Even Keir Starmer’s appearance seems to have changed, have you noticed? Before the election he often looked as though he had dressed in a hurry. But power confers a new swagger. His suits look sharper, he sounds like a man who knows what he’s talking about, and how long has it been since we could claim that of a prime minister?
And perhaps that sense of purpose will be conveyed to the new MPs, who now make up more than half of all the MPs in the chamber. In the past, newbies have had to fit into the cobwebbed public school ethos of the place, but why should that still be the case? Perhaps the old crusties will now have to fit in with the new intake. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?
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Bernard Weatherill was the Commons Speaker during the 1980s, a former doyen of Savile Row. Mr Weatherill recalled the terrors of being a new MP, including one day when he was enjoying the quietude which comes with sitting minding one’s own business in the Commons gents. Two other MPs came in, one of whom Mr Weatherill recognised from his voice.
“This place is going to the dogs!” that voice complained. “They’ve even let m’ tailor in here now!”
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One of the first tasks MPs have to perform of course is to take the oath of allegiance to the king. This rankled with Clive Lewis (Norwich South). Mr Lewis objects to pledging obeisance to a monarch and made that clear: “I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic. Until that time…” and he went on to affirm.
From beginning as a brash young man, prepared to take on the world, Mr Lewis has grown into a politician of significant stature.
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How to take the steam out of Reform? That may or may not be the question. The party seems entirely to comprise that windbag Nigel ‘Satchmo’ Farage (Clacton), leading to enquiries regarding the great number of invisible candidates they had, and whether indeed they ever existed.
We should never underestimate the British public’s wilful stupidity, but it may well be that even a modestly successful Labour government which ticks a few boxes early on will take the wind out of this particular bag. Mr Farage claims he will make a mass movement out of his party, but that remains to be seen. It may however give new voice to the lost cause of Brexit, which might bolster Keir Starmer in his present Brexit position.
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Though down at the Muckrakers, it has not gone unnoticed that suddenly the EU, if not actually Brexit, has been removed from Labour’s list of proscribed words. In this first week of government, it seemed ministers were taking turns in opening the door just a crack to closer relations with Europe.
So the wise men are in accord. This has not happened by accident. For the past year, not even the humblest Labour foot soldier has been prepared to talk about it. Now, the government itself is prepared to accept that having good relations with our near neighbours is not actually tantamount to high treason. This can only have happened as part of a strategic shift from on high.
How far this glasnost will go remains to be seen. The prime minister is still bound by his idiotically exceptionalist declarations on how there are no arguments for joining the single market or the customs union, and (only last week) on how Britain will never return to EU membership in his lifetime.
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In the last government, East Anglia had any number of Tory cabinet ministers. But until last week there were few Labour MPs in the whole region, and since none of the ingenues are going to be shunted immediately into government, we now have only one: Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge).
Mr Zeichner has become the farming minister at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It is a post Mr Zeichner has shadowed for some time, and he presumably knows his subject by now. This was never a quality the previous government rated highly, and we wait to see what civil servants make of a minister who can tell his plough from his pea viner.
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One of the more monstrous two-finger salutes the last government waved from behind the Brexit barricade was the decision to re-introduce neonicotinoid insecticides. It is claimed one teaspoonful can kill 1.25 billion honey bees.
This week we learned that an environmental watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, is investigating the last government’s re-introduction of the insecticide. A promise to ban its use was in the Labour manifesto, so presumably they feel they are on safe ground. But shifting in the prevailing political wind is hardly a good look for a supposedly independent watchdog. The whole point is that it investigates and reveals the truth, even and especially when those in power may not wish it. So here we seem to have another, like the Environment Agency, Ofwat and the others, who until now merely signed whatever was put in front of them by the last government.
It is difficult to put into words the contempt due to those who have been supine in the face of monstrous misconduct by their previous political masters. We must hope their new masters act decisively to replace them with others with more backbone.
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Two former Tory ministers in our own backyard who are bound to play a role in the forthcoming Conservative leadership race are James Cleverly (Braintree) and Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex), by virtue of their being among the few senior Tories left. Both have already put their oar in this week. Mr Cleverly is not of the right of the party, but he has demonstrated he is quite unprincipled enough to pretend he is in order to show himself a good team player.
Mr Cleverly has written in The Times about the need for his party to be a broad church, which of course it is always claimed to be. But in view of Mr Cleverly’s recent record, it looks suspiciously as though our man is hedging his bets.
Ms Badenoch has also featured in the same newspaper, over a row she had in the first shadow cabinet meeting. It is alleged she launched a no-holds-barred attack on her soon-to-be-ex leader Rishi Sunak. The fact that the row was leaked is assumed to be the work of Ms Badenoch herself, as a means of flexing her muscles to the membership before the campaign starts.
But she has problems. It appears that 2,644 of her constituency postal votes were sent out late, leaving people allegedly unable to vote, and her majority was only 2,610…
If is possible that this may require a by election, in which case, until it is held and a new count takes place, Ms Badenoch will return to being just a candidate, not an MP. So would presumably be disqualified from running to be party leader.
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The depths to which James Cleverly is prepared to sink in order to keep his reputation pristine amid the maelstrom of Conservative Party vituperation has been clearly demonstrated this week. A report from HM Chief Inspector of Prisons on Harmondsworth immigration removal centre describes the worst conditions the inspectors have ever seen. The report describes aspects of the centre’s running as ”shambolic” and goes on to declare: “The level of chaos that we found at Harmondsworth was truly shocking”.
The situation was reported to Mr Cleverly, as home secretary, but he simply never replied. Sky News also approached him for comment but received no response.
But for those who look for retribution – and don’t we all, my dears – Keir Starmer has suggested that all those dirty little government secrets of the past few years will be exposed to the light of day.
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Andrew Marr on Question Time introduced an interesting observation which closely follows the arguments that Pecksniff has been making over the past many months. This diarist has claimed that a large Labour majority would mean less government control, not more; and that frustrated backbenchers would begin to kick over the traces if there were no real movement towards the EU.
Mr Marr draws similar conclusions. He suggests that a resurgent parliamentary Liberal Democrats may well make common cause with those recalcitrant Labour backbenchers over Brexit. If that happens, will the government move more quickly to ameliorate the criticism? Or will they revert to that Labour stubbornness. move rightwards and become even more entrenched in their Brexit position?
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There was a strange development in the Tories betting on the election date scandal which may have cost a Labour candidate a seat. In their investigations, the Gambling Commission unearthed by accident the fact that Kevin Craig, the Labour candidate for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, had also bet on the election. But not the timing: just the result in his own seat, and quite some months ago. Given the sensitivities, they revealed this fact and Labour immediately placed Mr Craig under ‘administrative suspension’.
By this time, he had already been registered as the Labour candidate and so that’s how he appeared on the election slips. There was understandable confusion among voters over his standing. Was he still a candidate or not? Understandable confusion for the voters, but surely not for those running the election, who ought to have been clear that – whatever his party standing – he was still a legitimate candidate. But EAB received several reports on election day of polling clerks at more than one polling station apparently advising voters that Mr Craig was no longer a legitimate candidate, so robbing him of possible supporters.
In the end, the seat was won by a late entrant, after Dan Poulter crossed the floor to join Labour. He is Patrick Spencer, the son of the somewhat controversial billionaire former Conservative treasurer Lord Michael Spencer. (It seems the Tories still don’t get it.) He beat Mr Craig by just over 4,000 votes.
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The new Reform MP for Great Yarmouth is Rupert Lowe. Now it seems that Mr Lowe was once a director of a company called Digme Fitness. His fellow director was one Akshata Narayan Murty, also known as Mrs Rishi Sunak. It is alleged that the company went bust in February 2022, owing HMRC over £6 million in unpaid taxes.
Ms Murty’s husband, Mr Sunak, was chancellor from February 2020 until July 2022. So his wife’s company went bust owing millions to the taxpayer on his watch. This is what is known in some circles as an embarrassing sequence of events.
There is one more curiosity. The address given for Digme Fitness was 22 York Buildings in London. This is now the address of the Reform Party.
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Rupert Lowe has hardly made an auspicious start to his parliamentary career either. His first act was to declare that: “I have gathered a list of schools … in my constituency where teachers were allegedly pushing their own aggressive personal views … I will be following up with each and every headteacher, making it abundantly clear that their responsibility to the children does NOT include forcing political opinions on impressionable young boys and girls.”
Aficionados of The Mikado – a satire on the idiocies of British politics – will be conversant with the ridiculed character KoKo who also says: ”I’ve got a little list”. He is another who outreached himself. Mr Lowe seems confused as to quite what powers his role as an MP bestows on him. He is not, like KoKo, the lord high executioner. He has no powers whatever over schools, and no means of enforcing those non-existent powers. It is difficult to imagine a more ignorant, pompous and ineffectual way to introduce himself to his voters.
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