• UK Government, Sir Robert Buckland KC appointed to review the death of Sir David Amess, 23 March 2026

• House of Commons Speaker election hustings, YouTube, 15 June 2009

• Hansard Society, Rewiring politics: The danger of ill-considered House of Lords reform blowing a constitutional fuse, The Lord Speaker's Speech, 16 July 2026

• House of Lords Retirement and Participation Committee, Report of Session 2026-27, 15 July 2026

• UK Government, Political Peerages, 16 July 2026

• David Torrance, How is a Government formed?, House of Commons Library research briefing, 13 July 2026

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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: Following the murder of Ann Widdecombe, we speak to former lord chancellor Sir Robert Buckland, who’s leading a review of MP security, about what needs to change.

Mark D’Arcy: As 26 new peers are named by Sir Keir Starmer, the Lord Speaker tells the Hansard Society it’s time to clean up the process for appointments to the Upper House.

Ruth Fox: And the new government will emerge from its chrysalis next week. So what are the mechanics and the politics of the process? And what are the touchstones by which we should judge the new round of ministerial appointments?[00:01:00]

Mark D’Arcy: But Ruth, we begin today by looking at something incredibly sad and tragic that happened just after we’d finished recording last week, which was that the news broke of the death of Ann Widdecombe, former shadow Home Secretary, former Conservative minister, a very distinctive figure in the House of Commons for a number of years. I remember her making some absolutely barnstorming speeches in opposition to fox hunting when most of her party colleagues were very keen to stop the private members’ bills attempting to ban fox hunting, which happened in the early Blair-Brown years. It’s an awful event. We know now that she came to a violent end. The circumstances of that will depend on a police investigation, potentially a trial later on, we shall see what happens. But she was someone who had had a fair amount to do with the Hansard Society, it’s also fair to say.

Ruth Fox: Yes, when she was in Parliament, she stood down at the 2010 election, but she’d been in Parliament for, a good number of years before that, and she was very supportive. She [00:02:00] took part in a number of our events. You mentioned fox hunting. She took part in one of our, what was called a Heads-up Democracy Forum discussion with young people that we used to run for under eighteens. And she took part in one on animal cruelty. You ask her to take part in those kinds of discussions, she was always happy to engage in the debate. But my particular memory of her is in relation to the Speaker’s hustings in 2009, when Michael Martin, if you remember, he stood down, forced out really as Speaker because of the MPs’ expenses scandal. And there was then a lot of people putting their name forward to be Speaker to succeed him. And the whole question was about, how does Parliament, the House of Commons, need to change, need to reform to address the issues that had been raised. And Ann Widdecombe had already decided that she was leaving Parliament at that point. She planned to leave at the 2010 general election, and she was persuaded by a number of her [00:03:00] colleagues to throw her hat in the ring on a temporary basis to be a temporary Speaker, to fix some of the problems before the general election so that somebody coming in new would then have a fresh slate, but as an experienced parliamentarian she could address a number of the problems. She threw her hat in the ring, and as you know, we talked on the podcast before Mark, we hosted the first ever public hustings for that Speaker election. And in fact, we pitched it as a meeting about parliamentary reform. So it didn’t officially start out as hustings. And there were in the end, I think, 10 candidates.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, John Bercow was obviously the eventual winner, but yes, Ann Widdecombe was a very distinctive presence in that slate of candidates.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well, she almost wasn’t, because initially she, when we contacted her, when we knew that she was throwing her hat in the ring, her diary secretary told me that she’d got another engagement and wouldn’t be able to make it. And pretty much everybody had at that point accepted. We’d struggled to get hold of Margaret [00:04:00] Beckett, because she didn’t use email in those days. Those were the days. So we had a situation where Margaret and Ann were the two we didn’t know about. Margaret, we got hold of her and she agreed to participate. And there was a huge amount of tension around this because it was a new thing. There’d never been a sort of public meeting of the candidates for Speaker, generally speaking it was a pick behind the scenes made by the party leaders. This was going to be a more open contest. So there was a lot of press coverage. And that morning of the hustings I did quite a number of media appearances and obviously was asked about who the candidates were that were taking part. And I basically had to say, we’ve got everybody but Ann Widdecombe. And not long after I left the studio, I got a phone call from Ann to say, okay Ruth, I’m going to adjust my diary and I’ll be there. So I don’t think she was a fan of the idea of the hustings, I have to say I don’t think she thought it was necessarily a good idea. But again, she was a pretty [00:05:00] barnstorming performance at the event and she had some really good ideas, very much Hansard Society-type ideas about how to reform the Commons and the legislative process.

Mark D’Arcy: Let’s hear what she said.

Ann Widdecombe: The second thing which I think we have to do is to shift the balance, and most people have agreed with that this afternoon, from the executive to Parliament. I have been committed to that. From the moment I entered Parliament, I rebelled against my own government. In one case, actually joining up with Dennis Skinner, in order to protect backbench rights when, regrettably with success, the then government was proposing to stop Backbenchers doing a raft of things which they’d always been able to do, including putting down business motions in the House. And similarly, under the current government, I have steadily opposed timetabling, and on one occasion, even led something of a sit-in that – why do I say something of a sit-in, it [00:06:00] was a sit-in! – in a committee, to try and prevent it leaving with so much of its work still undiscussed. It is quite wrong that we are governed, I say we, the population are governed by increasing tranches of legislation that have not been debated by Parliament, let alone been voted on by Parliament. So in the remaining 30 seconds, which I have just been tactfully told that I have left, I have support on both sides. I have consistently demonstrated independence. Tally-ho, if any of you doubt it. and I think we must concentrate on two aims: to restore the reputation of Parliament with the public, and to shift the balance sensibly in favour of Backbenchers. Thank you.

Mark D’Arcy: Ann Widdecombe at the Hansard Society Hustings back in 2009. And of course this whole horrible chain of events has revived concern about the [00:07:00] safety of public figures, MPs of course, but beyond that other public figures, because Ann Widdecombe was not an MP or indeed a peer. She was though the Reform Party’s immigration spokesman in their shadow Cabinet. So she was someone who was in public life. And the system for protecting people in an increasingly hostile environment for public figures has come under renewed scrutiny. And that scrutiny is being led by the former lord chancellor Sir Robert Buckland, now out of Parliament, but an MP for 16 years. And we spoke to him about his review of MPs’ security, which is still continuing, and will report at some point in the future, and the concerns that he had discovered since he began looking at the operation of the current system.

Robert Buckland: The review is ongoing, Mark, and I was asked to look independently into the circumstances leading to the appalling murder of Sir David Amess back in 2021. There have been various reviews done [00:08:00] about the Prevent system, which is obviously relevant to that case. And I have been asked to independently review the whole factual circumstances. The family of David Amess have been consulted, and although they still want a full public inquiry, they’re very happy that I’m involved in this capacity. And as we were developing the terms of reference for the review, it became clear to me some time ago that actually looking at MP security more generally would be germane. And as a result of that, the Home Secretary and I, prior to the killing of Ann Widdecombe, had agreed to this second limb of my review. And indeed the work is ongoing. So it’s still relatively early days, but I hope to produce a report later this year into both aspects of the review.

Mark D’Arcy: Of course there is renewed concern after the awful case of Ann Widdecombe about the safety of figures in public life, MPs, ex-MPs, and of course plenty of other people as well. Do you [00:09:00] get the impression from what you’ve seen so far that the system we’ve got is fit for purpose?

Robert Buckland: Well, the system has changed, and I will give credit where credit’s due. I noticed in my 14 years in Parliament, quite a ramp-up in security efforts, particularly in the years after Jo Cox’s killing, and then more markedly so after David’s murder, to the extent that Parliament then decided to fund greater security measures for MPs, both in their offices in their constituencies, and in their homes. And that was welcome. And I think that since then there’s been improved training and awareness, but I’m not getting a sense that we are there yet. I still think that there is more that needs to be done, more in a proactive sense that needs to be done, in terms of equipping and preparing not just MPs, but their families and indeed staff who work for them to deal with the realities of the almost weekly threats, in some cases daily, that accompany [00:10:00] life as a Member of Parliament nowadays.

Mark D’Arcy: And what are the effects on the politician’s family?

Robert Buckland: I don’t think you can underestimate the effect on a politician’s family. A lot of us when we went into public, like me included, were very careful not to use family in any publications or literature or promotional material or on websites, which is very tempting for politicians who want to show that they’re normal people with family responsibilities living in their community. But there is a price to be paid for that because once you put your, particularly your children’s, identities into the public domain, frankly it’s open season. It’s not that long ago that, Euan Blair’s now a grown man and a successful man in his own right, but as a young man, he was thrust into the limelight by his father on the steps of Number 10. And then of course was himself the subject of journalism about the drinking habits of a teenager. Really difficult stuff. And it was that case that [00:11:00] really brought home to me the need for me to protect very vigorously the identity of my children, which I’ve managed to do. You wouldn’t be able to pick them out in the cloud. You wouldn’t know who they are. There’s nothing on the internet about them. There are no pictures of them, and there are no pictures of my wife either. I was absolutely jealous in my guarding of their privacy because they hadn’t chosen to go into public life. I think a lot of politicians take that route, I know Iain Duncan Smith did with his children, even when he was leader of the Conservative Party. Those colleagues who’ve chosen the other route, I think have found some difficulty being able to divorce their family away from the glare of publicity. People need to really think it through before they deploy their families into public life.

Ruth Fox: And Robert, we’ll get into the details about how those might be addressed in a minute. But just before we go there, can you give us a sense of the scale, your assessment of the scale? You said it’s MPs, it’s their staff, [00:12:00] we know it’s in-person threats, it’s online threats. What’s your assessment of the scale and the volume and the nature of it?

Robert Buckland: Yes, in broad terms, my assessment is that the problem has grown. I think it’s grown markedly since the rise of social media. I think there are particular parts of social media that are worse than others. I think X is a particular problem in the sense that it does tend to spew up quite a lot of very, very nasty and often criminal content. I think that women are more exposed than men, and that’s led to not just physical threats, but sexualised threats in particular towards women. I think that with the rise of ease of accessing communications to MPs has become a rise in the sort of kneejerk hostility that can have a real effect on staff and MPs’ morale. One threat is one thing, but to get a constant drumbeat of threats, even low-level [00:13:00] abuse, can really grind down MPs and their staff and make them feel that the world is just not a very friendly place, and that being an MP might not even be worth the candle any more. It’s as bad as that. And therefore, I think that sitting back and minimising the problem and saying, “we’re doing enough, we don’t need to do any more, nothing to see here, move on”, is not an adequate answer for the scale of the challenge that we face.

Mark D’Arcy: Is there still a tendency for officialdom to dismiss this, “oh for heaven’s sake, it’s just some sad keyboard warrior sitting in his attic in his underpants firing off threats in the small hours of the morning and no one should take this stuff seriously”?

Robert Buckland: I think, I’m afraid, there’s an element of that. I think unless you’ve been the subject of it and live with it, it’s difficult to fully appreciate the effect it has psychologically and mentally on you. I think to all the colleagues I’ve spoken to who have left Parliament, me included, in the last two years, not only was there a sense of release, but there was a sense that a burden had been lifted from one’s [00:14:00] shoulders in not having to deal with that type of abuse any more. Not being the subject of insulting or worse behaviour. Not the sort of vigorous debate that frankly MPs need to have and should be exposed to, and that means vigorous scrutiny as well, but just gratuitous criminal behaviour that needs to be better policed and needs to be better dealt with.

Mark D’Arcy: One feature of the debate around these things is that you get one side of any given argument, accusing the other side of being the sole originator of this. “This all comes from the left.” “No, this all comes from the right.” “No, this all comes from Brexiteers.” “No, this all comes from Remainers.” Whatever the argument is, one side is always accusing the other of being the bad guy while claiming to be the good guys themselves.

Robert Buckland: That’s right. And in the middle of all that noise, it’s very difficult to work out precisely what is going on. I think the truth is that extremes of whatever tendency, and the old terms left and right often don’t do a [00:15:00] service to the extremes, very often, they’re based upon identity and socioeconomic issues that actually do not conform with the ideological divides of the 20th century. Then the actual reality is lost. The reality is that extremes breed bad behaviour. They breed intolerance, they breed intemperance. They breed the sort of, frankly, very un-British way of doing political debate, and the British way of debating is to disagree agreeably, sometimes vigorously, and I can think of no better proponent than Ann Widdecombe. She was a robust debater. I debated with her many times, both as a student and then as a politician myself latterly. She was on the other side of the floor from me quite often, and we took part together in radio programmes like Any Questions. She was robust, but she was unfailingly courteous, unfailingly respectful, unfailingly generous, just like the good Christian woman that she was. Now, if Ann was with us today, [00:16:00] she would be appalled to think that those traditions, that tradition of open democracy where people can disagree in a proper way is going to be lost because of what happened to her and others. That’s not the message I think that Ann or David or Jo Cox would want to see come out of this, because what it means is that those people who seek to undermine our democracy, who hate our way of life, win. Through intimidation, through the bullet, through the knife, through the bomb, they win and the ballot box loses out. And that clearly is not a desirable state of affairs at all.

Ruth Fox: But nor is doing nothing, Robert, so what are the kinds of solutions that we might be looking at? Because one of them is that maybe all MPs need some form of increased security. And obviously there’s a sliding scale of security that’s available, but the prospect of the police being able to give personal protection to 650 MPs and possibly politicians outside Parliament, because [00:17:00] of course Ann was a shadow member of the Reform shadow Cabinet, immigration spokesperson, but she wasn’t actually in Parliament. So we are trying to have to pick up other figures in the parties as well. The scale of resourcing of that, not just the cost, the cost is one issue, but it’s a separate issue. It could, at a cost level, it could be done, but the scale of policing that would be necessary for it is enormous. So what are the options?

Robert Buckland: Look, I think calls for every MP to have bodyguards are just wholly impractical and also change the nature of our democracy itself. Representative democracy in Britain has prided itself on the accessibility of MPs to their constituents. The relationship that an MP has with their constituents based upon the constituency system is huge. I felt it strongly in my 14 years. I know colleagues feel the same. If you put a barrier between the MP and the people in their communities, that I think changes the nature of representative democracy itself. Having said that, there [00:18:00] are circumstances already where MPs are getting an enhanced degree of security paid for by Parliament because of the nature of the threats that they face. I think that’s right, but I think it needs to be made transparently clear upon what basis situations are escalated to warrant that type of security. Now, that’s not about naming individual MPs, because there are sensitivities around that are quite clearly the case. But I think we need to move from a system of opt-in to one of almost opt-out, where I think the default position is that the addresses of MPs, means by which their identity or whereabouts can be pieced together, are kept away from public disclosure, so that already it becomes much more difficult as a matter of course to track MPs and where they live and where they go. And I think that involves training as well. I think that the reality is that perhaps the old days of just having [00:19:00] totally open surgeries with no checks on who’s coming in on the electoral role, who they are, I think those days are gone.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s one of the most obvious pressure points on this whole debate, isn’t it? Because if you look at the various cases we’ve had in the past, David Amess was attacked at his constituency surgery. Jo Cox was attacked just outside her constituency surgery. If you look back a little bit further, I think Stephen Timms was stabbed while conducting a constituency surgery. But the list goes on. This is the most obvious place where MPs are vulnerable, precisely the point at which they’re trying to meet their constituents.

Robert Buckland: Correct. And I felt it acutely. Now, I started my MP work in 2010 with open surgeries, didn’t give a thought to security. Sitting in quite small rooms in community centres, often perhaps furthest away from the door. My staff, the only barrier between me and somebody who wished me ill, I didn’t give it a second thought. By the time I came towards the end of my period in Parliament, I had security guards at every constituency [00:20:00] surgery because I was worried about me and I was worried about the staff. And that was the seachange. Those security facilities were paid for by Parliament. And I felt that there was no alternative if I wanted to run genuinely open surgeries.

Mark D’Arcy: And what was the impact on your constituents when they were coming to visit you, when they saw basically uniformed security guards or un-uniformed security guards, protecting you?

Robert Buckland: Well, they weren’t uniformed. I think that the way it was done was subtle and careful. I don’t detect any sense that people were put off by it. It was very important to me that I saw only constituents. So we were always very clear about any comers to the surgery. They had to show where they lived and who they were and that they were on the electoral roll. And frankly, I think ID is probably going to be an essential part of this as well, so that everybody knows who they are. In the case of David Amess, the evidence emerged that the perpetrator [00:21:00] deceived the staff by pretending that he had just moved into the constituency and gave an address and postcode that was a plausible one and a real one. But clearly those checks proved to not reveal the fraudulent nature of his attendance and obviously his intentions, which were murderous. And I think that should make everybody sit up and think about better ways in which constituents are identified and that only genuine constituents are then seeing their MP. And if that means that they turn up to a constituency surgery and are not able to see the MP without it, that might be one particular requirement that should be adhered to in order to prevent the sort of devious and fraudulent behaviour that we saw in the case of David Amess.

Ruth Fox: One of the things, Robert, that I think I’ve taken from the discussions around this issue where MPs have talked about it publicly and in debates in the House of [00:22:00] Commons, is that there’s a feeling that the response is perhaps uneven from the authorities, particularly from the police, that some MPs have had a very good response and others feel let down. And one of the issues I think is that, for example, if you face an online threat, a death threat, for example, and you report it to the police, it goes to the local police constabulary because you have to report it via your domestic address. So for example, if you’re an MP in Devon and Cornwall, it would be that police force that would be picking it up. If you’re in the West Midlands, it would be that police force. And some of these forces are bigger than others, they’ve got more expertise in certain areas, they’ve got more resources. Is there a case for actually saying that we need a dedicated, almost police command structure, to deal with this at a national level rather than leaving it to localised responses?

Robert Buckland: I don’t want to cast aspersions upon [00:23:00] diligent local police forces like mine here in Wiltshire, where I had a very good relationship with senior police officers as part of what we call Operation Bridger, which is the operation that covers MPs’ security and threats to them. But there is no doubt that the response does vary, and I think the time has come for a much more national coordinated response to threat. This is frankly, a counter terror issue, a security issue. When an elected representative in Westminster is injured or worse, that strikes at the heart of our democracy. I think it demands a national response, and I think there should be a particular hotline. I think there should be specified points of contact for MPs and their staff, and there should be no question that when a concern is raised, that it is looked at quickly and dealt with expeditiously. Look, I think the events of recent days bear my view out very strongly, where we saw a local police force trying to conduct an inquiry, saying things that they really [00:24:00] shouldn’t have said about the nature of the attack because they didn’t know, and then having to backtrack when of course further inquiries revealed that there was more to this than met the eye. And I’m afraid it illustrates the point that frankly, where politicians and figures like this in the political area are involved, this requires a national response.

Mark D’Arcy: And we’ve seen in previous incidents an MP has been killed or injured in these kind of circumstances, there’s been quite a shockwave through Parliament. With Ann Widdecombe, what’s your experience of the response? Did you feel as, as I think Nadine Dorries put it, a gut-punch feeling when this happened?

Robert Buckland: Well, I felt as if somebody had, I was brought up short, I stopped in my tracks when I’d heard about Ann dying. And I was extremely sad to hear that because she’d been a friend of many years. And then when I was told that in fact it was a criminal inquiry, I was absolutely gobsmacked. And it led to me thinking all sorts of things about the nature of Ann’s life. the way that [00:25:00] she, not so much courted publicity, she was very relaxed living in the public eye and very open about her life and where she lived. And that openness in the sense that everybody knew where she was – she even named her house Widdecombe’s Rest – made her quite an easy target. That caused me huge distress that a blameless woman of indefatigable demeanour who said what she believed in and said it with style and great conviction, should meet her end in this way. Obviously I’m not going to speculate about the details. We’re still waiting to hear the detail of this inquiry, but I think has made all of us, and even people perhaps who didn’t know Ann, like I did, stop in our tracks and ask ourselves the question, what sort of democracy are we becoming if this sort of behaviour can happen?

Mark D’Arcy: And is this going to be something that scares people out of politics or deters people from entering politics in [00:26:00] the first place?

Robert Buckland: I’m afraid to say, I think it does. I think it’s already happening now. I think a lot of very talented men and women are saying to themselves, “Why would I put myself, and more importantly, why would I put my family, through this risk if I go into public life? I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to be safe.” These are fundamental questions, very different from questions of remuneration. There’s lots of talk about the remuneration of MPs and we won’t necessarily get into that today. Very often MPs just get on with it and get involved anyway. Security and safety, that’s a whole different level. And I do think that has a real chilling effect on the willingness of people to step forward into public life. God knows we need men and women of quality and talent helping to run our country. If this is the result, that we end up with a whole s swathe of talented people not coming into public life, we’re all going to be poor as a result. And I think in the back of the mind of the extremist, of the perpetrator of [00:27:00] crime, they know this. And that’s why they’re attacking the system in the way they’re doing. So they want to make it difficult. They want to obstruct, they want to prevent politicians from expressing the democratic power that they’ve been given. They want to undermine democracy, and it’s our job not to let them.

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

Robert Buckland: Thank you.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Robert.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, Ruth, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll be looking at recent developments in the House of Lords where there’s an awful lot going on.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: And we’re back. And Ruth, this week the Hansard Society played host to the Lord Speaker, Lord Forsyth. It’s almost his first big speech about the future of the House of Lords, and he used it to warn against the dangers of constitutional tinkering, especially with respect to the House of Lords. There are all sorts of rumours that Prime Minister Burnham has House of Lords reform in his sights in some way, although no one quite knows what he might or [00:28:00] might not intend. But Lord Forsyth had this to say:

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: There’s been talk recently about rewiring our constitutional arrangements. This is an ambition I applaud. Those entrusted with power must always ensure that the system is fit for the modern age, but they must do it on the basis of sound evidence of what works. Any electrician would tell you, if you get your wires crossed, you may be in for a nasty shock. The House of Lords is a kind of constitutional trip switch, forcing a reset on bad laws which have not been properly considered by the elected house. Anyone advocating rewiring politics needs to consider very carefully, will the new system keep the lights on? Or will it blow a constitutional fuse?

Mark D’Arcy: So Ruth, you were presiding over that meeting. What do you think Lord Forsyth is getting at there?

Ruth Fox: Well, I think it was a shot across the bows, if you like, of the incoming Burnham government. Andy Burnham has talked [00:29:00] about rewiring politics, as you say. He’s talked also about House of Lords reform, and we know he’s an advocate of changes to the Upper House, but what form will they take? And I think the view that possibly the Gordon Brown proposals of a few years ago, from an assembly of nations and regions, might be something that is on his agenda. One of the points that the Lord Speaker was essentially making is you have to think very carefully about how you bring people into the House and what kind of model you have. And he clearly did not object at all, in fact was an advocate of greater geographical balance in the House. But if the way of doing it is through, for example, election rather than appointment as now, then he was making a point that given the range of people in the Upper House who have great expertise in their particular professional areas, are these the kinds of people that are going to stand for election?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. He’s very worried about, would super duper [00:30:00] senior lawyers, of which there are many in the House of Lords, wish to do anything as vulgar as run for election? Would leading scientists, leading academics, the Astronomer Royal, who he cited on a couple occasions, senior military officers from the past, all those kind of people, major figures in business, would they be prepared to, get down and dirty on the hustings in the way that Members of the House of Commons do? And I think his answer to that was no.

Ruth Fox: And I think my answer to that is probably no too.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And thereby you lose a lot of expertise. And the point about the House of Lords is it is quite consciously a part-time house. If you are a peer, you’re not expected to be there the whole time weighing in on every debate, you come in for the stuff that concerns you and that you have something to offer on. And Lord Forsyth’s argument is that is absolutely critical to the House of Lord’s constitutional role in scrutinising laws sent to it by the Commons, and perhaps finding problems with it, and therefore sending those laws back so that they can be tweaked to avoid the problems their Lordships have identified.

Ruth Fox: Yes, [00:31:00] and I think he was also making the point that, if you were to move to an elected House, you have then got to address the question of, what would happen if that House thought it had an electoral mandate equal to the House of Commons? And that you get then the constitutional tensions between the two Houses. And he alluded to problems in America with that example.

Mark D’Arcy: Washington-style gridlock.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think the point he was making above all was, these are not new issues. These are not new questions. But he was basically saying to the Burnham government, okay, if this is the direction of travel you want to go in, fine, but you have to answer these questions. You can’t ignore them. You’ve got to answer these questions.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And that’s one of the things about House of Lords reform. People often start off from the point of view of who’s in it rather than what do they do, and how it actually works inside the kind of lawmaking ecosphere of Westminster. So that’s a point that people really do need to keep in mind when they actually come to playing constitutional wendy houses, if you like, it is, what are you going to put in them? And that’s point one on [00:32:00] all this. The second thing that strikes me about this is I think it would be bonkers for Prime Minister Burnham to set out his stall for really major league Lords reform. It takes 18 months, that’s almost the rest of your term, taken up with legislating about constitutional issues that most people frankly don’t care about. If you’ve been brought in by Labour MPs, as he has, to turn around their electoral fortunes, I think frittering your time away on constitutional issues that most people flatly don’t care about., you can always come up with a poll saying 76% of people think an elected House of Lords is necessary, but on the Richter scale of things that the voters actually care about, I don’t think it moves that many votes. And I think what Labour MPs are expecting from their new leader is things that do move votes.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think that’s true in terms of what Labour MPs will want. Having said that, I think there’s an awful lot of Labour MPs, particularly after the assisted dying bill experience, who think that the unelected nature of the House of Lords is just a democratic outrage. And therefore, from their perspective, [00:33:00] they might be quite happy to put the boot in. I don’t think spending time on constitutional – what was the phrase you used? – fritting away, frittering away time on constitutional issues, is necessarily wrong.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s probably not a view to express on the Hansard Society podcast. I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong. I’m saying that tactically, in the moment, this is not what Labour MPs who’ve just replaced Prime Minister Starmer with Prime Minister Burnham are going to expect their leader to be doing.

Ruth Fox: No, he is going to face a huge range of issues and ultimately he’s got to sort out the economy and get growth, and work out what he’s going to do with the finances. When so many of the taxation issues and the cuts to public spending that are coming in the latter end of this Parliament, how is he going to deal with that without breaching the fiscal rules and so on? There’s so much on his plate, not to mention the international situation that I think if he were to prioritise House of Lords reform, frankly it would be madness.

Mark D’Arcy: I think there would be absolute horror if that became [00:34:00] the major priority. But we are talking here, big-ticket House of Lords reform. We’re talking about creating the Gordon Brown-style Senate of the Nations or Regions, that kind of thing. If you are going for some smaller tweaks, there are plenty of options available that could be done relatively straightforwardly. He could, for example, follow through on this idea that’s been floated this week of giving the regional and big city mayors automatic seats in the House of Lords. That hasn’t been a fully fleshed out proposal, but it sounds to me as if, rather like the bishops, you would hold that seat while you were in the office and then leave it when you weren’t. And the other subject that might well be quite easily tackled is one that Lord Forsyth talked about as well in his speech, which is cleaning up the appointments process to the House of Lords so that there were less just pure prime ministerial patronage and the people who were put in the Lords had the requisite skills, seniority, prestige, powers, and abilities to make them good legislators for life.

Ruth Fox: Yes, he [00:35:00] essentially said that the House of Lords Appointments Commission ought to be able to make more independent appointments on merit rather than more members coming in through prime ministerial patronage. And I think that’s got to be right. If you want expertise and you want merit, then that’s a route to go down. And it is interesting that the number of Peers that have been appointed through that process over the last 10 years has dropped dramatically compared to the previous period.

Mark D’Arcy: Remember the people’s Peers.

Ruth Fox: And do you remember, of course, apparently Martin Lewis, the financial consumer champion, probably one of the most popular people in the country, I think he probably could run for president, he apparently applied to be a people’s peer and didn’t get accepted. So there’s certainly scope, I think for, more appointments down that route. But interestingly, the speech last night happened on the same day that the Prime Minister announced a list of 26 new peers, which as the law Speaker pointed out, that increased the size of the House of Lords by 3% in one go. And one of them, of course was Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. [00:36:00]

Mark D’Arcy: Well you brought in one obvious person there, and I wonder if that clears the way for somebody else to run for Mayor on Labour’s behalf at the next mayoral elections. Who knows? But that’s another subject for another day. But it’s a perfectly distinguished, perfectly acceptable looking list of people who were, for example, senior economists, people who had taken roles in representing victims and other groups, people with legal expertise. So the kind of people who probably ought to be in the House of Lords. But the point is that these, once again, it’s an exercise in prime ministerial patronage. I think the Conservatives had a number of peers there, including a relatively recently retired senior General. So there are some people in there who are exactly the sort of people you’d expect to be put in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Yes. and Mark you mentioned the senior General. We’ve actually had, hot off the press, We’ve had a question in this morning to the podcast from Ollie Hibben. So thank you, Ollie. He asked why was an army officer, Patrick Sanders, appointed as a Conservative Peer, not on the Crossbenches, in the last round of [00:37:00] peerages this week. Is there no precedent, like for the judiciary or civil service?

Mark D’Arcy: It’s not unheard of for military officers to suddenly discover a party political affiliation. You don’t have to look very far for that. Look at Al Carns, for example, recently resigned minister.

Ruth Fox: But he resigned.

Mark D’Arcy: Sure you can’t do it as a serving military officer, but once you’ve left the Army, Navy, or Air Force, you certainly can. And people have, think of Admiral West, Lord West of Spithead, who was appointed as Security Minister under Gordon Brown, for example. Think of Dan Jarvis, and Tom Tugendhat. And there are lots of people who’ve had military service on their record, who have gone on to have political careers in various different parties. So nothing unusual or untoward about that. It certainly would be dodgy for a serving military officer to suddenly grow a party political affiliation, but once you’re out, you’re out.

Ruth Fox: You said there’s nothing wrong with the list, and at one level no. But I thought, of the 26, 16 of the appointments were Labour [00:38:00] peers, and I think pretty much with the exception of Martin McTague, who is Tom McTague’s father, I believe he is Editor of the New Statesman. Martin McTague is National Chair of the Federation of Small Business. But I think apart from that, most of the people on that list are people in politics or in the public sector service rather than business, for example.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose I’m immediately thinking that’s a perfectly natural set of Labour appointees. But yes, you could do with more business people in the House of Lords. Undoubtedly.

Ruth Fox: Interestingly, the Liberal Democrats got more appointments than the Conservatives. They got five, the Conservatives got three. I think on the Lib Dem side, an interesting appointment is Dr Tim Leunig, who’s an economist, visiting professor at LSE, but was also an economics adviser in the Treasury to Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Prime Minister.

Mark D’Arcy: And I saw several Conservative MPs on Twitter singing his praises and saying what a great appointment he was. So they may be disappointed. He’s sitting as a Liberal Democrat, but he’s in the Lords and they think he should be.[00:39:00]

Ruth Fox: David Ross, the businessman, I suppose the most prominent businessman on the list, entrepreneur, philanthropist, co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, which is an interesting appointment. But then the two Crossbench Peers took my eye. Sir Chris Wormald, former Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Civil Service. Indeed. He basically got sacked.

Mark D’Arcy: He was Cabinet Secretary for about three femtoseconds before Keir Starmer got tired of him and pushed him out the door.

Ruth Fox: Yes, and pushed him into the House of Lords. And then the other one is Sir Brian Leveson, who of course led the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking.

Mark D’Arcy: A very interesting choice indeed. And you wonder if he might have a few things to say based on the experience of that inquiry once he’s sitting on the red benches.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Those appointments, they’ve been announced. They will presumably come into the House in September onwards. And I think you get two or three appointments per week usually in the Lords. So there’ll be a rotating list of new entrants.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, there’s that little ceremony where they have to read out their oath of allegiance and so forth in full regalia in front of the House. But I go back to a point that was made by Michael [00:40:00] Crick, who of course we’ve had on the pod a couple of times, and normally surveys new legislators in the shape of new MPs. And he makes the point that these are mostly people who’ve been chosen by political party leaders to be put in to be legislators for life with pretty much no scrutiny at all. We don’t really know much about them apart from their public record, which may be quite a lot. But there isn’t a scrutiny process that the public sees before suddenly – bada-bing! – they are legislators for life. And he’s not happy at all with that process. And Michael’s a strong observer of this and has spent quite a lot of time looking at who gets into Parliament and who tomorrow’s MPs are going to be. And I think he’s possibly now beginning to extend that activities to the House of Lords as well. He’s going to be a busy man.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The other notable thing about the list, of course, is no Peers for Reform. Or indeed the Green Party. But the Greens have got a few already.

Mark D’Arcy: And to be honest, I think Reform have good reason to gripe about this.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I think so.

Mark D’Arcy: The Green Party started getting peers when it started doing reasonably [00:41:00] well, polling 20 percent-ish in national elections, things like elections for the European Parliament, way back in the day when we still elected people to the European Parliament. And at that point the then Labour government started to think, maybe they should have some peers then. And lo and behold, you got Jenny Jones, and suddenly there were Green parliamentarians in the Upper House again. Now that is a principle that I think ought to be, in fairness, applied to Reform. Reform should have the chance to nominate at least a few peers off the back of the fact that they’re doing pretty well in national elections. It seems only fair and reasonable that should happen, and it hasn’t. And I think it’s probably boiling down to the fact that Labour don’t want to give a platform to a quite serious and threatening enemy.

Ruth Fox: But that’s the problem with patronage by the Prime Minister. He shouldn’t get to decide that solely on his own bat.

Mark D’Arcy: And I think there ought to be some kind of formula on that. And we ought to talk too, Ruth, incidentally, about the other big development in House of Lords-land this week, which is the [00:42:00] emergence of the Taylor report, the report by the boss of the Hansard Society, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, on the retirement age for peers, and whether there should be a sort of automatic process where you drop off the conveyor belt out of the Lords at a certain point.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I should just say for the record, Baroness Taylor has just stepped down as our chair. She’s not technically my boss any more. She’s going to be on the board for a transition period for a few months, but she’s stepping down. She was tasked with the vexed question of leading a committee to look at proposals for this retirement age and a participation requirement in the House of Lords. This goes back to the Labour manifesto where, out of the blue, to the surprise of many people in the democracy sector, was this commitment that peers should retire at 80. And the sense was, it hadn’t been particularly well thought through, and how that was going to be done. Not least because Labour peers were the most affected group because of the age profile.

Mark D’Arcy: The age profile, because essentially the bit of potted history here is that Labour have just come out of a process of 14 years where appointments to the House [00:43:00] of Lords were made by a Conservative government. And Labour really didn’t get that many extra Peers nominated. And the Conservatives nominated rather a lot of Peers for themselves, which is one reason why they didn’t get many peers in the latest list. Labour are seeking to redress the balance. Of course, the more Conservatives are appointed, the harder that is for them to do. So there’s that going on in the background. But the other side effect of that, of course, is that the most of the Labour peers are of a certain older vintage, shall we say.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And there’s also this sort of commitment through the Hereditary Peers Bill, the passage of that. So we need to sort out these issues about how people leave the House. So she’s been chairing this committee for many months, looking at the options and looking at best practice, and when other legislatures do. And there’s two central proposals. One is a mandatory retirement age of 80, which will be fully introduced by 2034. The idea is you have a kind of sliding scale through to 2034, by which time everybody who’s reached 80 will go. By that [00:44:00] time, at least on current membership, 375 current members of the House, so about 47% of the House, would be over 80 by that date, July 2034, so would be affected by the retirement age. So essentially you’ve got transitional measures to get to that point, to avoid the prospect of a cut-off and a huge number of peers having to leave at the same time.

Mark D’Arcy: You’re trying to avoid phrases like Cliff Edge.

Ruth Fox: I am.

Mark D’Arcy: And this again, is, where you hit a, a kind of one-size-fits-all rule. In the speech that we’ve been talking about, Lord Forsyth cited the case of Lord Judge, the patron saint of nominative determinism, Igor Judge, the former Lord Chief Justice of England, who was the leader of the Crossbenches for quite a long time, and a very senior figure in the House of Lords for quite a while before that, who was active in the House of Lords into his 90s. And was a formidable figure in the House of Lords, a fantastically nice man. I used to occasionally come [00:45:00] across him having coffee in Portcullis House, the parliamentary office block by Westminster Bridge. He would chat to anybody and he always had interesting things to say, and he was very active, almost up to the time of his final illness. Of course he’s now the late Lord Judge, unfortunately. But he was someone who made a huge contribution well beyond the mooted cut-off point of 80. And so there is a potential here for you to be losing people who could still be doing something very useful within the parliamentary system.

Ruth Fox: These proposals will obviously have to be adopted by the House. Some of them might be done by resolutions, changes to Standing Orders, some of it might require legislation depending upon the approach adopted and what the government wants to do. But essentially what would happen on this is that the proposals will be implemented from July, 2029, which is the latest possible date for the length of the Parliament, five years from July 2024, the general election. So if a peer is 85 or over in [00:46:00] July 2029, then they would exit and you would then drop every year, 2030 it would be 84, 83, 82 until you get to the year 2034, in which case the cut-off date is then 80 and continues to be 80 beyond that. So, yes, it’s a sort of way of getting to where you want to get, but over a longer period of time to avoid, as you say, a cliff edge, which they all fall off.

Mark D’Arcy: It is a metaphor, which you really don’t want to go too close to.

Ruth Fox: The average age at which peers are retiring from the House at the moment is apparently 82.

Mark D’Arcy: You’re not that far away in some senses. And that in fairness is probably when people start feeling that maybe it’s time not to be doing this any more. But some people last longer. But that’s always the problem with sweeping age rules. So yes. You might argue that a 15-year-old genius maybe deserves the vote earlier than most 18 year olds, but the system can’t possibly operate that way. And maybe you just can’t legislate for the [00:47:00] exceptional.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And the interesting thing about this is how you implement it, because you can do it by legislation, which would be the simplest route, but not necessarily the quickest. One route then would be to do it through the resolution of the House and the changes to Standing Orders. But the problem with that is it’s not a statutory requirement.

Mark D’Arcy: What if an 80-year-old dug their heels in?

Ruth Fox: Yes. And the Life Peerages Act 1958 entitles members to receive a writ of summons for life. So you’d come into conflict with that. So the view would be that the House could formally take a view, could have a resolution of the House, accept that’s not binding. It’s not, it’s dependent upon the cooperation of the individuals and the party groups. But then when new members are coming in, you could expect them to give a written undertaking, for example, that they would accept the mandatory retirement age and that would be a condition of the acceptance of their peerage. And therefore you’d have some [00:48:00] grip on, while you haven’t lived up to what you committed to. So it’d be interesting to see what they do decide about the best route to address it.

Mark D’Arcy: If they could pull that off, that’s probably easier than trying to get an all-singing or dancing piece of legislation through when you’ve got a busy legislative timetable anyway.

Ruth Fox: And I think that was the point. To give you an alternative route to achieving the same thing. The committee then had a second proposal, which is for whether there should be a minimum participation requirement. And if there was, how would you set it? And the proposal they’ve come up with is that members will be required to attend 20% of sitting days, averaged over two sessions of Parliament. Now of course, two sessions could be different lengths of time, because we’ve just had a very long, not quite two-year session, but not far off. The question is then what defines participation.

Mark D’Arcy: Are you just in the building? Do you have to have spoken? Do you have to have been sitting on a committee? Do you have to have been putting down amendments? All sorts of ways you could measure activity.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Number of speeches, [00:49:00] voting and so on. And the concern was, I think, if you made it too much related to the formalities of the House, the voting, the taking part in the Chamber, committees, you would miss out some of the more informal but no less important work that goes on behind the scenes, which is not public and that you don’t see.

Mark D’Arcy: But I don’t see how you measure that in any event, “I had a very important conversation with the Lord Chancellor in the Bishop’s Bar”. It may be something that actually has quite a lot of effect.

Ruth Fox: And hence why they settled on attendance, I think, but you attend at least 20% of the sitting days over the course of two sessions.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And do you attend for more than a certain amount of time on each day? There’s always this complaint, I think in some sense it’s slightly obsolete now, because there have been rule changes around this. There was always the complaint that peers sort of clock in and very rapidly clock out clutching their attendance allowance for the day. Now that’s a canard, if you like, that a lot of peers get very annoyed about. But you’d have to make sure that your attendance was more than just that.

Ruth Fox: Well, [00:50:00] of course if they are at attending, they get the £300, I think it’s £300 attendance allowance. So there will presumably be measures.

Mark D’Arcy: Already around that.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So yes, if you clock in and then clock out 30 seconds later, seems unreasonable. I think the reality is that for most peers who are attending, they’re there to do a serious job of work.

Mark D’Arcy: And they’re there for some hours at least.

Ruth Fox: They’re there for some hours. And it may well be that, some of them have got jobs, some of them are working in the health service, or they’re academics, or they’re professional lawyers. The bishops, they’ve got other responsibilities. So the idea that, when they come in, they’re necessarily going to stay all day is unrealistic. But you’ve also got to remember they’re staying often late into the night. So they might not come in till four o’clock, but they might be there till midnight.

Mark D’Arcy: Or beyond, indeed.

Ruth Fox: Or beyond. So I think there’s an awful lot of sort of issues and complexities around this, but the committee has said, [00:51:00] basically, we’ve got to have a simple straightforward way of measuring this, which deals with both formal and informal participation.

Mark D’Arcy: And doesn’t take vast amounts of staff time to calculate and monitor. So I can see all that, but there are also, and again this is something that Lord Forsyth mentioned in his talk, there are plenty of people who, as you say, are extremely engaged in outside activities who come into the Lords when they have something they want to say. And the effect of this rule might be they have to come into the Lords when there isn’t anything they want to say, but they have to be there to maintain their position in it. So you suddenly start having people who don’t really care very much about a subject, feeling they have to weigh in on it in a debate somewhere.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Although I’d be very surprised if most of those peers are not already attending for about 20% of the time, one in five sitting days over the course of a session, given the importance and the range of business that the House is, and legislation that the House is dealing with.

Mark D’Arcy: Because of course, it’s worth pointing out that the House of Commons, as we speak, has risen for its Summer recess, and the House of Lords is cracking on for a further week. It might [00:52:00] be quite entertaining in a number of points of view because apart from anything else, they’ll be the first to get a chance to question the new Burnham government.

Ruth Fox: They will. And on that score, shall we take a break, Mark, and come back and talk about that? And listeners, you’ll be able to have a look at the Lord Speaker’s speech. We’ll include a link in our show notes when we’ve got a recording on our website.

Mark D’Arcy: Back in a moment.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: And we are back and the waiting is over. While we’ve been recording this episode of the pod, Andy Burnham has to, no one at all’s surprise, been declared the new leader of the Labour Party at a special party conference. He’s been giving a speech there. He’s been name checking political mentors from the New Labour years, Margaret Beckett, David Blunkett, people like that. But we still don’t really have much clue about what Prime Minister Burnham is actually going to do in office. We have even less clue about who’s going to be the key figures within his government. There’s no clue yet about who his Chancellor will be, and that’s the pivotal appointment around which almost everything else revolves. We have no clue about [00:53:00] all sorts of other things, except that there will be a new government and there will be new faces in it. Not least because a lot of his supporters have to be brought into bigger roles than they currently occupy, or brought in that from outside government entirely. And there’s quite an interesting process around all that. So early next week, we’ll be taken up with the mechanics of the transition, the passage of power from Sir Keir Starmer to his newly anointed successor.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I think, Mark, you’ve been looking at a briefing from the House of Commons Library from David Torrance, a great constitutional expert in the library, about how all this works. And it’s kind of pertinent because there’s an awful lot to be done. And it comes in the context this week of a row between the government and the opposition, the Conservatives, about whether or not the House of Common should be sitting next week in order that the Prime Minister can be scrutinised, because it is pretty extraordinary when you think about it. He’s coming into office, just a few months ago he was not in Parliament, since he got back in he’s made one speech this week in the Hillsborough law [00:54:00] debate Third Reading, but he’s jumped from the Manchester mayoralty to Makerfield and now imminently into Downing Street. And there’s been very little scrutiny. And the Conservatives were basically saying, we need the House of Commons back next week in order to be able to ask him questions.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed, a lot of people in Parliament in general are in absolute awe the way that he has managed gazelle-like to leap from the mayoralty in Manchester to the pinnacle of power in Downing Street with virtually no scrutiny at all. I think there’s been one interview with Gary Lineker of all people, and there’s been a few public encounters with members of the public. He’s saying that he’s going to spend part of the summer meeting people out beyond London SW1. But in the meantime, he’ll have a government to assemble. He will have appointments to make, he will have big policy declarations to make. And none of that is going to happen in the House of Commons because MPs have risen for their summer holiday. So barring some emergency recall, he’s not actually going to have to stand at the Despatch Box in front of the [00:55:00] serried ranks of MPs until at some point in September.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So first week back in September.

Mark D’Arcy: And that’s a long time away.

Ruth Fox: Yes. it’s just under 50 days I think.

Mark D’Arcy: I suppose in some ways, if you are the person doing it, having a long period to get your government underway and hopefully undisturbed by any huge events, get the Ship of State sailing on some new course, is all very convenient. But it is un-scrutinised. It is almost uniquely un-scrutinised. Someone described it as a very British coup. A Prime Minister who won a general election quite triumphantly just a couple of years ago, has been replaced almost without opposition and with remarkably little up-front debate about what changes will now be made, and we all wait to see that. And as you were saying there, there’s quite a lot of mechanics involved in doing this. First of all, Sir Keir Starmer has to go and see the King in the Palace, I think probably next Monday. He will then recommend that His [00:56:00] Majesty sends for Andy Burnham to form a new government. Andy Burnham will then have to go to the Palace, kiss hands and set about the process of forming a new government, naming a slate of new ministers to take over the key jobs in government. And that will take quite a while and involves quite a series of formalities.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So the Secretaries of State, there’s obviously the junior ministers, the House of Lords, we mentioned earlier they’re still sitting. So House of Lords ministers are still in place. Jesse Norman this week as the Shadow Leader of the House, he was calling for the House to sit on Monday in order for the Prime Minister to be scrutinised. And there was a huge row about the fact that the Opposition Day debate, where they were proposing to debate the extending of the House’s sitting, cancelling recess by a day. There was a huge row about it. But actually, I do wonder about the mechanics. It’s so complicated. There’s so much to be done. I assume you’ll go to the Palace sort of late morning, early afternoon. You’ll then go on to Downing Street, and then he’s [00:57:00] got to put the new government together. He’s got to do things like writing the instructions for the nuclear submarines and so on. All of those kinds of procedures. An awful lot.

Mark D’Arcy: Find where the cat food is for the Downing Street cat. All of the above.

Ruth Fox: Look round the Downing Street flat. So there’s an awful lot of stuff to be done. Now I’m all in favour of him being scrutinised by Parliament, but I do wonder if Monday would’ve been enough or the best date, actually they would’ve needed possibly Tuesday, Wednesday. But the government’s not made time for that Opposition Day debate. They cancelled it. And so as things stand, the House of Commons will not be sitting. But there are quite some very British complexities around the appointment of ministers, which you’ve been looking at.

Mark D’Arcy: First of all, what happens is that the Prime Minister recommends his new Secretaries of State to the sovereign. And there’s usually a press release saying that his majesty has graciously consented to the following ministerial appointments. And then you get a list of who’s been appointed to what. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, etc, etc. So you’ll get a list there. And then you have to quickly backfill with the [00:58:00] formalities of actual appointment, which have to take place before the sovereign, in the case of Secretaries of State, Cabinet members, at a Privy council meeting, and they get the seals of office, and then they can go into operation as the heads of their various government departments. A few years back, Charles Clarke, when he was appointed Home Secretary, I think got into a bit of trouble by issuing some written ministerial statements between the press release of his appointment and him actually receiving the seals of office. And this was seen as a little bit of a constitutional bubble that was not entirely appropriate. And there are particular formalities involving particular offices. Junior ministers below Cabinet rank can take their oath of office in front of the Lord Chancellor, or I think the Lord President of the Council. And so they don’t actually have to have His Majesty present for their full appointment. But there are specific rules. For example, I think that the Attorney General, the government’s chief law officer, has to have letters patent, and the Paymaster General, a sort of all-purpose [00:59:00] office, has to receive a royal warrant. So there are some interesting peculiarities about the particular appointment formalities for specific jobs, but that all has to get done in order for these new ministers to wield actual authority. So off they go, then, into office. And one of the key questions, of course, is who’s going to be in Andy Burnham’s government? He has to make room for a lot of his allies to come into government. So people like Louise Haigh, who has been one of his close advisers, former Transport Secretary, has to be brought back into government, presumably in some senior role. The rumour is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Apparently the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has to personally receive their seals of office from the sovereign – interesting note in this fabulous briefing by David Torrance, which you can see on the Commons Library website.

Ruth Fox: We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. and there are plenty of other Burnham allies. Lucy Powell, the current deputy leader of the Labour Party, who doesn’t have a Cabinet office at the moment, will presumably be brought back in. Will Angela [01:00:00] Rayner, the former deputy leader, be brought back in? What about Wes Streeting? What about John Healey? So a whole host of people who may have to be accommodated, and that does suggest that there is going to be a considerable amount of churn at the top tier of government, and may even be people from the Select Committee corridor brought back in, Florence Eshalomi, Emily Thornberry, Meg Hillier, perhaps.

Ruth Fox: What do you think are the benchmarks that we should look at for the new government, coming in September? So there’s a lot of talk about the Burnham government having its eye on this sort of concept of a hundred days, which always makes me slightly nervous, but one of the criticisms of the Keir Starmer administration was that it became very clear, very quickly, that they hadn’t got a sense of direction, there wasn’t a plan. And those first few days and weeks were actually quite depressing because they…

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, they belly flopped into government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. It’s a good image. The Burnham government will clearly want to do things differently. They will clearly want to have a different appeal, [01:01:00] clearly want to have some clear messaging. He’s obviously a better communicator, so he will obviously want to be out there. But there is this problem, going back to what we were saying about the House of Commons setting. If they start making a lot of big announcements in that first 100 days, or at least the first 50 or so before the House of Commons comes back, I think it’s 43, 44 days, something like that, is problematic for accountability and scrutiny.

Mark D’Arcy: And “why didn’t they just keep Parliament going for another week?” becomes a very live question, if there are all sorts of mega policy announcements. On the hundred days thing, John F Kennedy really does have an awful lot to answer for because every subsequent administration in every other country ever since he had his a hundred days of the start of Camelot, signalling change, everyone seems to feel that they’re kind of coerced into having to do a big bang of changes. But in this case, I think it’s necessary for him to signal to the country that things are going to be different, and this isn’t a continuity Starmer administration, and I think it’s necessary for him to signal big league change. Now what that [01:02:00] change is who knows, but I think that people will want a sense of momentum and difference and not business as usual. So one of the metrics I think here is, does he signal something big and credible and different with some kind of convincing-sounding plan attached to it, so that it’s not just a press release of good intentions? So that’s part one. And then secondly, you come to the team. Now I don’t really want to get into the business of speculating about the various names floating around for various posts, because frankly I think it’s my colleagues in the lobby running a bit amok with speculation because they’ve got nothing better to do. And you do wonder if some of these stories you hear about “x is going to be appointed to this particular job”. It’s “my mate’s aunt lives next to the person who used to do Andy Burnham’s photocopying, and she says…” kind of level of credible information here.

Ruth Fox: We do appear to have shifted from news to comment.

Mark D’Arcy: And speculation. Pure speculation. In the last few days, we’ve seen definitive claims that Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood, [01:03:00] Pat McFadden, are all going to be appointed Chancellor. Now they can’t all be there. So let’s just table that and see what Burnham does when he finally gets through the pearly gates into Downing Street. So that, that is point one. But there are some things that you can say about the general shape of the government. One is that he’s clearly got to have a very strong economic team. And one of the hits against the current Treasury team is there’s an awful lot of fairly inexperienced figures in there and you need possibly more heavyweights, especially if you’ve got a new Chancellor, more heavyweights around them. And beyond that, you also need to make sure that the kind of engine room level of the government, the Ministers of State, are good compelling figures who will do a decent job. Now that may entail, for example, keeping the current housing minister Matthew Pennycook in place because if you remember back into previous governments, housing ministers seemed to change every 10 minutes or so. And it was a job with a fantastically policy-dense brief that was never really done because, by the time people have [01:04:00] read themselves in, they’ve been moved on.

Ruth Fox: We’ll be back, listeners, next week to talk about who has been appointed, rather than who might be appointed. But this question of the House of Commons scrutinising. So what are the benchmarks we should look out for in September? Because it seems to me he’s talked about parliamentary reform, he’s talked about the political culture, he’s talked about rewiring politics, he’s talked about an agenda for modernisation, wanting to be accountable and so on. There’s questions about how is he going to work in London and with Parliament and also have this Downing Street of the North. What’s that going to look like? How’s that going to be accountable? But come the first week in September, you’re looking, this is going to be the first time the House of Commons gets to scrutinise him unless there is an emergency recall. You’re going to have, obviously, PMQs that first Wednesday back is going to be a big session. But what else should we look out for? it seems to me that possibly an early call from [01:05:00] the Liaison Committee.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, the Liaison Committee. I always used to describe it in my Today in Parliament days as the super committee of select committee chairs. Presided over by the Treasury Committee chair Meg Hiller at the moment. That I think is probably a place that the Prime Minister should go to as soon as possible when Parliament resumes in September. In fact, it’s one of the things that didn’t happen this week because I think in the normal run of things, if Keir Starmer hadn’t been defenestrated, he would have been doing a kind of end-of-term chat to the Liaison Committee for a couple of hours. And that hasn’t happened because there really isn’t a great deal of point in asking the outgoing Prime Minister. Do you remember that rather surreal session in the very last days of Boris Johnson where he was being questioned quite solemnly about his policy approach to things when everybody knew he was going to be out before teatime?

Ruth Fox: Yes. Wasn’t it Darren Jones who was basically saying that, reeling off the number of ministers who were resigning as he was in the committee?

Mark D’Arcy: I think a certain amount of malicious pleasure was being taken then, but it really was an utterly bizarre occasion in which he was solemnly behaving as if he was still [01:06:00] going to be in power much after the end of that committee meeting. And everybody knew he wasn’t. Utterly bizarre moment. And, I don’t think there was any point in replicating anything like that. I think the only thing it could have done was have Keir Starmer reeling off advice potentially to his successor that his successor would then look weak if he took. So I don’t think there was a great deal of point in going through with that. But I think there are several things that could happen. One is the Liaison Committee meeting in that first or second week back. Secondly, I think it’s quite possible that there may be statements by the Prime Minister and maybe other incoming cabinet ministers, almost certain on policy issues where they’ve made big changes. And if those statements aren’t forthcoming, I would have thought Mr Speaker would find it very difficult not to grant Urgent Questions to pull them in anyway. So I think that there will be quite an orgy of parliamentary scrutiny of whatever new things the new government has come up with in that September session. And maybe that September session will be a good deal more lively than some of these September sessions often are. They are often a kind [01:07:00] of weird kind of caesura between parliamentary breaks.

Ruth Fox: I think it will be important to look out, not least because of the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Speaker, which is important and has at times looked a bit tense between Lindsay Hoyle and Keir Starmer sometimes. How does Andy Burnham approach the idea of making statements first to the House of Commons?

Mark D’Arcy: He’s been encouraging ministers to be more punctilious about the relationship with the House of Commons. More ministers actually voting in the division lobbies. Now Labour don’t need their ministers to vote in the numbers game in the Commons. Their majority is so huge. But at the same time, it’s incredibly important that ministers are seen by the troops and able to listen to the concerns of the troops. The classic thing about, the reason we have voting lobbies is so that you can kind of pin down a minister in the voting lobbies and say, “this is going on in my constituency, what are you going to do about it?” So those kind of conversations are quite an important informal part of parliamentary life. And that leads us on to one of the other things that I think a lot of Labour MPs hope the new government does [01:08:00] differently, is its relationships with its parliamentary troops. Andy Burnham, as we were discussing last week, has written this long letter saying there’s going to be more consultation and involvement with Labour MPs than we’d had previously. One of the big critiques of the Starmer government was it just came up with policy initiatives and expected the foot sloggers to swallow them without any real consultation. And it was a huge complaint on the Labour grassroots. And the expectation is he’s going to do that differently.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The other thing to look out for, we talked about the Liaison Committee, but the departmental select committees. Because, one of the implications of a ministerial reshuffle and changes in government is that there will be resulting changes on the select committee corridor. So in the normal run of things, you might be wanting to get your new minister in to the select committee fairly early on to have an early evidence session with them. But for some of these select committees, actually they could lose their chairs, they could lose a number of members. There will then have to be a new appointment process, an election [01:09:00] of the chair and the members. And that will take time. I doubt that they can do it all in the September couple of weeks when the House is back. So that might spill over into October. And of course, depending upon the agenda of the government, it may change the prioritisation of inquiries that they’ve already got going. And possible new inquiries that they’re initiating. So a lot of potential change and churn in Select Committee land.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. I suppose it is possible for people to set out the idea that it’s clear that certain people are maybe leaving the select committees, can we gear up once we know who’s leaving, to have elections fairly shortly after we come back after the summer? So it seems to me that ought to be arrangeable and, maybe the Liaison Committee, maybe the Administration Committee, I don’t know which Commons organ would be responsible for this, but maybe one of the things they should be doing is leaving instructions to gear up for fairly rapid elections to fill any spaces, whether they’re chairs or ordinary members of committees. The other thing is, of course, even [01:10:00] if the chairs of committees are called to glory in ministerial office, there will be deputy chairs so that it’s not like there won’t be anybody who can write to an incoming Secretary of State and say, we’d like to get you in front of us as soon as possible. So that side of things ought to happen. And whether or not a few figures are absent because they’ve been made ministers and not yet replaced as committee chairs, I do think that the Liaison Committee does need to swing into action and get the Prime Minister in front of it in September. Don’t wait till after the party conference season in October. Move very fast on this, because there is a parliamentary scrutiny gap and it’s quite an egregious one, really. This is an almost unique situation. I can’t think of anything in my lifetime quite like what’s just happened with Andy Burnham.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well, Mark, on that note, I think we should perhaps leave it there for this week and then we can, as I said, we’ll be back next week to talk about what we have actually learned about what the government is doing and what it looks like. And we might know more about, plans for the House of Commons.

Mark D’Arcy: It will be glorious not to be speculating and actually kind of bring the actual [01:11:00] facts.

Ruth Fox: Quite. Yes. But in the meantime, listeners, if you’re enjoying the podcast, do subscribe, to make sure you get it in your podcast app next week, if you’re a new listener, and particularly because we’ve got some summer recess episodes coming up, which we’ll tell you more about next week. And as usual listeners, if you are enjoying the podcast, please do share it with your friends, family, coworkers. Help us grow the podcast and leave a rating and review on your favourite podcast app. See you soon.

Mark D’Arcy: Bye-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.