in favour of the assisted [00:46:00] dying bill will be working out their tactics and strategy and it’s fairly straightforward to object to bills behind the first Friday sitting bill for second reading, to object to them and knock them out. But you’ve got to deal with the politics that flows from that. I still think the biggest issue is probably Sir Desmond Swayne’s bill taking up quite a bit of committee time, and he is anti the assisted dying bill, so he’s probably not got that much interest in speeding things up. If you remember, in the last session, a number of people who had got private members bills, there was a degree of orchestration going on because they also supported the assisted dying bill and they held back from pressing their bill to the next stages. So Desmond may not be so inclined and he’s a stubborn character, he’s not going to be easily moved or pressured.

Mark D’Arcy: Not easily orchestratable, you might say. And another figure to watch in all this is the veteran killer of private members’ bills, Sir Christopher Chope, who normally pops up on a Friday to denounce any given private member’s bill as vexatious flabby nonsense that shouldn’t waste the time [00:47:00] of the House. And he’ll try and talk it out as an exercise in, if you like, debarnacling the Ship of State. You don’t want all these annoying laws that just impose annoying reporting requirements or whatever. And he’s got form on that, but I suspect he’s very much against this assisted dying bill as well. And so perhaps he might decide to sit this one out and let those bills through in the cause of perhaps delaying the progress of the assisted dying bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and I think the politics around the assisted dying bill have changed because last time it got a clear second reading vote, but obviously by third reading the numbers had declined to, what was it, 20 odd. This time we don’t know what the position of the House is going to be. Is that majority still there or has it dissipated?

Mark D’Arcy: It’s been quite a racking toxic debate to get into and especially on social media, it’s been quite an uncomfortable place for proponents of either side of the argument. So it may be that a lot of Labour MPs would be quite attracted by the idea that maybe the sensible thing to do is kick the issue over to a [00:48:00] Royal Commission that can come up with a bill that isn’t this bill, but might be more acceptable or might square off the Royal Colleges of Physicians and other interested organisations who at the moment are very sceptical about the Kim Leadbeater bill.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think more than sceptical in some cases.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose.

Ruth Fox: And I think that one of the problems that proponents of the bill have got is reconciling what they’re doing with the fact that the professionals are going to have to deliver this. They’ve clearly got significant concerns, so we’ll have to see whether that holds up. There will be some who think on a matter of constitutional importance that we shouldn’t give way to the position that the Lords have adopted, and actually the elected House of Commons should have its way. But there’ll be others who will have listened to what’s been said in the Lords and actually will have reservations. It will all happen on 11 September.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed. And there are actually some other interesting bills a little further down the batting order, which I do hope that the House of Commons managers get to and aren’t squeezed out by ginormous debates about the assisted dying bill taking up all the time. In particular, [00:49:00] my eye was caught by Sir John Whittingdale, a former Culture Secretary, former chair of the Culture Select Committee, who has a bill on SLAPPs: Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. This is the practice of very rich people using expensive long drawn-out lawsuits to shut down criticism of them: any journalist who says certain things about me will be basically fighting for their financial life because I will have expensive lawyers on their tail. So that practice is something that there have been several attempts to clamp down on legally. And so John is now doing this and in the House of Lords as a parallel bill by the former leader of the House, Tina Stowell, Baroness Stowell. So there are two quite significant influential figures pushing the same bill through both Houses. So it ought to have a fairly decent chance perhaps of getting through, if the Government is prepared to let it.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And that’s the question, isn’t it? So John came sixth in the ballot. So again, he’ll be guaranteed first on the order paper on the sitting Friday he [00:50:00] selected, which is 27 November. So that’s D-Day for SLAPPs, that’s the critical moment. And if you remember Mark, we actually went to Parliament, didn’t we, to talk to Sir Wayne David in the dying days of the last Parliament.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, was his bill going to survive the process, which of course it didn’t.

Ruth Fox: It didn’t. So he was pursuing this. I don’t know whether Sir John’s, or indeed Baroness Stowell’s bill is exactly the same as Wayne David’s or not. It hasn’t been published, so we’ll see. But perhaps we’ll try and get Sir John on to talk about it.

Mark D’Arcy: He’d be a very interesting man to talk about. Sir John is an absolutely veteran, highly experienced politician who cut his political teeth as one of Margaret Thatcher’s private secretaries back in the day. So he’s been round the block a few times. And if anybody can get a bill like this through, I suspect he might be one. And in his days as a select committee chair, he learned, if you like, the consensual arts that maybe you don’t pick up in Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street. But the idea of being able to get people from other parties on side is something that you have to do to survive as a select committee chair. And he did.

Ruth Fox: Yes. [00:51:00] Any others that took your, eye in the list? Andrew George’s housing bill.

Mark D’Arcy: Andrew George has form on these kind of issues, because they’re a big deal in his Cornish constituency. And he tried to get a private member’s bill on housing benefit through during the Coalition years and was stymied by one of the great traps that the Government might indeed use on some of these other bills, which is not moving a money motion for them. So it’s actually more the mover than the bill, actually, that caught my eye on that one.

Ruth Fox: We should explain that if a bill gets through second reading, but the government doesn’t give it a money motion, a money resolution, essentially public bill committee is stymied, stalled. They can meet in public bill committee and they can complain about the fact the government hasn’t provided a money resolution, but they can’t actually start the clause by clause consideration.

Mark D’Arcy: The chair solemnly announces that in the absence of a money resolution, they’re unable to commence proceedings on the scrutiny of the bill. And so they sit there and have a whinge and then all go home.

Ruth Fox: Yes. It is again the most ineffectual use of time of an MPs time, [00:52:00] and all the staff, but there we are. So I think that seems to me a campaigning type bill. It’s where he can make some very big points about the housing situation. But whether it actually proceeds, I think, is probably highly unlikely given the scale of it. The seventh in the ballot, so again guaranteed a second reading on 4 December, a bill from Jessica Toale about domestic abuse protection orders. Just even on the title, a very difficult sort of bill for the government to be objecting to.

Mark D’Arcy: May even potentially be a handout bill, something the government wanted to get through. Yes. So watch this space on that one. We don’t know the content of it, but sometimes the government does have pieces of micro legislation that somehow hadn’t made it into one of their own bills that they like to try and get through, through the private member’s bill process instead as an alternative.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So we haven’t seen the actual text of the bills or any sort of accompanying documentation. We can’t tell from outside the process yet. Only when we actually see the bills we’ll be probably able to work that out. Again, some other interesting, quite niche, but [00:53:00] genuinely important pieces of legislation, Emergency and Life-saving Skills [Schools] Bill from Neil Shastri-Hurst, the Conservative. One though, that has taken my attention and it goes back, we should have mentioned this actually, Mark, in relation to the assisted dying bill. It’s actually 19th in the ballot, but I do wonder if it might take on more importance than that might suggest, and that’s a bill from Paul Foster, the Labour MP, for hospice funding. So this is a bill to require the Secretary of State to publish proposals relating to the funding by integrated care boards of medicines and pharmacy services for patients in hospices. So you can see, the whole debate about palliative care and about the funding of hospice care across the country has been a part of the debate about assisted dying.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. The feeling that people are forced into choosing assisted dying because there isn’t proper palliative care there to do pain management for them in the last phase of their life.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So one could see how, the government perhaps [00:54:00] indicating some more support for that, whilst alongside saying we will deal with assisted dying through a different route rather than the private member’s bill procedure, might be a way of reducing the temperature and the toxicity of this debate. Getting some genuine changes and improvements in palliative care. And being able to say to people like Kim Leadbeater and Lauren Edwards, look, you’ve moved the debate on. And there have been some genuine changes as a result of what you’ve done, but we need to tackle this in a different way. We will see.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s one issue that you might have to keep an eye on for what I call the trap door. There is a weird little provision in the private member’s bill process where bills that haven’t been debated on a given day but are on the list, have their titles read out as bills that hadn’t been considered, but were still on the order paper at the end of the day at 2.30 on a Friday, a long list of bill titles is read out and normally a Government Whip gets up and says “Object!” or someone else gets up and says, “Object!” if it’s not a Government Whip. [00:55:00] If that magic word is not uttered, a bill is deemed to have received a formal second reading and can go into public bill committee. It is given a second reading almost by magic, without actually being debated at all. And that’s a way that you can get all sorts of little measures through if you are so minded and if no one else is beady-eyed and bloody-minded enough to try and stop it. Christopher Chope used to be a great one for objecting to bills on the basis that there ought to be some kind of debate before they get a second reading, which is a not unreasonable point. So watch that particular space, it’s very rare for that to happen. But it does. The bill to try and exempt MPs’ expenses from the freedom of information legislation way back, best part of 20 years ago now, was smuggled through into public bill committee by exactly that means. And the reason that’s burned in my memory was I was doing “Today in Parliament” that day and I missed the fact that magic word object hadn’t been there. And it was a story, and I hadn’t covered it. What, oh dear. How we all laughed.

Ruth Fox: We [00:56:00] mentioned Baroness Stowell’s Bill for SLAPPs. It’s worth actually just noting that the private members’ bills, the first 25 for the House of Lords, have been agreed. And top of that list is Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town, Dianne Hayter, Labour peer. And she’s pursuing a bill on Lobbying Transparency [In-house Lobbyists] Bill. Now, I ran into Dianne last week as I was sitting in the Lord’s committee corridor waiting to go into the select committee to give evidence on the dynamic alignment.

Mark D’Arcy: As you do so often.

Ruth Fox: Yes, far too often sometimes, sitting there nervously waiting, thinking, what are their Lordships going to ask me? And Dianne happened to be just coming down the corridor and we had a very brief discussion about this. So I think we should try and get Baroness Hayter on to the podcast to talk about that as well. What is she trying to achieve with that, in terms of the in-house lobbyists and how that relates to what’s happening in the House of Lords? Because there’s a Transparency International report out suggesting that the number of [00:57:00] peers who are doing kind of lobbying, in-house lobbying for organisations, is a growing problem.

Mark D’Arcy: And sometimes I ask myself, what is the point of the House of Lords private member’s bill process? Because House of Lords private member’s bills almost never become law. There is nothing that says that a bill that’s gone all the way through its stages in the House of Lords gets any consideration at all in the House of Commons. But it does have this use of teeing up issues. And on assisted dying, for example, I think Lord Joffe of blessed memory and then Lord Falconer had several attempts to provide a mechanism for legalising assisted dying in the past, before the Kim Leadbeater Bill came along. So there were several run throughs of that issue. And this may be a good example of using the private member’s bill process in the Lords just to highlight something and provide a possible legislative mechanism for dealing with it, even though, as you say, it’s probably not very likely to become actual law.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Of course my old boss, Lord Grocott, Bruce Grocott, he had numerous attempts at trying to get a private member’s bill [00:58:00] through to abolish the hereditary by-elections. So when a hereditary peer died, they would have a by-election amongst a very small electorate eligible.

Mark D’Arcy: More candidates than voters.

Ruth Fox: Frequently, yes. Eligible hereditaries who could stand to replace them. And of course, that kept the whole debate about the fact that the hereditaries had not left the House, the remaining 90 had not been abolished. And of course, here we are at the end of the last session, finally the government got the legislation through and they have gone. It’s a good way of keeping these things on the front foot.

Mark D’Arcy: Keeping various pots of boiling.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And amongst this, we haven’t got time to go through 25, you’ll be glad to know, but second is the Green peer, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, Green Party peer, and she’s unsurprisingly got a nature related bill, Nature’s Rights Bill, which I think is one of the big bills that the environmental campaign groups have been pushing for, for some time, and may have been actually, it may be similar to the Nature Bill that was in the Commons in the last session. So [00:59:00] a lot of new legislation, a lot of new ideas that’s going to be coming through.

Mark D’Arcy: Let’s not, as you say, plough through the very long list of bills that may not be passed, but it’s worth flagging up one other issue where there have been a few minor developments. This week the National Audit Office released its latest report into the ongoing and very long running saga of Restoration and Renewal of the Houses of Parliament, R&R, as it’s known in Westminster, providing up-to-date costings and suggesting, and this is the particularly important bit to my mind, that there really is enough information on the table for an actual decision to finally be made. Although I don’t think anyone’s holding out much hope that the supreme sacrifice of an actual decision will actually be made.

Ruth Fox: We’ve been promised a debate and a vote.

Mark D’Arcy: We’ve been promised a debate and a vote every year since dinosaurs walked the earth.

Ruth Fox: We’ve also had debates and votes and made decisions and had Acts of Parliament, and we’re still not a whole lot further forward. We were promised a [01:00:00] debate and a vote in February. Then it slipped. I’ve been given periodically different dates. None of them have arrived. And I guess from a perspective of a government which is in some difficulties, who’s going to be leading it, who’s going to be in charge, who’s going to be making decisions, it’s not entirely clear at this point when they decide to schedule it. It is tricky.

Mark D’Arcy: Or indeed, if.

Ruth Fox: I think they’re going to have to bite the bullet because they can’t just keep putting it off and off. Because the Restoration and Renewal programme and the work and the scheduling of work and the timing and the costings all become critical. And bluntly, if they don’t, they are going to lose staff from the R&R programme because there’s already been churn, there’s already been loss of staff over the years,

Mark D’Arcy: And that’s not just a matter of individuals feeling a bit hacked off. It’s more a matter of when you finally need to do something because a bit of the building has fallen down or something like that, it’ll be much harder to bootstrap an operation into being.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think they’re getting to the point now [01:01:00] where they’ve got the proposals, they’ve got the plans, and, either they’re going to be operationalised or they’re not. And if they’re not, you are into constant patch and mend.

Mark D’Arcy: And that’s costing and that’s actually dangerous and expensive. And one of the things that came out in this National Audit Office report was that demonstrated what everybody already knew, which is that it’s much cheaper, billions of pounds cheaper, to simply move the parliamentarians out of the old Victorian Palace of Westminster for a prolonged period and do the work, rather than keep them in there and try and do the building work around them and in the holidays. And we’ve always known that, this is not news.

Ruth Fox: It’s not news. And also, put it another way, are we seriously going to run our national legislature in the middle of a building site for the biggest heritage restoration programme in the world for years?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Because this is an operation that, for example, dwarfs the rebuilding of Notre Dame in Paris, which is a massive restoration programme in its own right. I’ve been and seen it. It is an incredible scale of operation. [01:02:00] The idea of trying to have legislative debates in the middle of all that, with the chisels going into the, sculpting the buttresses or whatever, is almost unimaginable.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And Notre Dame is actually, in terms of scale, actually not comparable. Westminster is many times bigger and more complicated and more complex. So here we are. If we are going to have, and it’s a big question at this point as we’re sitting here, if we’re going to have a new government led by Andy Burnham, his Cabinet are going to have to confront this problem, can’t keep avoiding it. He, like Keir Starmer, dislikes Westminster. He’s been very critical of it. He talked about how leaving Westminster and heading back north was a freeing exercise. He felt free of the culture and the Westminster bubble and all that goes with it. I understand the criticisms of Westminster. I share quite a lot of them. I know the culture, the way the place operates, the wasting of time that often takes place. That’s why I do the job I do. Stop complaining about it and do something [01:03:00] about it. Have an agenda. Westminster is a huge project. It is going to cost an awful lot of money, but it is also, for a politician with a bit of vision, it is also an opportunity to reshape how Parliament and our political culture works.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Not just the bricks and mortar, the institution.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The institution, the culture. He keeps talking about two things in terms of political reform, electoral reform, PR, and getting rid of the House of Lords. Both of those are difficult to do. Both of those will resolve some problems, create others. They will certainly change the way the system operates. They’ll change some aspects of the culture, but they won’t do much about the House of Commons. And if he wants to really change, have a real big legacy about changing the political culture, then get hold of the R&R programme and think about how you can use that to develop a programme of change and reform and demonstrably [01:04:00] show that you’re changing the way Westminster works.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. that would be a very interesting exercise. Get the carpenters into the chamber of the House of Commons and maybe turn it into something that has cross benches.

Ruth Fox: Oh my goodness, steady on.

Mark D’Arcy: A spasm of wild radicalism there from me. But change the way the place operates because if you are in an era of multi-party politics, you cannot keep on with the system in the House of Commons that is built for a government and an opposition and excludes everybody else, which is pretty much the system we’ve got at the moment. It’s not just the electoral system that has to change, the whole load of downstream things, about the way politics in Parliament works beyond that, that would have to be addressed as well.

Ruth Fox: And just the very basic things about the physical layout of rooms designed for a two-party system. If you’re going to have a PR system, it’s going to need to operate differently.

Mark D’Arcy: Those carpenters are going to be very busy.

Ruth Fox: Well, there you go. So there, Andy is an item for your agenda for the [01:05:00] first hundred days. The Burnham Manifesto. Change Westminster. Don’t just talk about the froth on the top. Actually do something really substantive and visionary.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Would Burnham come to high Dunsinane tonight? Sorry. Very bad Macbeth joke.

Ruth Fox: Well, with that Mark, I think, that’s it for this week. It’s a very hot Friday, so I think you and I need to get out of this studio.

Yes, get out of the sauna of our studio and recover, listeners. We will be back as normal next week for our usual Thursday recording. So it’ll be in your podcast feed late on Thursday. Back to normal duties. If you are enjoying the podcast, do share it, with your family and friends. Do rate and review it on your podcast app, particularly if you’re listening through Apple and Spotify, because that really helps us grow the audience. I was at an event Mark, this week at the Statute Law Society. I was invited to give a lecture, and a number of members of the audience said they were listeners and how much they enjoyed it. Thank you to all of them and I’ll see you next week.

Mark D’Arcy: See you then. Bye-bye.

Ruth Fox: [01:06:00] Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm, or find us on social media @HansardSociety.