House of commons

John Bercow may be gone but his legacy still lives on. The former Speaker of the House of Commons quit the role back in November 2019 but new costs from his tenure at the helm are still being uncovered more than two years on. Steerpike has done some digging and it seems the scandal-hit Speaker felt the need to call in the services of an expert PR adviser, despite him having access to both his own press secretary and the Commons media team. A Freedom of Information request has found that Bercow spent between £65,000 to £70,000 on the services of former journalist Tim Hames between 2015 and 2019. Who he,

Labour has been making much hay out of the government’s £8.7 billion spend on personal protective equipment (PPE), much of it bought at the height of the Covid pandemic. The shadow Treasury minister Pat McFadden claimed the figure would be ‘galling to hard-working households’ while his colleagues have made much of the government’s VIP lane to secure kit that was in desperately short supply throughout much of 2020 and 2021.  Mr S abhors waste as much as the next man. But it’s worth asking as to what Labour’s own alternatives would have been if they were running the country when millions of items were suddenly required for frontline NHS staff.

Inflation, fuel prices and a looming cost of living crisis: it’s a grim economic outlook for many out there. Fortunately, MPs are doing their bit to help, namely by giving extra cash handouts to the staffers in the offices. Steerpike has spotted that almost a million pounds – £951,000 – was shelled out in ‘reward and recognition’ payments last year, according to the 2020/21 figures from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). A follow up request from Mr S has established the identity of the most generous bosses in parliament, with Sir Keir Starmer in the top ten of the 352 MPs who sanctioned such payments last year. Top of the

Today is the big day. MPs are set to vote on the ‘Plan B’ package of restrictions by 6:30 p.m tonight with many Tories publicly denouncing the winter restrictions as a step too far in a society protected by what Boris Johnson once called the ‘huge wall of immunity’ from vaccines.  The big question of course is how big the rebellion will be – 82 Tories are currently named on the Spectator’s list of self-declared rebels. If all were to vote against, it would be the biggest rebellion of Johnson’s premiership, comfortably beating the 55 who voted against a new Covid-19 tier system for England last December, with another 16 abstentions. Labour votes

Angela Rayner is formidable. Until today, that adjective never suited Labour’s deputy leader. She can be combative, authentic, eye-catching and crowd-pleasing — and quite annoying. Clearly she’s as tough as a vintage Land Rover. But at PMQs, she added statesmanship to her roster of qualities. The session was sparsely attended. The press are in Glasgow covering the Frequent Flyers Summit, aka COP26. Boris came south, by jet of course, to put in a stint at Westminster. He was met by Rayner, soberly dressed and steely-eyed. Her tactics were well prepared in advance. She used feints and misdirection to keep Boris guessing and she varied long rhetorical assaults with punchy killer-blows.

The speed of the Taliban’s advance in Afghanistan is remarkable. Even those who thought that the Trump / Biden policy of withdrawal was a folly, did not expect that Kabul would be surrounded before the end of August. Their only mistake was to believe our assurances about having an enduring commitment to the country What makes the whole situation, with all the suffering that ordinary Afghans will endure and the damage being done to the US’s reputation for being a reliable ally, so exasperating is that after years of failure the US and Nato had found a relatively low cost way of maintaining a form of stability in the country. This

It is not the Battle of Marston Moor, but it strikes me that we are now in something of a constitutional crisis following the Speaker’s dramatic outburst this afternoon. In response to points of order about the fact Boris Johnson is announcing lockdown changes in a press conference rather than to parliament, Hoyle said that he had been told no decisions had been taken only to find out that there was an embargoed document setting out what changes were coming. A visibly furious Hoyle declared from the chair that: ‘This House is being misled’. Considering that misleading the House is a resigning matter, this is a remarkably serious accusation for

The House welcomed the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, as he announced his spending commitments for the coming year. Rish the Dish delivered all kinds of goals and priorities for the UK but he left his personal plans in obscurity. Or did he? The Chancellor’s naked ambition may be sheathed in a Jermyn Street suit but his strategy is easy to read: knife the Honey Monster and evict him from his lair. Today he was addressing himself to his colleagues in cabinet, and in the wider party, and he wanted to show political intelligence and presentational shrewdness. His critics have already accused him of betraying the NHS by freezing pay settlements for

When Rishi Sunak gets up at the despatch box tomorrow to announce his spending review, the Chancellor is expected to commit to a public sector pay freeze — with NHS workers exempt. Ever since this was first reported in the media, the idea has met heavy opposition from Labour while Tory politicians have had to get used to being asked on air why their own pay is set to go up at a time when the bulk of public sector workers’ pay is not. That well-trodden answer tends to go along the lines of ‘it’s a matter out of our control as Ipsa (the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) sets MPs’ salaries’.

This afternoon Boris Johnson came close to losing a Commons vote for the first time since the election. Over 30 Tory MPs broke a three-line whip in order to protest over the government’s decision to allow the Chinese company Huawei to be involved in the UK’s 5G network. The government saw off the rebellion by Tory MPs over an amendment calling for Huawei to be removed from the 5G network in two years time if it is still deemed ‘high risk’ by British cybersecurity experts by 306 votes to 282. This means that the government’s working majority of 87 was cut to 24. The rebellion was spearheaded by Iain Duncan

Andrea Leadsom has just given a rather long and very comprehensive personal statement in the Commons following her sacking in last month’s reshuffle. She took no parting shots at Boris Johnson at all, preferring instead to focus any anger on former Speaker John Bercow, with whom she had a very long-running feud. Why did she bother giving a personal statement at all if it was just to look back on the past few years at work? Someone with very little knowledge of what has happened in Westminster in the past few years might have been forgiven for thinking that Bercow was the one responsible for her leaving government, rather than

MPs who aren’t in the process of defecting to the Liberal Democrats are using their conference recess to phone around their colleagues canvassing for the next Commons Speaker. Lindsay Hoyle is, according to YouGov, the favourite to win, but Harriet Harman and Chris Bryant are also running strong campaigns, along with Meg Hillier. Then there are the Tory candidates: Eleanor Laing, Sir Henry Bellingham, Shailesh Vara and Sir Edward Leigh. All of them are promising to stand up for parliament, albeit in rather different ways. Leigh, for instance, promises to ‘seek by my conduct and dress to submerge my personality into the office and keep business flowing’ (which if nothing

Oh look, there’s water coming through the roof of the House of Commons! What a gift to those starved of metaphors for the mess that has been made of Brexit. The problem is that the water coming through the roof, which the House authorities are insisting is not a sewage leak (in a blow to fans of particularly crap metaphors), is far more than some kind of coincidental symbol of what’s going on. It’s actually just a different manifestation of the same problem afflicting British politics as the one that’s led us into the Brexit crisis. The House of Commons Chamber is the bit of Parliament that the public notice