• Hansard Society, Why can MPs not simply resign their seats? Why must they apply for the Chiltern Hundreds?, 12 May 2026

• Hansard Society, Why MPs can’t just quit: The curious case of the Chiltern Hundreds - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 129, 1 February 2026

• House of Commons, Procedural Protocol in respect of the Code of Conduct, 24 February 2023

• House of Commons, Code of Conduct together with the Guide to the Rules relating to the Conduct of Members, 10 February 2023

• Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Investigation into Mr Nigel Farage MP, 1 September 2025

• House of Commons, Representation of the People Bill (2026-27)

• Alex Sobel MP, New Clause 31 to the Representation of the People Bill

• Politics.co.uk, One in four MPs demand electoral reform commission in ‘open goal’ for Burnham, 8 July 2026

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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 in this week’s episode:

Ruth Fox: Performance art or pre-emptive strike? Nigel Farage quits the Commons to force a by-election.

Mark D’Arcy: Andy Burnham emails his MPs to promise kinder, gentler whipping, and much more consultation. But will it mean better government?

Ruth Fox: And edging towards electoral reform: the Labour MPs trying to nudge the Government in the direction of PR.

Mark D’Arcy: But first, Ruth, Nigel Farage has managed once again to [00:01:00] dominate the political headlines. At two o’clock on Tuesday, a video was issued announcing that he was planning to stand down from the House of Commons and force a by-election in his Clacton constituency. And it seemed essentially to be an exercise in trying to head off a standards inquiry into the £5million donation he had received in the year before he became an MP. It’s a curious proceeding in a lot of ways and becoming curiouser and curiouser, not least because it looks like the major parties will not be contesting the Clacton seat against him. So there won’t be a Conservative candidate, there won’t be a Labour candidate, there won’t be a Lib Dem. There probably won’t be a Green. And so the major opposition to Mr Farage at the moment looks to be Count Binface, the satirical candidate who crops up in by-elections, last seen in Makerfield in his distinctive outfit.

Ruth Fox: Well, I’m waiting to see whether the successor to Screaming Lord Sutch will also be standing. We’ll have to see. But yes, I don’t know, Mark, I feel torn about this. Do [00:02:00] we really want to reduce our by-elections to comedy circuses? On the other hand, I can completely understand why the main political parties are not bothering with this.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, the, parallel that people are pointing to is 2008 when David Davis, then the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, stood down to protest civil liberties issues. And there again, the major parties did not field candidates against him and the whole thing became a little bit of a fiasco. And the end result was that I think David Cameron, the then the Leader of the Opposition, took the view that this was a rather quixotic gesture, wasn’t impressed, didn’t reinstate in the Shadow Home Secretary on his return to the Commons, and David Davis languished on the backbenchers until Brexit.

Ruth Fox: Well, as we are talking, we don’t yet know when the by-election will take place. So we know that Reform UK, their Chief Whip has moved the writ this morning in the House of Commons, to be technically accurate has moved the motion for the writ. But we don’t know when the actual date will be. I think that the idea is it’s going to be either the 6th or the 13th of August, but I suspect some [00:03:00] discussions and negotiations with the local council in Clacton have to take place to work out what’s going to be best. Because of course, staff will be on holiday.

Mark D’Arcy: This is Tendring District Council. District councils are not very large organisations and they presumably were not geared up for a sudden by-election to be held. It may not be possible to have the by-election on 6th August, which I think is Reform’s preferred option. So the campaign may drag on perhaps a week longer as a result of that. One of the interesting side effects of this, incidentally, is that this will be going on at the same time as Andy Burnham is pulling together his government, a subject we will return to later in the pod, no doubt. And I suspect that His Majesty’s press at Westminster will find their attention rather diverted from interesting questions about who’s going to be made the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Paperclips in the Department for Administrative Affairs by the rather gaudier theatre that will doubtless be unfolding in Clacton way.

Ruth Fox: Hustings between Nigel Farage and Count Binface.

Mark D’Arcy: I absolutely agree with you on this. There is part of me that rebels at the idea of taking something [00:04:00] serious like a parliamentary by-election and turning it into a comedy circus.

Ruth Fox: On the other hand, if you look through our parliamentary history, there’s plenty of examples beyond, it’s not unheard of. Is it David Davis? Should we just take a step back, because there was quite a lot of confusion around the 2pm statement. He dominated the headlines, the BBC switched to live coverage of what frankly amounted to not just an announcement of his intention to step down from the Commons, but also a party political broadcast lasting several minutes, which I think is awkward, but is proof of how Reform UK do tend to dominate the headlines when they want. But there’s quite a lot of confusion about what he was actually going to have to do. Because he talked about he was resigning from the Commons. But of course, as you and I have discussed on the podcast several times before, we’ll put a link to a previous podcast on this subject in the show notes, an MP cannot actually resign from the Commons formally. It’s not permitted. You have to take an office for profit to disqualify yourself.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. It is one of the wackier [00:05:00] of all the nooks and crannies of the British constitution for reasons dating back, I think, to something like the 17th century, MPs can’t just resign. They have to assume an office that is incompatible with being an MP, so an office of profit under the Crown, so that there are nominal offices kept for this purpose. The Steward and Bailiff of the manner of Northcliffe, for the Steward of the...

Ruth Fox: Northstead!

Mark D’Arcy: Northstead.

Ruth Fox: Northstead.

Mark D’Arcy: Northcliffe, that’s a Freudian slip there. Northstead. These are kept for that purpose and you alternate between the Chiltern Hundreds and Northstead. So departing MPs apply for one or the other and I suppose have to vacate the office again in order to return to the House of Commons.

Ruth Fox: Yes. They will have to renounce the office in order to stand in the by-election. And I think formally, I think they have to be released. I forget the wording now, but I think they have to be released from it by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as well. So when David Davis stood down, the Treasury press release noted both that he had been appointed to the office for profit and that he had renounced it. The [00:06:00] Treasury press release yesterday announcing that Farage had been appointed to the Manor of Northstead did not indicate that he’d renounced it, but at some point he’s going to have to, and presumably Rachel Reeves will have to accept that as well.

Mark D’Arcy: There was a little boomlet around the idea that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, might decline to appoint him and somehow try and forcibly keep him in the House of Commons. And apparently this all rests on precedents going back to at least the 1840s when apparently at one point, Lord Palmerston, who despite being a Lord was an Irish peer, was the Government’s leader in the House of Commons, said that he was not prepared to appoint a particular MP to, I suppose, the Chiltern Hundreds, it might have been Northstead, who cares, but was not prepared to do this because that MP was in trouble and shouldn’t be allowed to walk away from it. And similar logic was applied here by particularly the Liberal Democrats, who argued that Nigel Farage was trying to get out of being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, a subject we’ll come on to in a minute, and therefore should be prevented from leaving the House of [00:07:00] Commons. Now, I tend to the view that any precedent in Parliament that dates to before the era of universal suffrage is probably not one that should be taken all that seriously. And it seemed to me a rather silly piece of game-playing to try and do this. But anyway, he got the Liberal Democrats on the telly, which I assume was the aim here. And, in any case, the government declined to play along with that. Rachel Reeves tweeted rather scathingly that she was prepared to accept his self-nomination to this office, and if he wanted to spend the summer arguing with a bin, so be it.

Ruth Fox: Yes, the convention is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer accepts these requests to be appointed to such an office. And once you start fiddling with those conventions and saying in particular cases, no, we won’t go along with it, then the convention no longer exists, does it?

Mark D’Arcy: And then future governments could gameplay it in ways that the current government might not like.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And, every MP then is at the mercy of the incumbent government at the time. And if you’ve got a bad relationship with them, you might not be able to get out of the House of Commons, even if [00:08:00] you had a good reason for doing so. Who knows what circumstances could apply in the future. There’s an awful lot of circumstances that have happened in the last few years that I wouldn’t have imagined 20 years ago. So Rachel Reeves accepted it and moved on, and then there was a suggestion that maybe they’d amend the motion for the writ to prevent the by-election taking place until the Standards Commissioner had completed his investigation. That would’ve been bonkers because once, for the first part, Nigel Farage being appointed to the office for profit and therefore no longer being an MP, that has to happen before the by-election writ is moved, and if you then try to delay the by-election, all you do is leave the people of Clacton with no representation. And as long as Nigel Farage was out of the House, the Parliamentary Standards Committee investigation was suspended.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I think that this was just a moment when an awful lot of rather silly schemes were floated simply because there are enough people in Parliament who don’t like Nigel Farage that they wanted to try and find ways to trip him up. But none of them were very clever. And I [00:09:00] think that very quickly it became clear that people were going to play straight back to this. Where I think the game-playing started was, I imagine, through the Whips network, the parties put their heads together and decided that they were not going to field candidates against him, and were not going to indulge this. So now Nigel Farage finds himself in the slightly silly situation, as Rachel Reeves put it, of spending the summer arguing with a bin.

Ruth Fox: And when I reflect on this over the last few days, I would love to know the answer to two questions. One, when he went in to make that statement and make this announcement, did he know that in doing so, it would not stop the Standards Commissioner’s inquiry if he came back as an MP? Or even if he didn’t come back as an MP, which we can come on to in a moment. And secondly, had he contemplated a scenario in which the other political parties would not stand against him and that he might be into this kind of comedy circus?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, of course we can’t make windows into people’s souls, so we don’t really know the answer to either of those questions. But certainly it is pretty easy to find out that [00:10:00] actually this doesn’t stop the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards from continuing an investigation. It’s a matter of their discretion whether or not they continue to investigate if someone doesn’t return to the Commons. And they certainly can continue to investigate if someone does return to the Commons. So that’s the first answer. Secondly, did they imagine that the other parties would have the self-denying ordinance of not running candidates? Maybe not.

Ruth Fox: Yes, we will see. But let’s take Nigel’s Farage’s statement and work through it. Because he makes a number of important and interesting points. And I think it’s worth just dissecting some of it to get to some of the detail and trying to see our way through as to to whether or not he’s got a case or whether in fact he’s evading scrutiny. So he began his statement by saying, I have done nothing wrong, I have not broken the law in any way at all, I have not misused public money, and for the first two years of being an MP, my personal MP expenses are zero.

Mark D’Arcy: So let’s take that one first. He has not broken the law, that’s absolutely true, he has [00:11:00] not broken the law. What he may have broken is a code that MPs are supposed to obey, which is not enshrined in law, but is nonetheless binding on MPs. So if he’s done something wrong, it is in not following the code in which an MP should declare, not just in gifts and emoluments received when an MP, but for the year before. And it’s very important that people do that, because otherwise you could have a situation where people could preload a future MP with gifts and favours that they’re then expected to repay in office and it would somehow not be captured by the system for declaring interests.

Ruth Fox: To be clear, what he’s under investigation for with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, is breaking rule 5 of the Code of Conduct. Now the code is a mix of principles around the Seven Principles of Public Life. You know, honesty, objectivity, integrity, accountability, leadership, and so on. And then there are 17 rules about how you behave, your conduct, how you register things, and so on. Rule 5: Members must fulfil conscientiously the [00:12:00] requirements of the House in respect to the registration of interests in the register of members’ financial interests. And they’ve got to do that when they become a new MP. They’ve got to register their current financial interests, any registrable benefits other than earnings received in the 12 months before their election, within one month of going into the House of Commons. And then they have to register any change in those registerable interests within 28 days. So that is the subject of the commissioner’s inquiry. Did the £5million he received from Christopher Harborne, the Thai crypto billionaire, in the year prior to him winning the 2024 general election, should that have been registered? Nigel Farage’s argument is no, it was a personal gift. It was nothing to do with his political interests. He wasn’t even politically active at the time, which we can perhaps come on to, and that he took legal advice on this.

Mark D’Arcy: But none of that matters for the purposes of the rule that you’ve just quoted. If he received a very large sum of money, which he did, in the year before he became an MP, [00:13:00] which is the timeframe we’re talking about here, then he should declare it. Surely that’s pretty much open and shut.

Ruth Fox: I would’ve thought so. And the code also says that the overall aim of registration and declaration is to provide any information about any financial interest which might reasonably be thought by others to influence a member’s actions or votes in Parliament. It’s not whether Nigel Farage thinks it influenced him or not, it’s what does it look to the rest of us? And interestingly, almost the same day, the Bank of England released notes and a letter from the Governor of the Bank of England about a meeting that took place between him and I think Richard Tice of Reform with him at the bank, and makes very clear that they were lobbying in favour of cryptocurrency and that they favour cryptocurrency, and if there were to be a Reform government, that we will have some kind of crypto digital currency of some kind. Now, if you’ve received £5million from a crypto billionaire in the year before, there is clearly, whether or not it has [00:14:00] directly influenced his views or whether he had those views before, that’s a matter for Nigel Farage, but for the rest of the public looking on, quite clearly, it is something which we might reasonably think could have influenced him.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed. And it’s also worth saying that Nigel Farage may not have been the leader of Reform at the time, because of course, if you remember back to the 2024 general election, he came down the hill and suddenly announced he was going to stand when previously he said he wasn’t going to stand as an MP, but he was still, I think, the head honcho of Reform. He, I’m not quite sure what the legal phrase is, but he was basically the person in beneficial control of Reform PLC at the time, and I think he might even have been the president of Reform.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So this has been, again, a running sore in the debate about Reform, that it is structured and organised and owned in a very different way to most other political parties, in that effectively, Nigel Farage owns it. He is the person with significant control.

Mark D’Arcy: Oh, that’s the phrase I was groping for.

Ruth Fox: And [00:15:00] that’s why of course Richard Tice had to step down as leader and step aside, once Nigel Farage decided he wanted to give it a go and stand for Parliament, that’s why he could push Richard Tice out, because he is the person with significant control.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, whether Richard Tice needed to be pushed or was quite happy to step aside, the fact of the matter is that Nigel Farage could simply shrug his shoulders and take over. So there we are. It’s not like he wasn’t keeping at least a toe in the waters of politics, but that’s, again, completely irrelevant as to whether or not he was active in politics at the time. The fact is, the money arrived in the year before he became an MP, and should therefore, under those rules be declared, and going back to some of the things Nigel Farage has said and done in the past, he had a great time mocking Keir Starmer receiving the benefit of some spectacles that were paid for by a Labour donor, Lord Alli. If Keir Starmer’s spectacles are a matter of public interest and a matter of public influence and a matter of potential influence over Labour, then I’m sure that £5million for Nigel Farage is a matter that could reasonably be thought to [00:16:00] influence him in the future.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So Nigel Farage’s argument is, I was not a political player, I was in private life in that period, I wasn’t politically active. He was basically out earning money. And he says in the years 2021 to 2024, he was working as an influencer with over 7 million followers on social media, I’ve done well financially, that shouldn’t be looked upon as a crime, and yes, I had the equivalent of a lottery win, a large personal gift. Now again, I’m not sure how well that goes down with the public. Clacton will be an interesting test, won’t it? Because I suspect the focus on his finances is going to be even more acute as a result of the fact that the other parties aren’t running. So the big questions about policy or the direction of the government or those kinds of things, the economy, are not going to be to the fore. What’s going to be under the microscope is Nigel Farage and Reform’s finances. So it could backfire.

Mark D’Arcy: And indeed His Majesty’s press is continuing to dig into the [00:17:00] finances of Reform. And it is entirely possible that new nuggets of information will be dug up and put to Nigel Farage on the campaign trail in Clacton. So he may find that this turns into a rather gruelling multi-week interrogation on every financial transaction that he’s been involved in.

Ruth Fox: And I think it’s worth saying, although he is the subject of an inquiry by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, there are suggestions that there are other inquiries that were underway with the Electoral Commission about Reform UK, frankly I’ve lost track of some of this, the donations and payments and so on. And they would not be parliamentary rules that were being broken. They would be, if the evidence is there for it, they would be statutory, they would be breaking the law. So we can’t say definitively he has broken the law and we can’t say definitively hasn’t broken the law yet. We don’t know. But there are investigations under way.

Mark D’Arcy: The central allegation before the Parliamentary Commissioner is not about breaking the law. It is about whether or not he has broken parliamentary rules that parliamentarians are supposed to [00:18:00] obey. As for the rest of it, I think I’m getting one of my heads.

Ruth Fox: He did say that he thought standards are now being used as a political tool, the gift, this £5million, was given to me on an unconditional basis, I can do with that money exactly as I wish, but there is a much bigger reason why I’m going to need that money, and it’s this: for over 20 years, I’ve been the subject of constant demonisation by the press. So there’s two issues there, Mark. There’s standards being used as a political tool and there’s this demonisation by the press and the impact that he says this has on his personal security. So first point, on standards, I think sometimes he has a point on this. I do think sometimes the parties do use it as a political tool.

Mark D’Arcy: I think there’s a lot of vexatious complaints when people are running to teacher with a complaint that someone’s done something naughty and actually the politicians need to be a little bit careful about this. Because you can cheapen the whole standards system if every minor infraction leads to pompous letters flying around the place saying shouldn’t have done that, shouldn’t have done that. And very often these things [00:19:00] are done by people who need to be a little bit careful about their own conduct being questioned as well, or parties. So I do think that there is a bit of substance there. People do use the standards system to say, I have written to the Standards Commissioner about this and it’s obviously an outrage, as a way of attacking their opponents to be sure.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The second issue on his security, he said, I’m the most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times now. I know what he means. I understand the point he’s making, but I think he would have been well advised not to have used that phrasing.

Mark D’Arcy: Tell it to the families of Jo Cox or David Amess, for a start.

Ruth Fox: Yes, quite. I have no doubt, and we’ve seen some of it on the TV and so on, I’ve no doubt that he’s under a huge amount of pressure, that he’s followed around, that it’s very, very difficult for him to go out in public places. I doubt that he can just go out, go down to the pub or outside Westminster or get on a train or go to the airport and not face hassle. That is a product of his prominence and the issues he’s been involved in.

Mark D’Arcy: [00:20:00] And he’s not the only one in politics who has those problems.

Ruth Fox: Well, yes, and I do wonder, he says he’s the most physically and verbally attacked. The kinds of names that come to mind. Diane Abbott, who I know, it’s been well documented, but I also know, because we used to have Hansard Society scholars who used to work in her office, and the threats that were made to her office, our scholars used to have special induction training before they arrived in order to know how to cope and deal with it. So the verbal abuse, and we know that there have been court cases where women MPs, not just women but predominantly women MPs, have faced stalkers and threats online and so on. So I think he’s got to be a little bit careful about that. But nonetheless, he does make a point about his security, and he’s made this before. He says repeatedly over the years, I’ve asked the Home Secretary for help, and he basically says the police don’t seem to be concerned about his security or about his safety.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s a complaint that a lot of MPs have had, that the police haven’t exactly fallen over themselves when they felt under threat. And I think the [00:21:00] Speaker’s office, when Lindsay Hoyle, when he was Deputy Speaker, was made the kind of coordinator for MPs’ safety issues, and I think things began to improve a bit.

Ruth Fox: But he’s making some very specific points. He says, I asked the Home Secretary for help, I was rejected again and again when I became an MP, Parliament said yes, we will help you with security, but almost unbelievably that security funding was withdrawn. Now, I do think if he keeps making these allegations, I do think at some point, whether it’s Metropolitan Police, the parliamentary security team, whether it’s the Home Secretary, the Home Office, Parliament’s own security directorate, I do think at some point there needs to be something said without going into the detail of the threats and so on, but something said about actually how they approach this and what the process for determinations is on why he hasn’t got security.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Is this true? If so, why?

Ruth Fox: Yes, so I, I think that it’s a difficult area because they never want to talk about the security threats. They never want to talk about what provision is made. But [00:22:00] equally, I don’t think we can continue with a situation where a party leader of his prominence, possibly a future Prime Minister, given the situation in the polls, keeps coming out and making the allegation that the security is not available to him. And the threat is very, very high. I do think there needs to be some kind of resolution.

Mark D’Arcy: Absolutely agree with you on that. And I think it is just necessary to be clear what’s going on here. It’s quite an allegation if true that the security system has been weaponised against him.

Ruth Fox: The other thing I wanted your take on was clearly what appears to have tipped him over the edge in the last week is the level of press and media scrutiny, and particularly a visit he alleges from Sky News. He describes it as hounding of his daughter at a property she owns. He’s not there, but his daughter, she’s not school age, she’s an adult. And that they’ve released pictures of this [00:23:00] journalist turning up, obviously unannounced, to his daughter’s property. This seems to have completely tipped him over the edge that she’s being hounded, this is unacceptable. And I have to say, having watched it with an open mind, I thought, is that it?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Hounding seemed a pretty strong word for what actually took place, which was someone came and knocked on the door and then went away again fairly shortly afterwards. And it’s not like there was a press pack of dozens parked permanently out there with cameras whirring and catching every movement. And politicians at the centre of events have had that in the past particularly.

Ruth Fox: And their families as well, and their children, even in adults. Do you remember Estelle Morris stood down as Education Secretary during, I can’t remember if it is the Blair or the Brown government. There was something about her position that was being investigated by the press. Now, Estelle didn’t have children, but they were investigating her sister’s children. basically her entire family and goddaughter I think were being investigated. Tessa [00:24:00] Jowell, when she had the scandal relating to a situation with her husband, and she had the press outside her door for weeks. She couldn’t leave her house without paparazzi, photographers from the tabloids on the back of a motorbike following her around London. It was horrendous.

Mark D’Arcy: I’m afraid some of this comes with the territory now. It is terribly unfair on people who didn’t sign up to be in public life themselves but happen to be associated with someone who did, to be sure. I don’t tend to think that politicians’ children should be seen as legitimate targets for investigation, unless there’s a very strong reason for that, but all the same, this does not seem on the Richter scale of press intervention to be all that high up.

Ruth Fox: No. And he said by publishing the photograph of his daughter and outside the house, the editor of the Times has directly threatened her security.

Mark D’Arcy: Again, it’s a big, big claim.

Ruth Fox: A big, big leap. Particularly given that that property had already appeared in the press before. And that his daughter had appeared with him on that reality show that I never [00:25:00] watch.

Mark D’Arcy: I’m a Celebrity.

Ruth Fox: No. Is it I’m a Celebrity?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I think so.

Ruth Fox: Get Me Out of Here. Yes, definitely. Apparently been shown on that. So there’s issues about the degree to which you protect your children and you don’t.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And indeed Nigel Farage can now expect, I’m an Ex MP, Get Me Out of Here. He’s going to be followed around by the press pack as he campaigns in and around Clacton for the next however many weeks it is now. So he’d better get used to this and he’d better get used to questions being shouted at him about his personal finances, about donations he may have received about the financial dealings of his wider party as well, and possibly some of his colleagues, because new information seems to be on the front pages most days at the moment.

Ruth Fox: Yes. He came back at the end of his statement, he said, why should I be judged today or in history in the future by Sky News and their ilk? Why should they be the people that decide my fate when, as I repeat, I’ve done nothing wrong? So I’ve decided the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions, this will be a people versus the establishment [00:26:00] by-election. Not quite. It’s not going to be the establishment. But it’s also not the case that he was going to be judged by Sky News.

Mark D’Arcy: No. He was going to be judged by someone quite different. a character in the parliamentary ecosphere called Daniel Greenberg, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which is quite an interesting job. Being, as I am, a devotee of that short-lived series Murder in Provence, he’s kind of like a French investigating magistrate, the central character in Murder in Provence. He both assembles the facts and provides an analysis of them for the Parliamentary Standards Committee. So he makes a kind of preliminary judgment, possibly recommendation. A report then goes to the Commons Standards Committee, which be it noted, consists not only of MPs, but of seven lay members appointed from outside the Westminster bubble. They make a determination and their recommendations then go to the Commons to be approved.

Ruth Fox: There’s a few things to unpack here. It’s worth mentioning that Nigel Farage has already been the subject of an inquiry by the Standards Commissioner. [00:27:00] So a complaint was made under this same rule that he’s being investigated under now, rule 5, but that was in relation to whether or not he’d registered his interests at the time he’d became an MP, and whether he’d kept up with them within the 28 days required after he became an MP. And back in January, the commissioner published a report finding that he had breached that rule on 17 occasions, he’d failed to update his register of financial interest within the 28-day period required. But the commissioner concluded these were inadvertent because of staffing and other administrative issues. Nigel Farage took responsibility and he gave a clear undertaking that future interests would be registered on time.

Mark D’Arcy: So the defence here was essentially, new MP getting the office set up, complicated set of rules, sorry, we just got this wrong and lost track of it, and we’ll try and do better in the future. Which is fine, but it then does require you to do better in the future. And I think it may be seen by the Parliamentary Commissioner that this is an [00:28:00] aggravating factor. Having got these things wrong and apologised, you now have to get them right. And also maybe there was somewhere during the conversations between Nigel Farage and the Parliamentary Commissioner, the question was asked, is there anything else you failed to declare that really should be on the record?

Ruth Fox: Yes. On that occasion, the commissioner was able to apply what’s called the rectification procedure. So for the low level sort of cases where it’s in this instance inadvertent, the commissioner under his own sort of purview, if you like, can make some decisions about what sanctions apply. The member has to accept the findings of the commissioner. He has to apologise, but then could be requiring a member to attend training, they can do things like make a note on the register of interest, which I think happened in Farage’s case. But in the more serious cases, as you say, or if the member does not accept the findings of the commissioner, it goes to the Standards Committee. And I think this is a point that keeps being missed, that this is not a committee [00:29:00] comprised solely of MPs. It’s 14 members, 7 members of Parliament and 7 members of the public, lay independent members. Of those 7 MPs, 4 are Labour, 2 are Conservatives, including the chair, and one Liberal Democrat. So no Reform representation, but that reflects how select committees operate. And they must, the membership reflects the outcome of the general election.

Mark D’Arcy: And the composition of the House of Commons in effect. But you’ve also got these 7 lay members who will tend to have backgrounds in running companies, HR, that kind of thing. Independent people with a bit of experience in areas that seem relevant. And their job is to be, if you like, the canaries in the coal mine, able to say if they think that something’s become a political witch hunt. They can flag that up in their report. They’re intended to be a safeguard against the politicisation of this process. But what I understand from the occasional conversations with people who’ve been in this role is that they tend to think, if anything, the MPs are too lenient on one another.

Ruth Fox: That’s my impression as [00:30:00] well. When I’ve talked to the lay members in the past on certain cases, they don’t go into the details of the cases, but that they felt that sometimes the MPs were too easy on each other.

Mark D’Arcy: Which of course, it is just a kind of corporate interest of all MPs. They don’t want things to be made hanging offences, because it might be them in the dock one day, I suppose.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So where we’re at the moment is Nigel Farage is out of Parliament. So the Standards Commissioner investigation has to be suspended, pending the outcome of the by-election. And then if Nigel Farage returns, the inquiry can restart. There’s been some confusion about whether or not it restarts the clock and whether or not what happened before in the 12 months prior to the 24 general election now gets forgotten about, and what matters is the 12 months prior to the by-election should he win it?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, the short answer to that is no. No. There is no kind of Act of Oblivion that is passed here. I’m afraid his conduct in the year before he became MP, the donations that he received, do not suddenly disappear from [00:31:00] view because he’s held this by-election. It does not provide any kind of end run around this process. And I think that’s one of the things that people need to be very careful of imagining that it might. It doesn’t reset the clock, as you said. It doesn’t mean that suddenly the investigation has to disappear in a puff of smoke. It’s all still there when he comes back. And it is entirely possible that you could get a recommendation by the Standards Committee that he has to be suspended for 10 days plus, which could trigger a recall petition in his constituency and potentially trigger yet another by-election a bit further down the road. That is a distinct possibility here. And indeed, it is entirely possible that the people on the Standards Committee might see this whole by-election as an attempt to somehow spike their guns and may not like it at all.

Ruth Fox: No, and that is the question, isn’t it? On the basis of the evidence, if they conclude he’s breached the rules, given the amount of money involved, given the fact that he’s already got a prior rap over the knuckles for 17 breaches, and at that point you would [00:32:00] think, having done that, you’d look and reflect, is there anything else I should have registered, just to make sure that I am squeaky clean and I have done everything as conscientiously as I possibly can.

Mark D’Arcy: Because the word “conscientious” there, MPs are required to be conscientious about these rules. Not simply to just vaguely fill in the form and chuck it in the general direction of the registrar.

Ruth Fox: Or get somebody else to do it for you. Yes. These will be aggravating factors. Conversely, things we might not know about at the moment, are there mitigating factors?

Mark D’Arcy: There may be something in the small print that gets Nigel Farage off the hook, that we simply don’t know about from the basic facts that are available to the public.

Ruth Fox: But what I found interesting was, I think it was Zia Yusuf was talking about bringing forward the by-election, so that I took to mean that they clearly thought that they were likely to be facing a recall petition, and that would require 10% of the electorate of Clacton to sign a petition asking for him to be recalled, had the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found against him and the Committee on Standards recommended a 10-day suspension or more. They clearly thought that was a [00:33:00] likely outcome. I guess the question now is, if we’ve already had a by-election...

Mark D’Arcy: Do we really want to go through it all again?

Ruth Fox: If, yes, if, and there’s an awful lot of water to go under the bridge before we get to this, but were the Commissioner for Standards to find that he had broken the code of conduct, that it was a serious breach, that there were aggravating factors, that memorandum would go from him to the Committee on Standards to consider. They would have to decide whether they agreed with it. And it’s important to point out Nigel Farage can give evidence and meet with the commissioner and the committee. In fact, it will be a requirement, I think, to meet with the commissioner. And it will be interesting to see whether he, if he gets back in, whether he cooperates with the inquiry or not. If the Committee on Standards decides that the breach was significant and warranted 10 days’ or more suspension, and one of the things they’ll have to consider is how does this fit in terms of seriousness alongside the other cases that they have considered in [00:34:00] the past? Because there’s like a staircase of sanctions.

Mark D’Arcy: You’ve got to be consistent in the application of your rules here. And there are a couple of other points here. First of all, it would be a breach of the code for MPs not to cooperate with this inquiry. If you say, I’m not meeting the Parliamentary Commissioner, I’ve just had my by-election, that would itself be a disciplinary offence for an MP. And secondly, it is a breach of the code for someone to comment publicly on an investigation which they’re under. I mean there’s a Labour MP, actually we’ve had him on the pod in recent weeks, Peter Prinsley has had his knuckles wrapped this week for precisely commenting in fairly innocent circumstances, frankly, on an investigation into him, he had to correct his local press about what the nature of the investigation was, which he probably shouldn’t have done, but hey, that’s the kind of thing people trip over all the time.

Ruth Fox: Yes. But all of that said, if we end up in a situation where the Committee on Standards considers that yes, there has been a breach, looking at it, it’s a very serious breach and it would be [00:35:00] at the upper end of the sanctions, and this is likely to lead to a recall petition in his constituency, do you go there? What is the point, if you’ve already had a by-election? And I think this is one of the real problems that they will have to potentially grapple with, if that’s where we end up.

Mark D’Arcy: The good folk of Clacton having been through five, six weeks of a circus of a by-election from July into August, might not want to go there again. Now almost everybody who’s had a recall petition against them in the past has ended up facing a by-election. The exception being Ian Paisley, who managed to survive a recall petition being brought against him, there weren’t enough signatures in the end on the petition to trigger a further election, but that’s been quite rare. In most cases when these petitions are brought, there are enough people out there who want to sign them. Whether the good folk of Clacton, as I say, having been through one by-election, really want to subject themselves to another, is another question, but if there were, I think the other main parties would then contest it.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. I think that Kemi Badenoch’s made that clear. That’s what she’s [00:36:00] waiting for. She’s clearly assuming that there will be one, but to not have one if the Commissioner for Standards finds against him, if the Committee for Standards considers that it’s a serious breach and it’s at the upper end of the scale, and if it were any other MP, they’d be facing a suspension of 10 days or more to not do that, then creates a hole that any MP who’s popular in their constituency or the wider public and who can breach the rules at will, it just drives a coach and horse horses through the whole system.

Mark D’Arcy: I don’t know what happens then. Do members of the Standards Committee resign if Parliament rejects their recommendation on such a prominent issue?

Ruth Fox: I don’t know. No idea what happens then, but it’s important as well, this by-election. Nigel Farage will undoubtedly use it as a test of his popularity and he’ll be able to claim if he wins that the public have spoken, he’s been judged by his Clacton constituents, but it’ll have been judged on the basis of what the media say about him, not on the basis of what an independent [00:37:00] investigation of the facts and the evidence say about him. And would it be a different outcome in Clacton if the good people of that constituency had available to them the Standards Commissioner’s report? Possibly. We don’t know.

Mark D’Arcy: And it’s worth underlining at this point that Daniel Greenberg, the Parliamentary Commissioner, is someone no one doubts his integrity. Absolutely no one in the Westminster ecosphere thinks that Daniel Greenberg is some kind of party hack or establishment tool. He’s seen as a completely straight interpreter of the rules. So his verdict should be taken seriously. Nobody thinks that the Standards Committee plays games around these things. Most of the people that are on it are pretty straight, and they’ve got the lay members to keep them honest as well.

Ruth Fox: Yes. On Daniel, again, for transparency, we should say, you and I both know Daniel. Not particularly well, but I know him, not least in his former life as a government draftsman of some of the laws that we all have to abide by. He’s a bit of a Marmite character, I think some people take to him more than others. But [00:38:00] the other thing is, I can’t see him being a character who’s going to be pushed around. He’s pretty robust.

Mark D’Arcy: Woe beside anybody who picks up the phone and says, Daniel, can you make sure you get him on this? That would absolutely just not work.

Ruth Fox: No. Well, we don’t know quite, as I said at the beginning, we don’t when the by-election will take place. But I do know, Mark, that we will not be recording Parliament Matters because we’ll be on our summer holidays.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, indeed. We will be basking in our Tuscan villas while this is going on. If only we had them.

Ruth Fox: You might be.

Mark D’Arcy: But on that, Ruth, shall we take a quick break? And when we come back, it’ll be time to look at Andy Burnham and his promises to the Parliamentary Labour Party about how he’s going to run things when he takes over as Prime Minister. And I think now it’s a matter of when, not if.

Ruth Fox: But before we take a break, do take a moment to rate and review us, if you’re listening to us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it really helps with visibility on those platforms and so helps grow our audience. And if you enjoy the podcast, why not take the next step and join the Hansard Society? At a time when democracy is under growing pressure, [00:39:00] a resilient and effective Parliament matters more than ever. So you’ll be joining a like-minded community of people who care about our Parliament and want to strengthen and safeguard parliamentary democracy for the future. You can go to hansardsociety.org.uk and join for as little as £15 per year. A bargain! That’s hansardsociety.org.uk. See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: We are back. And Ruth, as we’ve been recording, Labour MPs have literally as well as metaphorically been queuing up to sign the nomination papers for Andy Burnham to be the next leader of the Labour Party, and shortly after that to be the next Prime Minister. Even those who aren’t in Westminster have been tweeting their determination to come in and sign his nomination papers in the coming days. So it looks very likely that Andy Burnham will be unopposed. It may even become mathematically impossible for anybody else to get nominated. They need 81 signatures, and it may be that so many Labour MPs sign that there aren’t 81 non-signers available for [00:40:00] anybody else. And anyway, there are no other declared candidates in the field. So we are looking at how the man who’s likely to be our next Prime Minister is going to govern. And he gave a few clues in the form of a long email to the Parliamentary Labour Party this week, telling Labour MPs exactly how he intended to run things when he takes over.

Ruth Fox: He did, yes. So he sent an email, dear colleagues, he began it by saying, changing culture through valuing and respecting every member of the PLP. That was his first heading. And he said, my aim is to create a team and culture where everyone is valued, seen, listened to, and can make their mark and make a difference for their constituents. The country’s counting on all of us, and we are all in this together.

Mark D’Arcy: I must say, this did slightly remind me of the cardinal who used to be in charge of the Roman Catholic church’s finances, he once remarked that you can’t run a church on Hail Mary’s. You imagine a few people muttering that to themselves as they read this missive.

Ruth Fox: Although I do think that the Catholic Church has done quite well with its [00:41:00] conclave arrangements to select its leaders.

Mark D’Arcy: Much more dramatic.

Ruth Fox: Yes. It, has a certain panache to it and, they’ve done quite well with their selection with the current Pope. Yes, he talks about wanting them to bring their skills and experience from their previous careers as well as the expertise from the places they represent. He says, I will lead from the front on culture, political direction, and narrative. So that’s addressing the whole point that’s been such a criticism of the Starmer years, that there isn’t a story about what this government’s about and the government is not on the front foot when it comes to communications.

Mark D’Arcy: And that actually behind the scenes things have sometimes got quite nasty and there have been a lot of complaints. People like Rosie Duffield, who quit the Labour ranks over this, really didn’t like the internal culture of the Labour Party. And there are plenty of people who didn’t go as far as that, who seem to have grumbled quite a lot about the way things have been done.

Ruth Fox: Plenty of people who talk about there being a sort of a boys club, [00:42:00] both in Downing Street and in Parliament, that quite a lot of the leadership in Downing Street didn’t seem to know much about the infantry, the troops in Parliament, didn’t have much idea about who they were or what their background was, what skills and experience they might have, and that certain individuals were given preferment very quickly and everybody else was on the outs. But he talks about his team, that the team will be based on the principles of contribution, experience, commitment, and represent the broad church of our party. So that is one of the things obviously we’ve talked about in recent podcasts, isn’t it? That the management of the parliamentary party is going to be so critical. And I suppose an early question will be, will he invite back in those MPs who’ve lost the whip? Because there’s quite a few of them.

Mark D’Arcy: That would be an early test and would be quite an interesting experiment. And is he going to, Harold Wilson-like, make sure that his Cabinet and wider ministerial team reflect the political spectrum of the Labour Party much more than more recent Labour leaders have?

Ruth Fox: Yes. There’s this question [00:43:00] about how are they going to balance out expertise, interest, gender, positions within the political party, and then how are they going to balance out prospects of possibly two Milibands in government. And it all becomes very difficult.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. People were talking at one point about a potential criticism of the Burnham Cabinet might be that it have more Milibands than women in the top posts. That is yet to be seen, obviously.

Ruth Fox: One of the concerns I will be how far does it look a bit like a return to the Brownite years. Back to the future, as it were. He talks about, in this email he sent round, he says, I want colleagues to be able to raise problems and suggest policy ideas or support important matters to their constituents without fear or favour. So this goes to the whole question about how he’s going to manage the whip. The feedback loop of the PLP, the Parliamentary Labour Party, into communities and back to the leadership and Cabinet is critical to good policymaking and delivery, it will make us a better government and a stronger team.

Mark D’Arcy: This is a point that MPs quite often make, and I’m sure it’s a [00:44:00] true one, that often when something is going wrong with the implementation of government policy, the people who hear about it earliest in the Westminster bubble are MPs at their surgeries: “I cannot get an appointment with my doctor for six months” kind of stuff can be reported back by MPs into Westminster if the people there are willing to listen, if the ministerial teams are willing to take on board that there’s a real problem that’s been spotted at the grassroots level.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The other thing he says, he’s going to expect ministers, particularly Cabinet ministers, to prioritise engagement with the parliamentary party. And interestingly, he has the line “for that engagement to be meaningful”. And he says that correspondence and casework will be a priority, not an afterthought. But interestingly he’s also trying to manage expectations because he said, I will do this by working together with the PLP as one team, but it takes time and the test will be months and years, not weeks.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s certainly true. I’m sure there will not be a sudden sort of complete overnight transformation in everything, all in one big bang. And [00:45:00] people who are hoping for that are going to have their hopes certainly dashed. Interesting to see how he does this though, because the letter to the PLP hints that he wants the informal engagement through ministers being in the division lobbies in votes precisely so that they can talk to colleagues and hear complaints and constituency issues and all the rest of it. But will there also be formal structures? Will there be policy committees for each department? Will there be groups of MPs attached to particular areas, reporting back on things, providing ideas for ministers? Will it be as detailed as that or will it just be, hey, we are listening, come and talk to us at a completely informal level?

Ruth Fox: I think in the parliamentary party, there certainly used to be, I don’t whether there still is, I assume so, but there used to be departmental groups where the ministers were expected to consult with the policy area MPs. There were also regional groups of MPs. So if you had particular issues affecting your constituency. In my day, Eastern region expansion of Stansted Airport was always a challenge. And that would be a route to [00:46:00] feedback into ministers and into the Cabinet concerns about developments. So I assume that’s all still, the structures are there.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s just whether any notice is taken of them.

Ruth Fox: And where they are treated as a sort of perfunctory exercise or not. The other thing he says, you mentioned voting, and he says, I understand the importance of voting together as equals. Because this has been a big criticism of Keir Starmer that at least until recently, he was very rarely in the voting lobbies, his voting record is quite poor. He says, my expectation for myself and ministers is that voting is a core part of the job. And it’s a chance for important conversations and shared experience to be had. So I would take from that, that he recognises the importance of the voting lobbies. What MPs often say, that ability to nab a minister and talk into their ear for a few minutes about a particular constituency problem or concern, or a policy issue, that a bit of legislation they’re concerned about, is valued, suggests that perhaps a reform like electronic voting might not be on its way.[00:47:00]

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And, that’s of course another issue that he mentions it, that he declares himself to be a parliamentary moderniser. There is no detail of what that might mean in practice, however, but he’s wearing the mantle of modernisation. So what will that mean if it doesn’t mean electronic voting, which is not the touchstone of modernisation for me. If it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean? We’re keen to guess. And I suppose a lot might depend on who ends up as the Leader of the House in the new reshaped Burnham Cabinet.

Ruth Fox: Yes. He says to do politics differently means modernising Parliament too. Quite right Andy. I want to see the modernisation agenda revitalised to support Backbenchers, make Parliament more accessible and relatable. Now, that does go to the current Modernisation Committee’s agenda so far, where they’ve talked about accessibility and it’s the sort of things I talked about when I appeared before the Mod Comm committee about how you could change the language and some of the practices of the House to make it more accessible. And he talks about wanting to cultivate an environment of more [00:48:00] consensus-building, not point-scoring. So if he’s wanting to modernise the House and revitalise it to support backbenchers and make the place more accessible, there’s not a shortage of ideas out there.

Mark D’Arcy: Dial H for Hansard and we’ll be able to tell you.

Ruth Fox: Yes, exactly, but you need a Leader of the House who’s willing to lean into that agenda and reach out, have those meetings with us, talk with organisations like us, the Constitution Unit, the Institute for Government and others, to put that agenda together.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. There are plenty of things there. There are plenty of, frankly, easy wins available for a government that’s actually prepared, as you say, to lean into that agenda. It’s a matter of the personnel, who’s going to be the Leader of the House. I don’t imagine that’s top of Andy Burnham’s personnel agenda at the moment. But someone’s going to end up in that job. And sometimes Leader of the House is the last person standing in a game of Cabinet musical chairs and they’re there because it’s a seat in the Cabinet rather than because they’re interested in the issues before them as Leader of the House. That’s a pitfall for Andy Burnham to try and avoid if he can.

Ruth Fox: And [00:49:00] one early thing to look out for, he says the House should be respected by ministers. That includes ministers engaging properly with the chamber, bill committees, and select committees. So one of the big issues in the Government has been that ministers have been making statements outside the House, driving the Speaker mad. Big announcements which have been trailed in the media, and then announcements in the House are like a second thought, low down the list of priorities. So let’s see. The ministerial code is that major announcements should be made to the House first. So will he take a different approach to that? I would be amazed, but you never know.

Mark D’Arcy: Well be prepared to be amazed, I’m not holding my breath quite yet, but the, touchstone of this is he’s going to try and be nicer to the parliamentary party and that’s all fine until he has to do something that’s really going to take some pushing to get through his Parliamentary Labour Party. And that’s going to come because the decisions will not all be ones which are greeted with cheering crowds and wild applause. He may have to do some very tough things in the coming months. So [00:50:00] that’s the test of whether these new arrangements will actually work and stick. You know, as I was saying earlier, you can’t build a church on Hail Mary’s. You can’t build a government that’s trying to get its business through on just a group hug with your MPs.

Ruth Fox: No, I just say the point at which he wants them to march through the voting lobbies for something that’s quite tough, it is going to be the big test. And I guess we don’t know when the Budget will be. That will be the big set piece, won’t it? Assuming he’s not going to scrap the session and start again with a new King’s Speech. The Budget will be in the autumn. We don’t have the date. I think the Office for Budget Responsibility needs something like 12 weeks’ notice. So actually something to look out for the week after next, once he’s appointed. Once we know who the Chancellor is, will one of their first announcements be the date of the budget, essentially issuing the notice to the OBR? And then in that Budget, one would expect that some difficult issues are going to have to be grappled with.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed. And with that, Ruth, shall we take another quick break and when we come back, we’ve got a chat with Alex Sobel, who’s the chair of the All-Party [00:51:00] Group on Fair Elections and Fair Voting, about the forthcoming Representation of the People Bill back before MPs next week with lots of very interesting detailed amendments, covering everything from dodgy cryptocurrency donations to reforming the voting system.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: We are back. And Ruth, there’s quite a lot going on at the moment in the space around democracy, democratic reform, and cleaning up British politics. We’ve had the Rycroft review published this week. This is Philip Rycroft, senior civil servant, looking at the issues around foreign interference in British politics. And he concludes, there is a persistent dangerous threat there. The Ethics and Integrity Commission has just published a review suggesting reforms to lobbying in politics as well.

Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark, if you remember last week we were talking to Dianne Hayter, the Labour peer who’s come top of the private members’ bill ballot about her bill to tighten up her one of the loopholes for lobbying. And in fact Dianne gave us a bit of a heads up that the Ethics and Integrity Commission report was coming this week. And of course, if you [00:52:00] cast your mind back a few months ago, we talked to the chair of the Electoral Commission, John Pullinger, early in the new year. We’ll put the links to these, listeners, in the show notes. And he was expressing concerns about the threats that our democracy faces and the need to get ahead of the curve, both with legislative and non-legislative measures.

Mark D’Arcy: And a lot of the issues that he was talking about are going to resurface in Parliament next week because the Representation of the People Bill is back before MPs for its Report and Third Reading stage. Report is when MPs can propose lots of amendments on the floor of the House to be voted on by the whole House. The Speaker has to select them, etc, etc. So it’s not a done deal that just because an amendment exists, it actually gets put to a vote. But there’s an awful lot going on in that bill. It includes all sorts of issues, everything from votes at 16 to whether voters should be automatically registered rather than having to proactively sign up to the electoral register, and much, much more.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And one of those, amendments is by the Labour MP Alex Sobel, chair of the All-Party [00:53:00] Group on Fair Votes. And Alex’s Amendment proposes a national commission on electoral reform. So we went along to have a chat with him.

Mark D’Arcy: Alex Sobel, welcome to the pod. The Representation of the People Bill seems at the moment to be falling into the kind of twilight zone between the reign of Keir Starmer and the reign of Andy Burnham that is yet to come. Therefore, there’s an interesting question about who’s in charge of it. Is this bill going to have someone deciding, yes, it definitively needs to be much tougher than it now is? Or is it languishing, waiting for someone perhaps at a later stage, perhaps in the House of Lords, to make any changes that are needed to be made?

Alex Sobel: It’s obviously best that we make all these decisions in the Commons where there is a clear Government majority and legitimacy because we are the elected House, and this is a bill about elections. So to have an unelected house make decisions about the electoral system is, in my view, constitutionally problematic. So it is best that we make those decisions in the [00:54:00] Commons rather than leaving it to the Lords. But there are lots of things in the bill with backbench amendments and government amendments on the Rycroft foreign interference issues, which do need to be put into the bill to strengthen it.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, I was going to come onto the Rycroft review. It was published earlier this week. The Government says it’s accepting all the recommendations for toughening up electoral law that Philip Rycroft has made. These amendments have only just emerged. So it is probably early days to ask if you are satisfied that the Government’s doing enough on this as chair of the all-party group.

Alex Sobel: First of all, it’s a bit difficult because they’ve published the amendments only two sitting days before we look at the bill for all remaining Commons stages, not just Report stage, we’re going to go to Third Reading, so it’s going to pass through the Commons. And so I haven’t had time to look through all and assess all of the amendments. Neither has the democracy sector. Hopefully we’ll have done that by Monday and we’ll see if they’re robust enough. I’m sure that they will get us a long way along, but [00:55:00] as we even see now there are loopholes. We had this cap on foreign donations, a £100,000 cap, and then the biggest foreign donor, who is obviously British, returned and put himself on the electoral register. And then the Government came to the House and gave an additional statement to try and close that loophole. And my concern is that even after we’ve done the remaining stages, we will still have loopholes. And it’s not always easy to work out where all the loopholes are, which is why I believe in some quite crosscutting things, making it more difficult. So a donation cap, a spending cap, and other measures, which means that it rounds out the Rycroft review, because some of these things were out of scope of Rycroft. And I absolutely think Philip Rycroft did a very thorough job, but he did it within the scope that it was given within the remit it was given.

Ruth Fox: What do you think are the things that are out of scope? And we had a conversation a few months ago with the chair of the Electoral [00:56:00] Commission, John Pullinger, and one of his concerns was that whole question of how you stay ahead of developments, stay ahead of the curve rather than always catching up. So things like crypto donations and cryptocurrency, donations to political parties, for example. Is it those kinds of things or can you see other things on the horizon?

Alex Sobel: It’s related because the Rycroft review is about foreign interference in our democratic system. Are we saying that the only interference in the democratic system is by people who are foreign? Are we saying there is no interference on democratic systems by people who are British citizens wherever they live in the world? I think that there is, and I think that we need to have rules that fall outside the scope of foreign interference. Cryptocurrency is a really good case in point because it is a system of financial transactions which are effectively untraceable. It’s used very extensively in the criminal world. It’s used for instance also by Russia in terms of its transactions, particularly in terms of fossil fuel sales [00:57:00] because they can evade sanctions that are put on it. So if we’re saying that a state like Russia can utilise that, then anybody can utilise it. And the Government’s argument, and I’m sure they’ll put this forward when we get to the amendments and Report stage, is that they’ll have these due diligence checks about the origins of the finance, so if somebody makes a large donation, that it’s very clear where that money has come from. But we’ve already had the Government shifting the goalposts because the donors shifted the goalposts and there’s absolutely no reason to think that they won’t be able to do that again, and it’ll fall outside of the scope of the amendments, which is why I’m very supportive of a donation cap.

Mark D’Arcy: And when we say interference in the electoral system, let’s just clarify exactly what we’re talking about here, what bad things are happening under that rubric?

Alex Sobel: I think it’s important actually to look at what’s happened in other countries, because in other countries the interference there is much greater than in ours, and I don’t think it’s good enough to say, oh well it happens there and it wouldn’t [00:58:00] happen here. It obviously could happen here. So for instance, in Moldova in their elections where they’ve taken a very clear pro-European, pro-Western, pro-Ukraine turn, and there was an attempt to turn them to a more pro-Russian turn, there was utilisation of digital currency apps to transfer money to people to effectively buy their votes. There was also very heavy utilisation of misinformation techniques on social media to influence people’s votes. The EU intervened and supported Moldova to ensure they had a free and fair election. But at the beginning of that, the Russians did things which were really obvious, like they just sent suitcases of money from Moscow. I’m not worried about that here. That’s not going to happen. But things like utilising crypto, misinformation, deep fakes, AI, all of those things are things that I’m concerned about. And we’ve seen British people acting on behalf [00:59:00] of Russia. Obviously we have a very clear case in Nathan Gill who’s gone to prison for it. And that was quite crude, but it happened. But there are much more sophisticated things, so we have to be very clear that the sophistication is going to ramp up exponentially.

Mark D’Arcy: So it’s not just “Moscow gold” anymore, it’s Moscow algorithms, Moscow cryptocurrency, not to mention other countries’ algorithms and cryptocurrency.

Alex Sobel: Yes, and I read a report the other day that the AI capabilities of Russia have been hugely underpriced in the West and they actually are much more agile than we thought, are much more advanced. So that is a real concern.

Ruth Fox: And do you think, in terms of what the Government’s planning, the proposals that the Government’s got for the bill, and possibly other regulations in future, that they’re quick enough off the mark in dealing with this? Or are we always playing catch up?

Alex Sobel: That’s what my concern is. And that is why I’ve tabled and other people have tabled donation cap amendments, because it’s like a cover over in terms of money. My colleague, Emily Darlington has put a whole suite of amendments down around AI, deep [01:00:00] fakes, misinformation, which I hope the Government supports, as well as the Rycroft amendments again, which I haven’t got full coverage over, but hopefully by Monday we’ll know if they are going to fully cover us.

Ruth Fox: And what would Emily Darlington’s amendments achieve in relation to AI?

Alex Sobel: I think the main amendment, NC41, that she’s keenest that the Government adopt, is around deep fakes, and responsibilities including other publishers around removal of deep fakes. It’s a funny thing because that falls between the Government departments, MHCLG and DCMS, and Ofcom, the regulator of communications, and obviously the Electoral Commission, the regulator of elections. And so I think there needs to be some more work there around the regulation and regulators working together. So it’s not just about legislation, it’s also about implementation.

Mark D’Arcy: Now, aside from dealing with the issue of foreign interference, a lot of people are attempting to use the Representation of the People Bill to tighten up other aspects of the electoral system, and indeed to change the [01:01:00] electoral system itself. Now you as the chair of the All-Party Group on Fair Votes have an amendment down which calls on the Government to consider the feasibility of setting up a commission to look at changing the electoral system. That’s not exactly the storming of the Winter Palace, is it?

Alex Sobel: Well, when we started on this, we thought to maximise support, we would put quite a soft amendment down for the Government. Because the Government’s stated position was that they didn’t support a commission. It was repeated by successive ministers from the front bench. And we obviously got that message from Downing Street as well. We are now in a situation where the Prime Minister has resigned. We are yet to know whether we’re going to have a contest, but it appears that it is highly unlikely. And then the incoming Labour leader, who will obviously become the Prime Minister, has been very clear that he supports a commission and said so repeatedly. But the important thing about a commission is that a commission does not need to be legislated for. The Jenkins Commission was not legislated for, which was the last time, [01:02:00] nearly 30 years ago, that we had a look at our very antiquated electoral system in the UK, in Westminster. So a Prime Minister could at any point announce a commission. This is just actually a way to signal support in Parliament and, although we’ve got another couple of days that people can sign it, we’ve got 175 members have signed it and 92 Labour Members of Parliament have signed it. This is the most supported amendment in this Parliament by a distance, to be honest. So it just shows that although there are obviously 650 MPs, you’re never going to get that sort of level because Government can’t sign backbench amendments, etc, etc, but that is very considerable support. It’s very hard to get that level of consensus across, I think we’re on eight different political parties, on any issue.

Ruth Fox: What would the roadmap look like if you do get the commission? If Andy Burnham comes in and says, yes, he’s been a longstanding advocate for proportional representation, changing the Westminster culture? [01:03:00] So you get the commission, is the intention for it to report, wrap up, so that you can get a commitment in the Labour Party manifesto? And if you get that, do you think that would mean if Labour won the next general election, you wouldn’t need a referendum? Or would you, do you think it’s, you’d still need that as well?

Alex Sobel: There’s a lot of hypotheticals there. Lots of ifs. So we obviously, in the APPG for Fair Elections, are concentrating on getting the commission agreed, set up, running and reporting. And our timescale is that we want all of that to happen within 12 months of the Prime Minister announcing it, and which I think is where we’ll end up as the Prime Minister to announce it rather than being in the legislation, which is preferable in fact. And at that point, we’ll need to look at the result of the commission. There is a chance, although I think it’s unlikely, that the commission report that our electoral system is great and we should just keep it as it is. So then there’ll be nothing to do. But if the commission proposes a change, then we’ll [01:04:00] have to look at how, why and when at that point.

Mark D’Arcy: Is there a game plan in mind where you get a lot of buy-in, it’s in the Labour manifesto, it’s in other parties’ manifestos, and therefore you get a critical mass of MPs after the next election, bada-bing, you’ve got a mandate to change the voting system then?

Alex Sobel: Obviously I’m an idealist in this. So my ideal is that all the political parties that are represented in Parliament now, because we have eight on the amendment, but there are, if you include all the Northern Ireland parties, at least another five, then we could get to the ones that don’t support change in the system would change their position as the Labour Party has done incrementally over the last few years. Because we recognise that in a multi-party system, having effectively a system which is designed for two parties is broken, and then you get very unrepresentative results. Once we’ve got that consensus, then anything can happen. Andy Burnham has ruled out an early general election, so we still have possibly even not quite three years, but almost three years until another general election. That [01:05:00] gives us plenty of time because we’re talking about 12 months it reporting and then another 18 months to two years before a general election. I’ll talk about what happens in that period in that period, I think, rather than now.

Mark D’Arcy: Is the driver for this, that a lot of Members of Parliament across all the parties really are looking at the current polls and thinking almost anything could happen at the next election with very slight fluctuations in who’s voting for who? You could have a hung Parliament, a very messy situation and a lot of them are thinking they could lose their seats, whereas they might not lose their seats under a PR system. Is this a just a sort of herd instinct for survival that’s perhaps driving more support for this even on the Labour benches than before?

Alex Sobel: I think for Labour MPs that’s definitely not the case. Because if you look, we’ve got over 400 MPs. There is no PR scenario where in a 650-member parliament Labour has over 400 MPs. Unless we move to 66% in the polls, which I don’t think Labour has ever been at 66% in the polls. So I [01:06:00] don’t think that this is about survival for Labour MPs. This is about, one, it’s about fairness, and two, it’s about the fact that the entire ecosystem has changed, including for people who are longstanding members of Parliament, the entire basis of the number of parties, the way that politics operates, the variations between even places quite close to each other in how they engage in the electoral system is entirely different. I’ve only been here nine years, but it feels very different for me and there’s colleagues that have been here since 1983, so I can’t imagine, in 1983 things were much simpler than they are now.

Ruth Fox: You say it feels very different. In what ways, reflecting when you first came in to now just give a sort of flavour.

Alex Sobel: Nearly every seat was a two-party contest, and it was obvious which the two parties were contesting the seat. That is not the case any more. There are some seats where you could easily have a four-party contest and the winner could [01:07:00] be elected on less than 20% of the vote. That is not democracy.

Mark D’Arcy: What is the attitude of the Government towards your amendment here? I mean we are hearing that Andy Burnham wants a kind of gentler whipping system. But have you been getting the knock on the door in the night about pushing this?

Alex Sobel: No, not at all. I’ve had really good engagement. Just the minister restates the government’s position that they don’t at this time support a national commission on electoral reform. That’s their position. We’ve had very cordial discussions. There’s been no pressure put on me to withdraw the amendment or anything like that.

Mark D’Arcy: Do they even see it as a useful debate to now be having?

Alex Sobel: That’s not really a conversation, I mean it is a debate that we are having. So that’s the reality of the situation. And they know that people will raise it on Tuesday. So they are prepared for that. Yes.

Ruth Fox: Can you just give our listeners a sense of when you have got an amendment like this and you’re trying to attract support on a cross-party basis, how do you go about it? Are you having lots and lots of meetings? Is it emails, is it messaging? Is it just drawing on your personal contacts? How does it work behind the scenes to get [01:08:00] that 170 MPs signed up?

Alex Sobel: Quite a lot of it’s organic, to be honest. There’s lots of people who signed who I didn’t even know supported changing the voting system. Or maybe they don’t really, but they want to explore it, because this is about exploration. This is about looking at whether the voting system is fair or is fit for purpose. So much of it is organic. Most of those people that have signed the amendment, I certainly haven’t asked them to sign. I haven’t got time to go around 175 people and ask them to sign an amendment. I’ve asked Labour MPs to sign, I have asked a few of the whips or the frontbench spokespeople in MHCLG, which is the area that this falls under, to ask their members to sign because it’s their party policy. And that has happened. Every Green, every SNP, every Plaid, they’ve all signed. The Lib Dems, there’s a vanishingly small number yet to sign, I’m confident that they will all have signed by the time we get to the end of it. And Labour colleagues, I’ve spoken to people, other [01:09:00] senior members of the APPG if you like or longstanding supporters of changing the voting system have spoken to colleagues, and actually what this has shown over the last couple of weeks is lots of Labour colleagues who previously haven’t expressed any support for changing the voting system, signing the amendment. So it is showing a shift.

Mark D’Arcy: In many ways, your amendment is a campaigning amendment. It is about a show of strength, giving the Government a nudge. An amendment that might make an immediate difference to the voting system is being proposed by your colleague Florence Eshalomi, who’s the chair of the Communities, Housing and Local Government Committee, where she’s wanting to speed up the move to automatic registration of voters so that people don’t have to go in and sign the forms and be harvested by canvassers from their local council to make sure that they’re signed up to the electoral register. It all happens with much more automaticity, perhaps through engagement with Gov.UK online.

Alex Sobel: It absolutely needs to happen. We’ve got a really antiquated system of electoral registration really based on [01:10:00] people choosing to, and local authorities undertaking that work. Automatic voter registration pilots have been done at pace and at quite an advanced stage in Wales. And the way that we collect data in England and Wales is the same. There are some slightly different rules of who’s eligible to vote in the Senedd than to Westminster. That’s absolutely true, but nothing insurmountable. So I think that Florence is absolutely right and that this needs to be done at scale and pace. And what I think people need to think about is that we’ve got a lot of people who live now in private rented accommodation, much more than in the past. And every year it grows, unfortunately, and those people move quite a lot. And elections in this country are not fixed. So it can easily happen, and I’ve had this on the doorstep where people go, I just moved, a week ago, whatever it was, and then they’re not eligible to vote. While if we introduced this system, we will not have people falling through the net and effectively being [01:11:00] denied their democratic rights because of bureaucracy.

Mark D’Arcy: And is there a sense of how many people we’re talking about here, does this make a really substantial difference to the number of people signed up on the electoral register?

Alex Sobel: I think so. My constituency’s got a particularly high and transient population. So I don’t have a national figure. I don’t think we quite know to be honest, but it will run into the millions.

Ruth Fox: Another issue that this bill addresses is to introduce votes at 16 for UK parliamentary elections, and local elections in England and Northern Ireland, I think. One of the concerns is whether or not there is going to be enough support for broadly citizenship education, political literacy, so that the 16, 17, 18 year olds who are coming on to the electoral register for the next election have got the information available and are able to feel confident to participate in the system. In your discussions with ministers and with colleagues and so on, what kind of view have you taken about that?

Alex Sobel: I’ve been a longstanding supporter of votes at 16 and 17, [01:12:00] and I think it’s a generational bias, people going, oh, young people aren’t prepared and ready to vote at 16 and 17, because actually citizenship education now is much better than when I was at school. Certainly much better than it was for somebody who’s 80 years old when they were at school. And just having an age qualification, it doesn’t mean that people have more knowledge than somebody who’s 16 or 17 because they’re effectively gone through a system where it’s preparing them to vote. And we need to remember again that this is going through now and the next general election won’t be for a while. So we have even more time to prepare people. And the other thing that I find, so my first general election, I was 22, and so effectively I missed one election by six weeks. Then I had to wait just under five years to vote. And that’s the other thing. So this is also about enfranchising more young people and not making them wait so long. So I went through a whole Parliament where lots of negative things were done to [01:13:00] me because the Conservative government won in that election. And obviously I’d have voted Labour and I had no say in it. I mean, obviously you have to have a cut-off, but effectively you are enfranchising more people not to have to wait for someone to be able to cast their vote. I think it is actually dreadful that some people don’t get to vote in a general election until they’re 22 years old.

Mark D’Arcy: Alex Sobel, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Alex Sobel: Thanks. It was great coming on.

Ruth Fox: Well Mark, that concludes our 150th episode. Can you believe it?

Mark D’Arcy: We were going to have cake, but really it’s just too hot here in Hansard Towers just at the moment.

Ruth Fox: I think it might be ice cream later on. Listeners, that is all we’ve got time for, but just a couple of housekeeping notes. Next week we will be recording a day later than normal, so we’ll be recording on Friday 17th July and it’ll hopefully be out, barring any technical gremlins, it’ll be out that evening, by which time we should know whether Andy Burnham definitely is going to be the next Prime Minister, even though we’re assuming he will be. And of course we might also know whether [01:14:00] England’s going to reach the World Cup final and whether or not we’re going to get a bank holiday and Keir Starmer is going to fly to America to watch the match. Possibly Andy Burnham as well, who knows.

Mark D’Arcy: Possibly delaying any chance of an exchange of power between the two of them.

Ruth Fox: You never know. That would be quite amusing.

Mark D’Arcy: Maybe it’ll take place at a stadium in North America. That’ll be interesting symbolism there.

Ruth Fox: We will see. But we’ll be back next Friday. And of course if you’ve got any questions, then do get them into us by next Friday so that we can have a go at trying to answer them. And if we don’t get to them next week, we’ll get to them over the summer recess.

Mark D’Arcy: Goodbye for now.

Ruth Fox: 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.