• No. 10 Downing Street, Ministerial Appointments: July 2026

• House of Lords Written Ministerial Statements, Machinery of Government Changes, 21 July 2026

• Hansard Society, What happens to Select Committees when Government Departments change?, 24 April 2023

• Hansard Society, How are Select Committee Chairs elected?, 16 May 2023

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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 in this week's episode.

Ruth Fox: A new Prime Minister and a new cabinet. As a Burnham era dawns, we look at the challenges facing his new ministerial lineup in Parliament and beyond.

Mark D'Arcy: New structures at the apex of power.

We talk to political historian, Professor Jon Davis about why Andy Burnham's changes at the centre of government matter.

Ruth Fox: And as the summer holidays beckon, our recommendations for political books to read on the beach or when taking shelter from the latest heatwave.[00:01:00]

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, let's begin with a pedantic point. This is not a government reshuffle, this is the formation of a new government. If you're going to get to the technicalities of what's happened with Andy Burnham's selection of ministers, we should start from a firm foundation. This is a new government. It may incorporate elements of the old government, but it is not a mere reshuffle.

Ruth Fox: It is not. It is a new government, as you say. And that's the kind of niche constitutional point you get on this podcast.

Mark D'Arcy: And what we've got is a selection of new ministers in new briefs, a bit of departmental rejigging, and a large collection of ex ministers who have ceased to be, at least as far as the ministerial office is concerned.

Returning to the backbenches, either happily or, I suspect more frequently, nursing grievances. And we'll come on to all that in a minute. But that is one of the things that Andy Burnham's new team of parliamentary managers, and in particular Anneliese Midgley, the new chief whip, will be having to manage. And you do wonder what some [00:02:00] of those exit interviews were like. Were people told there is a way back for you, you are not being cast forever into the outer darkness? You might get through the pearly gates again into ministerial office.

Ruth Fox: Yes, we don't know, unless they say or unless they write their memoirs. I mean it's probably worth more just reflecting on who is Anneliese Midgley, because I think for many of our listeners, she will be something of an unknown quantity.

She's a bit of an unknown quantity for us. Apart from the fact, I know that she's been involved as a bit of a fixer behind the scenes on some of the rebellions in the latter part of the Starmer government. She's a member of the, Culture, Media, and Sports Select Committee.

So that'll be creating a space, which we should also come onto, the implications for the select committee corridor of all these changes. But Anneliese Midgley is, I can't think of a Chief Whip who has come into government in that post having never served on the front bench, never been a minister, never been a whip previously.

So she comes in with a lot of inexperience, if you can put it that way.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I think that [00:03:00] it's also worth pointing out that she's? Of course, a new MP in the 2024 intake. Now, she was clearly involved in Labour power broking positions as a senior trade unionist long before she entered Parliament. But her parliamentary experience is what the 24 months plus that she's had since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister after the last general election.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And she's got the fifth safest seat in Parliament, I think, Knowsley. So she's unlike many of the Labour MPs who are in quite small majorities in their seat. She's not got that challenge. She beat Morgan McSweeney's alleged preferred candidate for that seat, 'cause of course it was a plumb seat that people were after.

And, Ryan Wayne, who was a sort of bigwig at the Tony Blair Institute, was apparently lined up for that seat. She beat him to it. She's regarded as non factional. Pretty pragmatic.

Mark D'Arcy: In the Labour context, that's quite an interesting description of itself. There's a non factional faction.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And she actually described herself as a Wilsonite, [00:04:00] which is interesting.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose that's Harold Wilson's old bailiwick, isn't it, Knowsley. His Huyton seat was in the Knowsley area.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So she was apparently in line to be, or thought to be in line, to be General Secretary of the Labour Party in 2020. Didn't get it and accepted a job in, actually, in Keir Starmer's office.

So she's worked at the TUC, she's worked at Unite the Union, she was in Jeremy Corbyn's office. I think she was Deputy Chief of Staff in Corbyn's office. She then went to work for Keir Starmer, and now she's working for Andy Burnham. So you can see the argument that she's not necessarily factional.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a bit like the Andy Burnham joke, isn't it? A Blairite, Brownite and a Corbynista walk into a bar and the barman says, what would you like Mr. Burnham?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. and interestingly she said to herself, you can either be a good fixer or a famous fixer.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: So she's known as a fixer. And I think hitherto, a lot of that has been behind the scenes, but of course she was one of the two or three women at the heart of the Burnham operation in the Makerfield [00:05:00] by-election.

So Louise Haigh, who's now in this sort of zooped up office of the Prime Minister and head of the Cabinet Office, the new central body around the Prime Minister, that's as a result of the machinery government changes, which we'll no doubt come on to talk about in a bit. So there was Louise Haigh and then there was her, and then people like Lucy Powell up in the northwest as well.

But, she was effectively running the Makerfield by-election operation.

Mark D'Arcy: And as chief whip, she has I think, one very substantial advantage, which is that I think almost every Labour MP realises whatever factional resentments or personal resentments of the loss of a job that they might have, that this is the last chance saloon for Labour, they've gotta make this work.

If they end up changing Liz Truss like their Prime Minister a few weeks or months down the road, then it's game over. Possibly not just for this government, but for the Labour Party as a whole. If it can't deliver with a majority of this size, can it ever deliver anymore?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I think that's where she's got some interesting sort of political management challenges ahead.[00:06:00]

We'll perhaps come on and talk about some of the big policy issues where, you know, not least public spending, welfare reform, defence spending and so on that we've talked about previously. But going back to what you were saying about these MPs who've lost their jobs, and there's a mix of people who've been around for a long time, like David Lammy, people who've been around for a reasonable amount of time and reached high office, people like Darren Jones.

And then you've got a number of class of 24 MPs who've had a taste of ministerial office, but are now out. So there's that mix there of people who might have personal reasons for leaving office, might have genuinely wanted to go or have effectively been sacked.

Mark D'Arcy: May have been cast out of paradise.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And she's gonna have to think about how do you manage that? Because as you say, is there a way back for them, for the ones that are relatively young and ambitious, is there a way back? Because if not, then you're looking at three years, potentially, the rest of this Parliament. At least two and a half years probably.

Unless we go for an early general election, which is a whole different question.

Mark D'Arcy: A whole different conversation to [00:07:00] have later on.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And they? Going to the point about this is last chance saloon, they will be hoping that this turns around sufficiently for a second term, in which case with Burnham at the helm again, is there any hope in a few years time of coming back to office?

So there's that group to manage and how do you get them through some of these big difficult votes. How do you essentially offer them a kind of a career on the backbenchers that is satisfactory and satisfying?

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, it's worth pointing out that Anneliese Midgley as Chief Whip will have had these conversations directly with the junior people who did lose their jobs in the government here, 'cause that function was delegated to her by Andy Burnham. So she would've been the one who delivered the coup de grace to the junior ministers who were not retained in government. And presumably she'll know how they took the news. And that information will all be filed for future reference, I'm sure.

But there's a group there who may, for example, decide that they will take up alternative careers in the kind of Commons [00:08:00] scrutiny track of politics that's been created in the last few years where they might seek seats on select committees. They might indeed seek the chairs of select committees. One of the things about the reshuffle that we'll come on to a bit later on is that there are now three select committee chairs and any number of select committee places vacant because their occupants have been translated to glory in government.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But before we get onto that Mark, shall we just finish off the sort of parliamentary management side. Because I think one of the questions was then, okay, you've got new Chief Whip, pretty inexperienced in terms of both Parliament and Government, but we've got a retained Leader of the House. So Sir Alan Campbell, who was previously the Chief Whip in the early parts of the Starmer government, he then became leader of the House.

He's been kept on, and in fact he's been on Labour's front bench continuously since 2006.

Mark D'Arcy: Extraordinary. Practically, no one else has done that. I think. So there will be a blend of new talent and experience if you like, in the parliamentary management side of things for the government. As you say, Alan Campbell, considerable old stager. And I [00:09:00] think Analyse Midgley may want to listen very carefully to his advice, although of course Andy Burnham is promising a different kind of whipping kindler gentler, more consensual whipping than before his early days to see how that will unfold and what kind of working relationship the two of them will have.

But getting it right for both of them is actually quite important to the future of this government because if the parliamentary party dissolves into fractious factionalism, there's gonna be trouble.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And there's been talk, hasn't there, that these members of the, particularly the cabinet, but some of the junior ranks as well, who've lost their jobs and went off down the pub with Keir Starmer on a Monday afternoon to have a drink and commiserate with each other, that with the emergence of this Starmer faction, Starmer never really had a faction, and, he'd have never really had a clear philosophy to have a faction around.

Mark D'Arcy: Starmer, if you're to believe that fabulous book, Get In, which charts how he became Labour leader and then Prime Minister, was essentially the front man for a faction rather than its leader.

So the faction could go and have a drink together [00:10:00] and mutually commiserate at the fact that most of them have been so summarily expelled from government, but, whether they can reform into a coherent body and push a particular view of what to do next in the Labour Party, whether they even want to do that. Still open questions.

Ruth Fox: Yes. this would be sort of Labour Together faction, which has now been rebranded, hasn't it? Yeah. This is the Morgan McSweeney backed organisation that's now been rebranded as Think Labour. But interestingly, the head of that who was brought in, think late last year, maybe in the autumn, Alison Phillips, the former editor of, I think it was The Daily Mirror, she has now gone in, I think, as deputy Chief of Staff into Number 10.

So these things are not simple and straightforward.

Mark D'Arcy: You imagine one of those Private Eye style how they are related diagrams here, which could get very complicated indeed.

Ruth Fox: And, actually one of the features of the reshuffle and the backroom people, as in the previous government? Is how many of them are actually related?

Marriage. Sisters. Brothers.

Mark D'Arcy: Sisters. Brothers. Dynasties.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: Stephen Kinnock, Secretary of State for [00:11:00] Wales, for example. Hamish Falconer. All sorts of dynastic connections.

Ruth Fox: Ellie Reeves in Cabinet as Attorney General as her sister leaves it as Chancellor.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. All great fun. I should add to this that the whipping challenges in the House of Lords looks slightly easier in that Angela Smith, Baroness Smith of Basildon, the leader of the House of Lords has retained her leadership there. No change.

And one of the points to make about the Leader of the Labour peers is that they more or less choose their own leader. And any given leader of the party has to live with that choice. Jeremy Corbyn never attempted to replace Angela Smith, I don't think. No. Certainly never managed to replace Angela Smith when they were certainly not sympatico ideologically.

So it's not a direct kind of appointment in the same way as almost every other cabinet position? That you've gotta have someone the peers are happy with and they've kept Angela.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I imagine feelers were out. Is there any appetite for a change? And I think the answer was no.

The other piece in the [00:12:00] jigsaw puzzle around parliamentary management that we've talked about on the podcast a number of times, Mark, is Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. We've been critical of Keir Starmer's choices as not being sufficiently experienced, not being sufficiently powerful and influential in their own right, but not necessarily looking to get on the ministerial ladder.

But good political minds, good political judgment. Andy Burnham's appointed Nick Daikin, who is an experienced MP. He's in his early seventies. Veteran whip, I think. Yeah, veteran whip. In fact, he stood down as a whip in order to take this job. So he must have taken a salary pay cut for this to take this role on.

Mark D'Arcy: He's one of these exotic titled Vice Chamberlain of the Household or something like that, which are the weird royal titles that whips have for reasons lost in the midst of antiquity.

But what you need is someone who can sense the vibrations, feel the force, someone who can go into the tea rooms, spot a knot of discontented colleagues, go over and find out what's exercising [00:13:00] them, try and get something fed into government to do about it. Someone who can see a plot coming, someone who can see trouble ahead.

And that is absolutely critical. And I suspect that Keir Starmer either didn't have it or perhaps just wasn't prepared to be concerned by rumblings from within the parliamentary party. And look what happened to him.

Ruth Fox: But the Parliamentary Private Secretary has also got to be able and willing to speak truth to power.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And to tell the Prime Minister something he may not wish to hear.

And despite that, he's gotta hear it and he's gotta hear the message loud and clear. And I suspect that's part of the appointment for Nick Dakin. He's, as I said, I think he's in his early seventies, he's been around for a long time.

He's not looking for a long ambitious career on the ministerial ladder.

Mark D'Arcy: And he's really got nothing to lose.

Ruth Fox: And he's got nothing to lose. So he's part of the team now that's got to stitch together this parliamentary management to make it work for the party, because as you said it's last chance saloon time.

Mark D'Arcy: Ruth, let's turn now [00:14:00] to the sheer scale of the changes in government that Andy Burnham has implemented because it was by any standards a massive clear out of serving ministers. Absolutely massive Starmer allies, left, right and centre were removed fairly unceremoniously from power, including some very big names.

David Lammy, deputy Prime Minister under Keir Starmer out the door, not given a job. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in this kind of bespoke position that had been created for him at the heart of government, was removed to the backbenchers. Out went plenty of other people. Nick Thomas Symonds, the man in charge of the EU reset getting off. Half the cabinet went.

But beyond that, of course, you've got an influx of new ministers and some of them will attract a certain amount of jealousy. For example, Miatta Fahnbulleh is perhaps the single most spectacular promotion because she's only been an MP since the 2024 general election.

And badder bim, she's now got a seat in cabinet. [00:15:00] She's got a reputation as being one of the biggest brains in Labour politics. So it's perhaps not entirely surprising that she's gone very fast at the political tree. But all the same, that kind of advancement, and this applies to several other new appointments as well, does attract jealousy.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, she's, as you say, class of 2024. And I think? Alongside Anneliese Midgley, it is probably the biggest promotion from that group. There's been Members of Parliament elected in 24 who've sat in cabinet, attended, but they haven't had their own departments and been Secretary of State level. So it is a big jump.

There's some elements as well of this setting back a bit of a reset on the, what was it, September 2025 reshuffle.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Where people like Lucy Powell left, Johnny Reynolds lost his department, went to be Chief Whip. He's now back in his old department, albeit with bits added to it. And of course the big change is John Healey becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So coming back into government just a few weeks after having resigned as Defence Secretary.

Mark D'Arcy: And that's the [00:16:00] single most fascinating appointment. John Healey, of course, has a long background as a Treasury minister. It's less remarked that he was also a housing minister in the dying days of the previous Labour government under Gordon Brown and may have quite an interest in housing, but he was a long serving Treasury minister.

So he knows the Treasury and is able to get a grip on it. But of course he resigned because the Treasury was blocking the funding he felt was needed for his Defence Investment Plan. The DIP. And presumably a conversation has taken place in which he has received some assurances about finding extra funding for defence.

If that hasn't happened, I don't see how John Healey could possibly command any credibility. Once that emerges, if you resign over something, you care so much about getting defence spending, right, that you are prepared to resign from a government over it and then you become chancellor and you're in charge of the money and you can't find the money for that purpose, then I think your credibility is in tatters right there.

So I'm [00:17:00] assuming that John Healey and Andy Burnham have some kind of agreement or concordat, which maybe hasn't been transmitted to the new Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, who seems to be, I dunno quite what the word would be, slightly erratic about what exactly is gonna be happening about defence funding.

Ruth Fox: Who knows? But one person who's gonna be holding their feet to the fire is Al Carns.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: So the, again,

Mark D'Arcy: The other resignee from a few weeks ago,

Ruth Fox: The former military officer, of course. One of our most distinguished former soldiers. In fact, is he a soldier or are you a special boat squadron, Royal Marine.

He apparently was offered a job as Prisons Minister in the Ministry of Justice and he said no because he wanted to be free to comment on the defence spending and also the situation regarding veterans in Northern Ireland and legislation around that. So he's making pretty clear today that if the defence spending quandary is not resolved, he will be raising it regularly from the backbenchers.

Mark D'Arcy: And that's a very interesting factor that the whips will have to take into account because he's a [00:18:00] pretty powerful voice to have raising those concerns. We're talking about an extremely distinguished member of the armed forces. So if he speaks on these matters, he will command a lot of attention. So the government will better watch out on that front, I think, because he will be a pretty formidable critic.

And of course finding that extra several billion for defence is just one of the many challenges John Healey has to deal with here. And it's not going to be easy for him to find X extra billion for defence because there's plenty of other areas where the government is looking to dispense largesse as well.

We've had the proposal to cut energy bills. We've had the proposal to cap bus fares. We've had the proposal to cut VAT for clubs and pubs and music venues. So there's plenty of largesse coming from the Burnham government at the moment, and it is not at all clear how they're going to be funded and they've already tripped over their feet a little bit on this.

Darren Jones now, ex minister, former Chief Secretary of the Prime Minister helpfully pointed out what the [00:19:00] proposed mechanism for funding the VAT cut on energy that Andy Burnham's announced actually didn't work because cutting the identity card proposal from the previous government's programme doesn't save any money, because no money had yet been allocated to it. Oops. The government tripped a bit over its feet on that and it can't really afford too many stumbles like that before they start to erode its credibility. I think an awful lot of people are waiting to see whether this government seamlessly does great and important and good and welcome things, or whether it's going to start tripping over its own feet rather too often.

If it becomes a comedy act, then it could very quickly be game over for Andy Burnham. They can't afford too many of these stumbles.

Ruth Fox: On the other hand, I want to have a go a little bit of a go market, your former colleagues in the lobby.

Mark D'Arcy: Indulge.

Ruth Fox: So, for a good few weeks now, we've had lots of commentary on who was gonna be in and who was gonna be out in this new cabinet.

Shabana Mahmood in recent days was definitely gonna be chancellor. She was gonna be moved from the Home Office. A lot of which turned [00:20:00] out to be just nonsense. They didn't clock quite a number of these big changes or indeed the scale of the changes. And now we've got the lobby saying that this is a government that is not taking AI seriously because they've abolished the science department and reallocated some of the responsibilities around Whitehall.

And yet this government has put the first AI minister into cabinet Kanishka Narayan\, who's a highly respected minister. Everybody that you see speaks very highly of him. And his grasp of the technology and the issues around it. And as I understand it, it's the first government of a major economy that's got an AI minister right at the heart of the executive in the cabinet or its equivalent.

So you can't really say you're not taking AI seriously when you're doing that. So I just find quite a lot of the lobby commentary at the moment is a mix of gossip and ill-informed speculation. I'm a

bit sick of it frankly.

Mark D'Arcy: You can have a debate about whether it is better to have a science department focused entirely on these kind of issues or [00:21:00] whether it is better to have a wider industrial strategy department, which incorporates AI.

And that seems to be the direction the government's chosen to go. But as you say, I absolutely agree. If you've got an AI minister around the cabinet table, that represents an advance in the way AI is treated from what happened before. So I don't really buy the idea that the Team Burnham doesn't think AI matters very much.

It's very hard to imagine a policymaker these days, a serious one anyway, who thinks that AI doesn't matter. And then generally I think the kind of vacuum that the lobby has been trying to fill with endless gossip about who's got what in the reshuffle, most of which turned out to be inaccurate, on Shabana Mahmood becoming chancellor, everyone said this is now nailed down.

And the excuse when John Healey was made chancellor was, oh, we reported that she was going to be made chancellor, and she was, and then the pushback was such that, I mean that's a bit do at my homework. Yes. People were recycling endless gossip [00:22:00] and I think they need to take it with a lot more salt than they were taking it with.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it confirms my view that those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know.

Mark D'Arcy: And the other side of the kind of media on this is the social media side of this. I've been very struck that some people have been incredibly classy about being generous to opponents or successors in the ministerial job they had, and other people have been rather snarky and unpleasant.

Ruth Fox: It surprised me. On social media, surely not?

Mark D'Arcy: In Westminster as well. I was very struck for example, that when Lucy Powell was given the job of Education Secretary, the former Labour Leader of the House who was turfed out by Keir Starmer and then got elected Deputy Leader when she came back into the cabinet as Education Secretary Robert Halfon, Tory former education minister, now out of Parliament, chair of the Education Select Committee before he became a minister, tweeted that when she was on his Education Committee a few years back, she was a quote powerhouse of ideas about how [00:23:00] to get education and training improved.

Now, that was a piece of generosity towards an opponent, Halfon is of course a Conservative, that others could do well to emulate. I think that some people have been distinctly unclassy. There's at least one former MP whose continuous stream of disappointed bile has gone on since the last general election, and I just can't imagine it's doing him any good at all.

You have a vision of this guy sitting there on his sofa, tweeting, sarcastic, embittered, rejoinders to people all day long. I can't imagine it makes him more attractive to any committee looking to reselect candidates for a seat. No names, but this guy really needs to get a life.

Ruth Fox: You tell me afterwards, will you?

The other unpleasant side of this that I said, there's this stuff that's circulating in the media about this idea that there's a pestminster list. There's this list of MPs, presumably male, but not necessarily at all, who are essentially sex pests.

Mark D'Arcy: Or bullies, I think

Ruth Fox: Or [00:24:00] bullies.

Yeah. So it's a bit like a self-appointed pestfinder general has come up with a list and is sending that to the Burnham team, to the whips office, don't appoint these people. Now, it's not difficult to work out which MPs have problems in their offices because you only have to go on a place like working for an MP and look at how often they're advertising for staff. That's often a pretty solid sign.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So it was one ex MP who was rumoured to chew through a staffer every fortnight or so.

Ruth Fox: So there's that side of it. And of course, you do not want MPs who have got this reputation, this history where there's some solid grounds of concern in their private office or whether that's conveyed through the civil service.

But I do find it a bit worrying that there's a kind of a list circulating. Who's in charge of the list, who puts you on there, and what's the level of proof? What's the evidence, what's the evidence of proof and, how seriously it's taken. Now we've no idea whether this featured at all in any of the decisions to get rid of some of these MPs from the Starmer government and not reappoint them.

But who [00:25:00] knows? But it did have that feeling of like denunciation from on high.

Mark D'Arcy: Remember in the mediaeval Venetian Republic, there used to be a thing called, and I apologise in advance to my Italian pronunciation, bocche di leone, I think the lion's mouth. There was a kind of plaque of a lion with a little post box in the mouth and you put your denunciations, your neighbours through that, and they would then be investigated and people would be hauled off across the bridge of sighs, never to be seen again.

There's a flavour of that about it. I remember a few years back, the Guido Fawkes website published a kind of spreadsheet, naming the charges against certain MPs, and it was supposedly compiled by 20 something staffers, sick of the way they were being treated by their political masters. But the language on it was so odd, such and such committed fornication. And I just cannot imagine most 20 somethings using that kind of language. It just felt completely fake and off to me from the start. And my worry [00:26:00] is that you can blight someone's career with an evidence free denunciation if you're not careful. And it is not to say that real allegations against real individuals shouldn't be taken seriously and properly investigated.

Ruth Fox: And there are procedures for that.

Mark D'Arcy: And there are procedures for that. But a system of kind of anonymous denunciation strikes me as absolutely corrosive in the end because anybody can be smeared and the damage can be done whether or not proof is then produced.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. With that, onto the House of Lords. One of the big items of news, of course, is that the Scottish Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, Anas Sarwar, is giving up his seat in Edinburgh in the Parliament, and he is heading south to take up a position in the House of Lords.

And I think he's gonna get a trade brief.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Minister for Trade, apparently, which is of course quite a senior job. And you wouldn't expect Anas Sarwar to give up the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party to be parly sec for paperclips somewhere in the Department of Administrative Affairs. So he's moved for a serious job.

And I think a lot of people in the Scottish Labour hierarchy are a little bit [00:27:00] irritated by this, not least because the House of Lords is not particularly well regarded in Scotland.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Although from a perspective of the Scottish Labour Party, it does give them a sort of an opportunity for a reset.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Given that he's led the party through, what, a couple of elections and,

Mark D'Arcy: And without conspicuous triumph.

Ruth Fox: Yes, exactly. So possibility of a reset there. The other feature in the House of Lords, of course, is the loss of some of the outside names who were appointed to the Lords in order to take on a particular ministerial role.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, Government of all the talents Gordon Brown style appointments. And we're talking here about Lord Timpson, who was made the prisons minister, and Lord Vallance, the former Chief Scientific Advisor who was made the science minister. Now both of them are saying that they left for personal reasons, not because of any great ideological objection to Andy Burnham.

It was just a good moment to go if they wanted to go.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And the other, of course, is Lord Hermer, who leaves the cabinet as Attorney General and back on the Lords backbenches. Or should I say he'll take his seat for the first time on the Lords backbenches because he has always been on the front bench.

Mark D'Arcy: Because he was straight in. I think this one's a bit like [00:28:00] removing Rachel Reeves as Chancellor. If you were going to make a break with the policies of the Starmer years, I think Richard Hermer was someone who's gonna have to go.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean he was very close personally to Starmer. That's why he came in. So he has gone.

But back to the Commons. There are some implications flowing from all of this for the select committee corridor.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, we touched on it briefly a moment ago, but three select committee chairs have now passed through the pearly gates into ministerial office and therefore cannot continue to chair select committees.

We're talking about Andy Slaughter, who chaired the Justice Committee. We're talking about Florence Eshalomi, who chaired the Housing and Local Government Committee, and we're talking about Sarah Owen, who chaired the Women and Equalities Committee. They've all moved into government, so three plum jobs there. And a series of vacancies for other select committee members who've also got ministerial jobs and therefore won't continue on those select committees. So it's a quite significant churn on the committee corridor,

I mean

Ruth Fox: it's early days because the final ministerial appointments were only made and [00:29:00] published quite late last night. So I have done a very quick review and I think, at least, and I say at least, 'cause there may be one or two I've missed, and we'll be looking at this over the next few days, but certainly 14 committees by my calculation have lost a member of the committee.

DCMS at least has lost two members of its committee. And of course these are all Labour members, so there'll have to be elections within the Labour group as to who's going to replace them. But some big jobs here. Place on Foreign Affairs, place on Home Affairs, Justice, Public Accounts, Modernisation Committee, Standards, Transport, and Energy committee as well.

So there's some plum roles ahead. And obviously some of those former ministers who've lost their jobs and are now back on the backbenches may fancy their chances possibly to return to the select committee.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, the select committee chairs have to be elected by the whole house. Ordinary members, it's within the party group. Chairs of select committees, you have a whole house [00:30:00] election. And in the past, in previous parliaments where the government party wasn't quite so dominant, what you'd often see was a pattern where the opposition parties would weigh in beside the person they thought was likely to give the government the most trouble.

That is less of a factor this time, but you've got, as you say, three crucial posts there. And I think a number of former ministers might quite fancy the idea. I mean I think it would be a bit much for say David Lammy to try and chair the Justice Committee having just been Secretary of State for Justice.

But then you've got the precedent of Jeremy Hunt who, former health Secretary, who then chaired the Health Select Committee, memorably during COVID, of course.

Ruth Fox: One name who hasn't returned to government as far as I can see is Jess Phillips. So she might fancy her chances for Women and Equalities.

But, yeah, Steve Reed for Communities and Housing, again, a bit like David Lammy, it's possibly a bit too soon,

Mark D'Arcy: A little bit too soon. They would be marking their own homework, I think, is the key point. Although it is interesting that one of the committees where there hasn't been a vacancy arising is defence.

Because you'd have thought if there was a vacancy on that committee.

Ruth Fox: Al [00:31:00] Carns.

Mark D'Arcy: Like a rat up a drain pipe. Straight there, I imagine.

Ruth Fox: And before we take a break, Mark, just one thought additionally, that it's probably gonna require some front bench changes as well for the opposition parties, because not least as you mentioned, there's scrapping of the science department, reorganisation of portfolios across Whitehall.

So one assumes that at some point, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey may decide that there's an opportunity for them to reconfigure their front bench as well.

Mark D'Arcy: There may be a need for a different strategic response to particular cabinet members. I find myself imagining what Treasury questions are gonna be like.

You didn't exactly get rhetorical fireworks between Rachel Reeves and Mel Stride, but John Healey and Mel Stride doesn't strike me as a coruscating parliamentary duel waiting to erupt upon us, put it that way.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. with that, shall we take a break and then when we come back, we'll be joined by the political historian, Professor Jon Davis, who's a bit of an expert on the central government.

And we'll be talking about the machinery of government [00:32:00] changes, how that's all gonna pan out, and his reflections on the transition and Andy Burnham's first week in office.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. Because the first week can matter a very great deal. Join us in a minute.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: We are back and we are delighted to be joined on the pod by John Davis, professor of government at King's College London.

Jon, you've made a particular study of how the centre of government works and Andy Burnham is of course busy reconfiguring at the moment the way that the Prime Minister's office works with a souped up new department headed by his colleague Louise Haigh, close ally from the days when he was fighting his by-election not that long ago. What's he trying to achieve with all this? Is it just moving the deck chairs around?

Jon Davis: Very nice to be with you. Do you know, I think that there is a longstanding issue here. As you know, the Cabinet Office was created in late in December 1916 under the pressure of war. But I think that in recent years, there's been real feeling from just about every Prime Minister that we've had, that Number 10 is [00:33:00] underpowered and that its delivery capability, its mechanisms, have not been what Prime Ministers have wanted them to be.

I seem to remember Boris Johnson announcing an Office of the Prime Minister, which never quite happened, uncharacteristically for Mr. Johnson. But I think that what we've got here is the latest in a long line of machinery of government wishes, which on this occasion looks like it's really happening.

Mark D'Arcy: I was quite struck that David Lidington, who was Theresa May's deputy Prime Minister back in the day, was on Twitter this morning saying what a good idea it was and how it would improve delivery. What does it do? What difference does it make if you have a more powerful Prime Minister's department?

Jon Davis: The idea of a more powerful centre is all around delivery capability.

That decisions taken in Number 10, do they actually result in changes on the ground? And one of the inane metaphors that many [00:34:00] people have used over the years, well worn and tired, is the idea of pulling levers, and you pull a lever, but it's not actually connected to anything. And I think that the idea behind a much more directed, a clearer, more powerful centre is to actually enact decision making.

Because one of the big criticisms since certainly Starmer came in 24 is that decisions have been taken, but have they actually resulted in change. And I think that is at the heart what this is all about.

Ruth Fox: And do you see any challenges ahead, Jon, in terms of this relationship between this new power centre of the Cabinet Office in Downing Street in London, and then this new office in Manchester, the Downing Street North?

Because obviously from our perspective as a podcaster, we're concerned about Parliament. We're always worried about what extent ministers and officials and so on are accountable to Westminster. And clearly if [00:35:00] they're in the Northwest, how much time is Andy Burnham and officials gonna spend there?

Who's gonna be in charge of this office in the Northwest? What are the kinds of things that they're gonna have to pin down?

Jon Davis: I think the idea of Number 10 North, this is maybe a turbo charge, but it's part of a direction of travel that we've been on for some time now on many occasions, several. I've been up to the Treasury's Darlington economic campus, for example. And that seems to work well.

So the idea of an outpost is something which is happening. It has happened. And I think that it's only for the good actually. The whole point about remote working, we don't have to be in the same room as everyone anymore to actually get things done. I think that's all part of it as well.

And also, let's face it, that the Prime Minister with a Northwest constituency was gonna be spending time up there, anyway. And so in many respects, this kind of just makes sense that I think, that there are [00:36:00] issues around, as wiser heads than me have pointed out, around national security issues chairing Cobra.

Are you going to disperse a lot of the national security personnel up to the northwest? Does that actually enhance your capability or does it dilute it a bit? So I think that there are many things to be worked out, but actually I think that this is all eminently doable.

Mark D'Arcy: Of course, one of the big tasks, one of the big policy commitments that Andy Burnham signed up to, is getting the social care system reformed, revamped to unblock the NHS.

And that's a massive policy challenge one, The immediate big test that will be in front of this new souped-up Cabinet Office, Prime Minister's department, 18 billion quid seems to be the price tag that's attached to it. Is this gonna be driven from this new department rather than left to Yvette Cooper in the Department of Health?

Jon Davis: The Department of Health, but also I guess Work and Pensions, HMRC, the Treasury, [00:37:00] everyone's gonna be involved in this. The whole idea of the reform of social care, it's been an aim of so many people. Boris Johnson said that he had solved it, if you remember. He really hadn't really scratched the surface of it.

I think that this particular issue, maybe it is first on the agenda, but it won't be first in terms of being resolved. This is big. This is long term stuff.

Mark D'Arcy: This isn't something that they're gonna get resolved even in time for the next election, two and a half years. This is a mega reform that is gonna take quite a while.

Jon Davis: They can certainly try to get it done in two and half years and very good luck to them. But will it stick? I mean that's the real issue here. I think that this is one of those massive, probably cross party agreements that a country has just got to agree on. Just saying that it's done does not make it done.

It's gonna require much of government, it's gonna require a probably another general election to [00:38:00] actually confirm these things. The whole triple lock as well. It will bankrupt the country if it carries on. So it has to be grasped at some point. You put all of these issues together, they've got a lot of things to get their teeth into, but two and a half years actually solving them. Likely not.

Mark D'Arcy: Is it something then that Andy Burnham's got a call in Kemi Badenoch, maybe Nigel Farage, Ed Davey as well, and get them all to sign up to some kind of social care proposal and maybe in the mix removal of the triple lock on the value of pensions.

Jon Davis: If you cast your mind back to the National Health Service and the whole welfare statism and that Attleean settlement, alright. Churchill didn't agree to it, but there was such a big agreement from a landslide. There was a mandate. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be called in and everyone needs to agree on these things. I doubt that's going to happen, but I think that putting these ideas out, maybe even having a Royal Commission [00:39:00] around it, something really long term, serious, really trying to get this right, I think it's the only way.

Mark D'Arcy: But isn't that just a way of kicking it back into touch again? There've been high powered bodies of one sort or another by the dozen considering social care over the years. The Dilnot report's gathering dust somewhere in the recesses of Whitehall. Isn't it time for someone to actually do something.

Jon Davis: It absolutely is, but how do you get agreement on this. This is all about inheritance taxation. This is about wellness agenda. This is about the National Health Service. It's everything. It seems to me that yes, you could argue it's kicking it into the long grass, but on the other hand, what Burnham has said is that he wants to move beyond one and two year tenures.

He wants to get to the 5, 6, 7 years. For me, as a historian of New Labour, I think that one of the key lessons of New Labour is that when Blair and Brown were in situ, both of them for 10 years, you can get things done. [00:40:00]

Ruth Fox: And Jon, just going back to the scale of the reshuffle, one of the issues is that the department for science has been abolished and the roles have been redistributed across Whitehall and just reflecting over the New Labour years and then the Conservative years that followed, we've obviously had quite a lot of restructuring of the centre from time to time.

Does this reorganisation work or does it just delay things and you spend an awful lot of money rebranding departments and actually what it does is mean that ministers and civil servants have to spend time on the reorganisation and working out who's in charge of what, as opposed to actually getting on with the policy development.

Jon Davis: It's a really interesting one this. When the Department of Science, innovation and Technology was created, soon after Rishi Sunak came in, and it's part of his approach to things, right? That scientific mathematics sort of approach. I think that for sure it took a bit of time to get underway and there were criticisms of it. [00:41:00] There's no question, but I'm quite marked by how many people, how many entrepreneurs, how many outsiders have really criticised this dismemberment. What's the reason for it?

And you know what, I'm not sure that right now we actually know what the reason for it is. It seems to be a reversal, digital going back to Department for Culture, Media and Sport as they won't need to reprint any business cards there. They'll just call it DCMS. It would be D-D-C-M-S. Right. but anyway. But the idea of a souped up business department, which has taken science and innovation, but crucially not technology, I see. Look, there's a little bit of communication needs to be done here to put it mildly.

So let's see how the next weeks pan out here. But it certainly has attracted a lot of criticism from people who thought that actually it wasn't a bad department.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the things I suppose we all sort to [00:42:00] talk about is events, dear boy, events. You come in with big ambitions and policy directions, and then something happens that completely throws a Prime Minister off course.

And in this case it could be anything from a renewed energy crisis sparked by events in the Gulf to something disastrous happening in Ukraine. All sorts of things could go wrong in the world seen at the moment. So whatever Prime Minister Burnham's domestic agenda, is he tooled up for the kind of unexpected developments that might now happen.

Jon Davis: One of the things about Burnham is that yes, he's Manchester and he's the mayor and, but actually he was around Blair and he was a cabinet minister, wasn't he, at the very end of the New Labour era. So this man has seen how events can actually derail you, push you off course, all those metaphors.

I think that he's actually, so far, in terms of being a Prime Minister, he's looking like to me as if he might be able to withstand these events. Certainly he's put together quite a [00:43:00] high powered team. I would say he clearly wants Lou Haigh to be a real enforcer. That's been a role that some of the time has worked, but most of the time has not.

But let's give her some hope and some time to actually see what she can do. One of the things I'm always reminded of in our classes, we're lucky enough to have Michael Barber, Lord Barber now, the head of Tony Blair's delivery unit, and one of the things that he pointed out was the idea that delivery never sleeps.

And so even when Blair had created it and just months later you had 9/11 followed by Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you would've thought that Blair's vision, his ideas, even the government would be derailed on public service delivery. But I think it's fair to say that middle era of New Labour and a bit later is probably the high point maybe ever of public service delivery in this country. Just when you would've thought that Blair's eyes and [00:44:00] focus were being pulled elsewhere.

So much of this depends upon who Burnham is choosing to run all these various bits of machinery of government, which sound quite dry to most people's ears, but are crucial to the success of a government in the longer term.

Ruth Fox: And one of the features of Andy Burnham's experience obviously is that he's been a metro mayor, which other prime ministers have not had, that kind of executive experience at a political level in the nations and regions and coming in certainly in recent times. What difference do you think that's gonna make?

Jon Davis: He's clearly got a very good touch with the media. I think we all remember the quite performative stuff when, during COVID, when he was outside receiving information just in and doing very well with the cameras and looking for all the world like the proper leader. So look, I think that there is a confidence that comes from that.

Clearly, the devolution agenda is not just something that he's interested in or he is gonna learn on the job like George Osborne did. This is [00:45:00] front and centre. He really knows what he wants out of this. Let's see how he delivers that. Because it's all these things are easier said than done. And also I think that I was quite pleased to see his focus on trying to reach out beyond Manchester, talking about I was a local leader, now I need to become in effect a local leader for every locale.

Let's see how this works out. But at the moment, as I said, I'm looking forward to giving him a fair wind here.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose the other aspect of his time as a metro mayor was that he was his own boss in Greater Manchester for several terms. And that was a rather different experience to being a cabinet minister under Gordon Brown.

You weren't being tele operated from Downing Street. You were running your own show, taking your own decisions. Alright, the Treasury controlled your money to a great extent, but other than that, you were fairly independent. Has that experience made him a better leader, now?

Jon Davis: Do you know, I remember there was a Geoff Mulgan, another one of those really clever people that Blair and Brown brought [00:46:00] into government in the, early new labour period.

And I read Geoff Mulgan, I spoke to him years ago, and he was talking about how in other countries, like France for example, or even in the US, local leaders often became national leaders, but we didn't have that functionality in the uk. So we do now. We do have that functionality. And so as I was saying earlier, I think that there is a certain kind of confidence that comes from having in effect like an apprenticeship.

Alright, this is now immeasurably harder. This is now so much bigger and more pressurised. But actually, I think that what Burnham brings is a huge amount of experience. Let's see now if he steps up to the plate and steps up to the level of events.

Mark D'Arcy: Jon Davis, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Jon Davis: Absolute pleasure.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Jon.

Mark, should we take a another break and, when we come back, some helpful reading for [00:47:00] our listeners for their summer holidays.

Mark D'Arcy: I just want to read beside the pool.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute. Byebye.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, I thought it might be quite fun for us to explore what we're gonna be reading during the holiday break. The summer recess looms, long langorous days beside the swimming pool, clutching a pina colada.

Ruth Fox: I don't know where you're expecting from your summer break. It doesn't sound like mine. Garden and a gin and tonic for me.

Mark D'Arcy: If only, but all the same, I thought it might be quite fun just to think about a little bit of holiday reading. What sort of things do we enjoy? What are the best political books? What could we recommend to listeners?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, okay. Top of my list, partly because it's been sitting in my study for ages and I really need to crack on with it is a book about Parliament, sorry to, maintain the link.

It's called The Fiery Spirits: Popular Protest, Parliament and the English Revolution by John Reese. And I've been waiting to read [00:48:00] this. It's a bit of a tome. It's about 550 odd pages. I think published last year and I really need to crack on with it. But essentially the fiery spirits are the four or five MPs in Parliament who had these links with the popular protests in the run up to the Civil War, members of the Long Parliament. One of whom was one of the great advocates for annual parliaments of course, which influences so, so much of what happens in Parliament today.

So quite interested to read that. It's had very good reviews. So I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into that.

Mark D'Arcy: My reading project for the summer is Between the Waves by Tom McTague partly 'cause I lived through a lot of its subject. It's a kind of deep history of Brexit and it goes back all the way to Charles de Gaulle's attitudes towards the perfidious English shaped by his experiences in the Second World War.

It traces the current of conservative thought that always really rejected the idea of European entanglement and almost forgotten conservative youth leaders, Peter Young, Patrick Robertson, people like that who were [00:49:00] campaigning on the fringes of the Conservative Party when Brexit was a really subversive idea.

And it just traces how that finally built up and gets into the, parliamentary plotting that led eventually to the Brexit referendum. So it's a fascinating subject I've always been very interested in with Brexit. You always feel that people tend to regard it as something that just happened in a spasm and don't necessarily look at the deep political roots that nurtured it over the decades.

So that's by Tom McTague, the editor of The New Statesman, who's a very good writer apart from anything else. And I always just enjoy his prose. So I'm really quite looking forward to getting my head down and really getting through this.

Ruth Fox: Doesn't sound very relaxing, I say.

Mark D'Arcy: It may not be good for my blood pressure.

Ruth Fox: Revisiting brexit.

You remember all those sort of torturous sessions you and I used to commentate on for BBC Parliament. The other book again that I've been waiting to crack on with, it's part politics, part geopolitics, but a lot of economics. And that's the book Material World [00:50:00] by Ed Conway, who's I think the economics editor for Sky News.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, he writes some very good columns occasionally at times.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And he does really good explainers. But this book is about some of the key components of the way our world operates the essential. Products that are necessary for everything from iPhones to medical equipment and drugs and so on.

So he basically looks at sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. And it's an examination of the economics, but also the geopolitics, the implications of what happens when you've got shortages of these things. How the effect of the location of where these essential, often critical minerals are based, explores some of the dark history of the mining of these products, for example.

Mark D'Arcy: So the Scramble for Africa.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it is absolutely fascinating and what happens if you've got shortages of these or if China, for example, has got particular controls over certain of these products and what are the implications for the rest of the world and how [00:51:00] does it affect the market?

So I'm looking forward to really getting into the detail of that. Because he really does go behind the scenes and he's obviously travelled all over the world to track some of these essential products and how they are produced and where they go.

Mark D'Arcy: It sounds like one that perhaps more people ought to dig into.

Because it's a subject that shapes a lot of what then goes on in the world.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: One of my recommendations is a novel, it's by Robert Harris, who's been writing political novels for decades now, and it's a book called Precipice.

Ruth Fox: Oh.

Mark D'Arcy: Now it takes us back to the outbreak of the First World War.

The Prime Minister at the time is Herbert Henry Asquith and herbert Asquith is carrying on with a woman called Venetia Stanley, who's a friend of his daughters. So she's 30 years younger than he is. And at the outbreak of war, his chosen method of impressing her is to show her absolutely critical, top secret government documents.

So [00:52:00] I'm enclosing for your interest, a map of our dispositions in Belgium. Here's a telegram to the Tsar of all the Russias explaining why he should declare war on the Kaiser right now, that kind of level of top secret political material. And they would take drives around the countryside in which he would, in one of these kind of curtained cars, where you've got a chauffeur in the front who can't see in, and every now and then, Asquith, having shown her these documents, would toss them out in the window.

And then people started to find them.

Ruth Fox: Oh dear.

Mark D'Arcy: And then security inquiries went on about how these incredibly limited. It's absolutely true. And the reason we know it's true is because years later, Roy Jenkins, when writing Asquith's biography came across the letters that Venetia Stanley had returned to Asquith.

So Asquith letters to her, which would include literally, I enclose a map of our dispositions in Belgium kind of material. So it is a gobsmacking true story in which Robert Harris [00:53:00] invents a fictional police officer who's detailed to investigate and follow this around. But it is just the most extraordinary tale of a Prime Minister dealing with the outbreak of a world war in a state of absolute emotional turmoil and possibly even meltdown.

I once proposed a radio for a series to be called Desperate Prime Ministers, which looked at prime ministers in emotional crisis.

Ruth Fox: And they didn't take it up.

Mark D'Arcy: They didn't take it up.

Ruth Fox: Maybe that's a podcast series worth.

Mark D'Arcy: It could be at that, but Asquith would've been Exhibit A had we done that the first episode, because the tale is just so extraordinary and it's meticulously researched by Robert Harris as well.

Yeah, he did things like go to an auction room and look at the videos that they were putting out of the precise model of car that Asquith was being driven around him while conducting his affair. So it is the most amazing and largely true tale. There's obviously a bit of fictional embroidery to make it work as a novel, but my goodness, what a story.

Ruth Fox: The other story that I'm gonna be reading, which probably would be regarded as too fantastic for fiction.

Mark D'Arcy: Stranger than [00:54:00] truth.

Ruth Fox: Stranger than truth. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. I'm slightly hesitant to read it, but I ought, which is the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. I think Maggie Haberman is in the New York Times or Washington Post, I can't remember.

But this is big bestseller in the United States and yes, I wanna get my teeth into it and

Mark D'Arcy: I've dipped into this a bit actually and you have to read it in instalments because it is so high octane and so bonkers all the time.

Ruth Fox: I know.

Mark D'Arcy: That you feel that you need to go away and have a breather after reading half a chapter.

Ruth Fox: Oh, there we go.

Mark D'Arcy: I've got an American politics book to offer as well, and the link is JD Vance's remark that the Watergate scandal would barely be used for 10 minutes these days given rather unintentionally reviewing remark by the Vice President. It's a book about Watergate by someone who was almost the central protagonist in the Watergate scandal, which heaven help us, it is more than 50 years ago now. But this is a book by [00:55:00] John Dean called Blind Ambition, and John Dean was the counsel to the president, Richard Nixon's in-house White House lawyer. More importantly, he was in charge of what was known as the White House Plumber's Unit, which was the unit that investigated leaks of information in the White House and more widely was a kind of dirty tricks unit.

And it is the most astonishing account. It's not in print now, but you can easily get it on eight books and places like that. And if you see it in the secondhand bookshop, snap it up. But it has some of the most astounding scenes in it. There is a point where John Dean is in a meeting in the office of the Attorney General, the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States, John Mitchell. It was at the time.

And they are discussing plots to undermine the Democrats as Richard Nixon seeks reelection, which includes such things as compromising delegates at the Democratic National Convention by getting prostitutes to lure them onto a riverboat equipped with cameras so that their infidelities could be filmed [00:56:00] and documented. It includes plots to kidnap key political figures. It includes all sorts of bugging and astoundingly unethical interference in the politics of the United States. And Dean at the end of it, remarks that he really doesn't think this is a good discussion to be having in the Attorney General's office, do you think?

And there's this fabulous character called G Gordon Liddy, who was the kind of point person for the Nixon administration's dirty tricks, whose party piece was to burn his hands with a cigarette to show how tough he was and who volunteered to be assassinated if it was necessary to prevent the scandal reaching the President when the Watergate scandal eventually broke. John Dean essentially broke with the Nixon White House and testified as to his own role in the dirty tricks, and did a prison sentence for them and gave evidence to lots of congressional inquiries. These incredibly famous televised hearings where he just laid out what had been happening in enormous detail.

But he was an incredibly ambitious young Republican lawyer. Quite happily [00:57:00] complicit in all this until he realised that he was being set up as the fall guy who would be blamed for the antics of the Nixon administration. And he basically took the whole thing down with him. Amazing tale.

Ruth Fox: Okay, that's one to add to my list.

Mark D'Arcy: Bedtime reading.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Rather more prosaic option on my part, back to British politics, I do want to see if I can get into Alan Johnson's memoirs, 'cause everybody tells me that they're very well written, really interesting, fascinating social history as well as his political background.

They were published a couple of years ago, at least in the last one in the cycle. So I've not yet got into those.

Mark D'Arcy: So i've read the, at least, the middle volume for book talk. The BBC programme I used to present back in the day. And I thought it was the most fascinating insight into the lost corporatist world of the 1970s.

Alan Johnson's coming up through the trade union movement. The Post Office trains him to get a driving licence that he can drive a delivery van. All sorts of things that happened a lot less in the current world. He moves out to a nice [00:58:00] council estate in Slough from the inner London semi slum in which he previously lived.

And it's all beautifully written. It's lovely prose. So it's emotionally sensitive, intelligent, fascinating to read. I love them.

Ruth Fox: And you're a big one for diaries. Any diaries on your list?

Mark D'Arcy: My absolute favourite, and again, this is rather dates me, are the Alan Clark diaries, and Alan Clarke, for those whose memories don't extend quite that far, was a middle ranking figure in Margaret Thatcher's governments.

His peak was probably as minister for trade and minister for defence procurement. So he never got to cabinet level, but he was on the far right of the Conservative Party. He was a very close Thatcher ally. He was at least slightly in love with her, he wrote.

Ruth Fox: Which would be quite worrying for Margaret Thatcher.

Mark D'Arcy: A stunning account of his life in politics.

Most political diaries are a bit expedited. His were too, but they were unexpurgated [00:59:00] to a much higher level, shall we say. It chronicles his infidelities. It chronicles his political intrigues. It chronicles how he attempted to undermine his Defence Secretary Tom King, when he was minister for defence procurement and basically drafted his own defence review in the teeth of Tom King's objections.

It describes all the intrigues and he describes fascinatingly the fall of Margaret Thatcher and how finally Conservative backbench disquiet at her style of government crystallised into her being removed. And it's all superbly written. Part of the delight of this book is it is just so well written when so many political diaries are very humdrum and hurried.

This is elegant and it's prose that you can just listen to. And there is an audio book of it, which I can highly recommend, which is Alan Clarke himself reading it out in this wonderful Etonian twang where he's at one point lamenting the horrors of having to go [01:00:00] on official tours to the Baltic, he says, leavened only by the girls.

Only this morning a Nordic beauty served me breakfast. He says, delightedly. And it's the kind of thing that if other politicians had written, it would've been career ending. But there are three volumes of the Alan Clark diaries, but the middle one about his time in government is the one that is absolutely fascinating to read, even if it's probably a slightly obsolete account of how government works these days.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. with that Mark, I think we should leave it there. Plenty of ideas there for our listeners in terms of their holiday reading.

Mark D'Arcy: I like to think of you leaning back with that pina colada sipping.

Ruth Fox: Gin and tonic.

Mark D'Arcy: I want something with an umbrella in it. Come on.

Ruth Fox: Yes. With that Mark, that is it for us for a few weeks. Like Parliament, we're also going into recess, taking a break for the summer, unless of course there's a recall of Parliament, any major developments necessitating an emergency podcast. Please no, 'cause I'd like a few weeks off,

Mark D'Arcy: Wouldn't we all?

Ruth Fox: Otherwise we'll be back on, I think Thursday the 3rd of September is [01:01:00] the plan.

But in the meantime, listeners, we have got a couple of recess episodes in the can for you, which will be coming out in due course. And they're also looking at some relatively new books that are out. But, with a very clear parliamentary political theme.

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed, yes, we've got Joanna Cherry, the former SNP MP's account of her time in Westminster, which covers such delights as Brexit, the unlawful prorogation of Parliament, and her internal battles inside the SNP with Nicola Sturgeon.

And we've got Charlie Feldman, an expert on the Canadian Parliament with a book of rather peculiar anecdotes about life on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So that's all to look forward to. But otherwise, we hope you have a great summer, listeners, and join us back in September for the next exciting instalments at West Enders.

Mark D'Arcy: See you then. Join us then. Bye-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.