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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. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Some by-elections you just shrug, some completely transform the political mood, so how will Gorton and Denton reverberate through Parliament?

Mark D'Arcy: Should Parliament take the lead in investigating the Mandelson, Andrew and Epstein scandal? We talk to former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat MP.

Ruth Fox: And why MPs should be paying a lot of attention to what's going on in the Ministry of Defence and other departments in next week's debate on government spending.[00:01:00]

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, the Labour Party celebrated its 126th birthday, the 126th anniversary of the great meeting in London that founded Labour, by losing one of its safest seats, Gorton and Denton, or Denton and Gorton, choose your permutation, on the outskirts of Manchester, fell not to Reform, which had been strongly predicted by a lot of people, but to the left wing competitor, the Green Party, and the results of this by-election will, I think, reverberate through Parliament and have all sorts of interesting effects. So what do you think is, first of all, the biggest effect in the Chamber?

Ruth Fox: Well, the biggest thing that strikes me is that the three main parties in Parliament, the biggest Parliamentary groups, Labour, conservatives, and Liberal Democrats got 30% of the vote between them, give or take a few extra votes for things like the Monster Raving Loonies and others.

Mark D'Arcy: So the three big parties that have dominated British politics for more than a century, between them, are now a tiny minority of the votes cast in that seat.

Ruth Fox: In that seat. And the two parties that [00:02:00] topped the polls, Greens and Reform, between them, got 70% of the vote in that by-election, but between them can't muster 20 seats in the House of Commons.

And so there's a real disconnect between the level of support for the political parties out there in the country, and which is also reflected of course in the polls, these results confirm that the polls are not a fantasy, but that is what is actually happening on the ground, and yet within Parliament they have a very small voice. Clearly a growing voice and you know, if there are gonna be future by-elections, it'll grow further. I think it'll put the pressure on. Are there gonna be more defections?

Mark D'Arcy: Indeed. I mean, that's the thing though. The parliamentary numbers for these parties can grow in two ways. One, they can win seats in by-elections, and two, they can attract defectors from other parties.

And certainly Reform has had a succession of Conservative MPs deciding to switch to them over the last few weeks. And maybe there are yet more to come. They've set a bit of a deadline. If you are a Conservative MP and you're thinking of changing your colours to [00:03:00] Reform, you've gotta do it before the local elections in May.

And there may be a few more who are now tempted across the line to sit on the Reform benches. And equally interesting is the prospect that some people from other parties might defect to the Greens. I don't expect that will be many Conservative MPs defecting to the Greens. But you might imagine a situation where some discontented Labour MPs, maybe even some discontented Liberal Democrat MPs, might decide to switch their rosette to a green colour.

Labour MPs who might be thinking of jumping ship to the Greens or anywhere else come to that are probably gonna wait and see whether there's a leadership contest and new dispensation inside their own party before they attempt to move to another one. So a lot depends on what happens in those May local elections and Scottish Parliament elections and Welsh Senedd elections.

Ruth Fox: One of the consequences for this, I don't think it changes the calculus in relation to Keir Starmer's position. I think it is as dire as it's already been for some months. The realities are that there's no alternative candidate standing in the wings ready to go. So I don't see that, until at [00:04:00] least the local elections, that there's gonna be any more pressure on him. We're saying that now immediately the day after the by-election. Parliament is obviously not sitting today in the House of Commons. Certainly, we'll see next week I may have to eat my words, but I don't think it changes the calculus for him immediately.

But I think it changes the broader calculus and strategic thinking about the way he behaves in the chamber, the way he talks about the other parties. You know, if we are looking at the collapse of the traditional two party system and this emergence of block voting, if Labour is to have any hope of hanging on to power, then he's gonna need to have more friendly relations, shall I put it, with the parties within that left-leaning block. So the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. And his immediate comments after the election results today were to say that the Labour Party stands against the extremism offered by Reform and the Greens. Well, telling 70% of the electorate that effectively they voted for two extremist parties, I don't think is necessarily the right tone to strike.

Mark D'Arcy: [00:05:00] You're right that there is an emerging pre coalition politics that I think everybody's gotta think about here. Reform will doubtless be singing a siren song to Tory defectors, and you can imagine a situation after the next election where Reform's the biggest party but still needs the Conservatives in order to have a governing majority in the House of Commons and will sing its siren song even louder.

You could imagine a situation where Labour might be seeking to enlist the votes of Lib Dem MPs and Green MPs in order to build a governing majority. So you don't want to go round as Labour leader, if it's Starmer or anybody else, torching your bridges before you have to cross them to those parties. So that is going to affect the tone and it's quite noticeable that certainly Keir Starmer was, in exchanges with Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader at Prime Minister's questions, have become notably more snippy in the last few weeks.

Ruth Fox: Why do you think that is? Because I can't quite work out what the issue or issues are that has led to that, but he does seem a little bit more dismissive.

Mark D'Arcy: [00:06:00] I think that part of it is that the Lib Dems have started to go in a bit harder about rejoining the EU, getting into the single market, signing up to the customs union, having more freedom of movement. And these are all things that Labour has set its face against, but that a lot of Labour supporters might actually quite like to do. And so I think that rather stings Keir Starmer, and maybe he's just getting a little bit tired of batting back nicely any question that Ed Davey makes. Perhaps it's beginning to irritate him.

Once upon a time, Ed Davey would talk mostly about things like social care, which Keir Starmer could sort of nod along to. Now he's dissenting on really big ticket policy questions.

It's another matter, and I think it's getting under Sir Keir Starmer's skin equally, with the Greens. He's had a couple of swipes at the Greens that have really annoyed them. He made a reference to one Green MP opposing electricity pylons across his constituency. He made another joke about Zack Polanski, which didn't go down very well on the Green benches. So there's a bit of animus building up there and, yeah, at the moment, that's all in the [00:07:00] normal stuff of politics. You've gotta be able to take the occasional brick back from another party, but he doesn't want to get into a position where he has irretrievably poisoned his relationship with parties who he might need on the other side of a general election.

I think actually Zack Polanski said that he wouldn't join a coalition government headed by Keir Starmer, so he'd want another Labour leader anyway, so maybe that ship has sailed as far as the Greens are concerned, but all the same, this holds true for an alternative Labour leader as well. One day you might need these guys.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The other thing of course is that although they haven't got many seats in Parliament, they may have votes in the country, but they will come under much more scrutiny now, the Greens, in the ways that they have not experienced before, and as Nigel Farage has found in recent months with Reform, coming under that scrutiny can be quite tricky and difficult.

So I think I think that's a challenge. I don't think there's any great lessons here for Kemi Badenoch. I mean, the Conservatives didn't really do much in this constituency. I think the result was baked in. They knew that they were not gonna perform very well.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, both the Tories and the [00:08:00] Lib Dems were never in the game in this by-election. And they know it. And they would expect in different by-elections in different circumstances to be more serious contenders.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Although I think the Conservative Party losing its deposit is not a terribly good look, but you know.

Mark D'Arcy: I think that hasn't happened since 1983,

Ruth Fox: Something like that, yeah.

But in terms of her performance, I think most people observing her in Westminster think that she has definitely improved at PMQs and so on, and her press strategy and social media strategy has improved. So I don't think there'll be much pressure applied in terms of her position.

Ed Davey is possibly in a different position because there has been speculation about his role as leader, speculation that despite the fact they've got, you know, 70 odd MPs, not making as much noise or getting as much traction as the smaller parties.

Mark D'Arcy: It's the biggest third party group since Asquith. And they aren't making as much of a splash, certainly as they would've imagined they would the day after the election in 2024.

So there've been pieces appearing in the past saying, what's the point of the Lib Dems? What's the point of Ed Davey? What's the strategic [00:09:00] direction? Is there any, or are they just standing as a group of local champions who will sort out the local bypass and oppose the closure of an A and E here, insist on stopping sewage pollution there, and not have a view on national political issues.

The Lib Dems possibly need to do more than that if they're going to break beyond the enclave that they've got at the moment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But we've not mentioned the actual winner of this by-election, so congratulations to Hannah Spencer, the newest MP in Westminster. So it'll be interesting to see what she makes of the experience coming into Parliament in the second year.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it'd be very interesting to watch what develops here. I can remember a by-election, the Rochester by-election, one of the by-elections won back in an earlier sort of Nigel Farage heyday, where the sitting Conservative MP Mark Reckless switched to UKIP and held a by-election to confirm his switch, something which seems to have gone outta fashion in more recent years, and then rushed to Parliament the next morning to take part in a division on a private member's bill about the NHS as I recall.

And I [00:10:00] imagine that the Greens will try to make the absolute most of their first ever by-election victory. Photo calls outside Westminster for her triumphant arrival. Get her to make a maiden speech as quickly as possible. Try and get her in maybe on Prime Minister's Question time and ask a question to Keir Starmer. I think Lindsay Hoyle might be moved to indulge that if she can get in in time to do it.

And, at that stage, watch out for how Keir Starmer responds to it. Is he constructive? Is he snippy? Does he say say may I congratulate you on your victory, enjoy it while it lasts, or something sarcastic like that?

Ruth Fox: Well, I think he goes as far as congratulating them, but yes, we'll have to see. I mean, some interesting jokes going around at Westminster because of course, she is by trade a plumber.

And listeners will know in the context

Mark D'Arcy: Could come in handy.

Ruth Fox: Listeners will know in the context of Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster, plumbing problems are a major issue. So there's quite a number of MPs and journalists speculating that her talents could come in handy. So we'll see what happens.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose the other thing that's brought [00:11:00] up by the sheer weirdness of the current opinion polls and the decline of the big traditional parties as a share of the vote is, are there implications for the electoral system?

Ruth Fox: Well, I mean this has been a question for quite a few general elections now, hasn't it? I mean dating back related to 2010. I mean, I know Professor Sir John Curtis has been saying for quite some time that, you know, first past the post is not delivering in the way it's supposed to. I guess it's possible that within Labour ranks, you know, it's already the wish of the sort of broad membership of the party. I think thet may even have voted for it at party conference a while ago in support of electoral reform. So it's possible that you'll see that pressure now start to build within the Labour parliamentary party to be thinking this is possibly something that they need to address. And you know, cynically, you'd say, well, they would now, wouldn't they, when you know things are not going well.

But conversely, Reform were always in favor of electoral reform when they were getting, you know, 4 million votes in a recent general election and no seats in Parliament, [00:12:00] now they're getting seats in Parliament and they're riding high in the polls, they don't want electoral reform. So it is a cynical situation, but the system will never change unless a party makes a big pitch and decides that the time has come and maybe now's the time.

Mark D'Arcy: And spookily enough, there is a potential vehicle available. There's an elections bill before Parliament at the moment. I'm sure that the Liberal Democrats will stick their traditional amendment calling for single transferrable vote in multi-member constituencies or the like into the bill, but maybe there's a moment now where a cross party coalition could push for change. I'm sure the Greens would be on board for it as well, as you say, it used to be Reform's policy when Reform wasn't getting much out of first past the post, and now they have the prospect, the happy prospect for them, of possibly winning a crushing majority on a third of the vote just as Labour did at the last election. So, you know, suddenly when the system's in favor of you, it doesn't look so bad.

Ruth Fox: And it's a huge legacy issue, you know, you're changing the nature of our democracy, changing the nature of the electoral system, it's a big pitch to your parliamentary party, to the [00:13:00] electorate, whether Keir Starmer has got the strategic adeptness and the ability to build the story around it, to sell it to the public, I rather doubt and possibly too many other distractions in other areas. But it's not beyond the realms of possibility that post the local elections, a potential candidate for the Labour leadership makes that part of the pitch.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose there are a couple of things that you have to look at though in terms of detail.

One is, which proportional representation system do you go to? And then you get into all sorts of theological discussions about exactly what systems works best and also lots of party calculations about which system works best for them.

But also the question of whether you need a referendum to validate the change. And of course, oh no, there are a lot of people with post-traumatic memories of Nick Clegg's attempt to get the alternative vote system up and running in this country, which is flatly rejected in the referendum because at that point everybody hated the Lib Dems for joining the coalition.

Ruth Fox: Well, I wrote a book a few years ago on a completely different subject, but it was titled The Devil Is In the Detail. I think that will be true.

Mark D'Arcy: Certainly [00:14:00] looks like it in this case.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. What did you make, Mark, before we take a break? What did you make of the report, shortly after the polls closed, of an organization called Democracy Volunteers expressing concern about breaches of ballot secrecy, of family groups going into the polling station, and also going into the ballot booth together, which is a breach of electoral law and concerns that in effect, people within families were exerting influence and control over voting decisions of other family members. And let's be clear what we're talking about. We're talking about Muslim family groups going into the polling stations in Gorton and Denton.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well first of all, this is a newly created electoral offence. It was a bill in the last Parliament, which started unusually in the House of Lords, the Conservative peer Lord Hayward, an elections expert, and indeed a former MP, got this through because he wanted to make it absolutely clear that exerting influence in the polling [00:15:00] booth by a member of your family was not something that should be allowed and it would then be a duty on presiding officers to stop it. Now, I had a quick chat with Lord Hayward earlier this morning, and he's going to be putting down a private notice question in the House of Lords next week, and he's going to be asking why this law was not enforced. He said that Democracy Volunteers regarded this as the worst example of widespread family voting that they'd ever seen in the British election, and he wanted to know why presiding officers were not preventing that from happening because that he says is their job. So watch out for an exchange in the House of Lords next week about that, because I think it will be quite an interesting and illuminating exchange.

Maybe part of it is that what Democracy Volunteers see as family voting didn't quite reach the threshold suggested in the law of someone actually being in the polling booth with the person as they vote.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: And directing their vote. We shall see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, in terms of what the Ballot Secrecy Act says, it's an offence where a person [00:16:00] is with or near another person who is at a polling booth and attempts to influence that person's vote.

Now, I think Democracy Volunteers, I should perhaps explain for listeners, this is an election observers group, it's like an NGO, non-government organization

Mark D'Arcy: And it's a long established one as well. There were people tweeting, who are they, never heard of 'em before. Funny they've popped up this time. They've been around for yonks.

Ruth Fox: They've been, yeah, they've been around for a number of years. They've produced reports as election observers of UK elections for quite a number of years. They're authorised by the Electoral Commission to go into polling stations. I think the only other group is the police that can do that kind of observation. So they come with some authority.

And I should also say they do election observations in other parts of the world as well, not just the UK. What's unusual about what they've done is that they've produced their report or at least a press release about it on the night of the by-election when polls close.

The normal way of things is that they will take a few weeks to compile their information, consider it, and publish their report. So it was unusual and it was [00:17:00] because of this, what they say was a high concentration of observations that they've made, their definition of family voting where two voters either confer, collude, or direct each other on voting is arguably a little bit more expansive than what the law says.

So it'll be interesting in addition to the private notice question in the Lords, what will the Commons do? It will get questions, possibly inquiries, by All Party Parliamentary Groups. And it wouldn't surprise me if at some point a select committee says that they got to look at this. This has been a long running issue in lots of constituencies up and down the country, but it seems to be the concentration of it in this particular election that's caused concern.

Mark D'Arcy: I would be surprised though that even if there had been quite a lot of family voting, if it was enough to have swung the result from one direction to another. I doubt it was decisive.

Ruth Fox: No, I mean, you just look at the scale of the Greens' majority. It wouldn't have been possible to do it on that kind of scale.

Mark D'Arcy: Right with that, Ruth, shall we take a break and when we come back, we're gonna be talking to Tom Tugendhat, the former security Minister, about his idea that Parliament should take a [00:18:00] lead in investigating the Mandy Andy Epstein affair and all its ramifications for national security, the status of the Crown, and all sorts of other matters.

Ruth Fox: But before we do listeners, if you are enjoying the podcast, please do share it with your family and friends, help us spread the news about the pod and generate more listeners. And, if you're new to the podcast, then do click the follow button in your app to make sure that you get all the future episodes. It really does help us to grow the podcast and keep the conversation going. So see you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back, and Ruth, the Mandelson, Epstein, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor affair is just continuing to roll. Both Peter Mandelson and the former Prince have been very publicly arrested. It wasn't quite an American style perp walk in leg irons, but they were both there in front of the television cameras or indeed the cameras in an exquisitely public humiliation that some people have wondered is perhaps a little bit too public and possibly even a [00:19:00] calculated humiliation, but it's happened now.

Meanwhile, there have been several parliamentary debates trying to extract papers from the Government. There have been two humble addresses proposed in the House of Commons, in which they request that His Majesty would be graciously pleased to give directions to the government to lay before the House all papers relating to the creation of the role of special representative for trade and investment for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, or indeed all papers relating to Lord Mandelson's appointment as His Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America. Quite a lot of stuff to come out there.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I'm not sure about the King being graciously pleased to hand over all his material.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm sure he'd be delighted.

Ruth Fox: I think he'd be pretty annoyed, willing to do it no doubt, but pretty annoyed that it's come to this about his own brother.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, the Conservative MP, Tom Tugendhat, a former Security Minister in the Rishi Sunak Government, has been suggesting that Parliament ought to set up a very broad inquiry into the whole murky affair, and that there should be a [00:20:00] special committee created for that purpose, rather than leaving it to individual select committees to kind of pick at the edges of the whole thing.

So we spoke to Tom Tugendhat to find out a little bit more about what he was proposing. Tom Tugendhat, welcome to the pod. I gather you are a regular listener. What we'd like to do is explore what this committee would do, how it would work, who'd be on it, and why the existing set of select committees isn't necessarily the right thing for this particular case.

Tom Tugendhat: Well, look, I am a regular listener, and I probably shouldn't confess this, having chaired the premier Committee of Parliament, which of course, as you both know very well, is the Foreign Affairs Committee, and being a Minister, I shouldn't perhaps confess this, but I learned a lot from your show, so I'm enormously grateful. And the way in which you covered, for example, the assisted dying debate has been incredibly important, and so I'm very grateful for what you do.

Let me tell you a little bit about why I think this committee has a purpose. You know, traditionally we haven't looked into the work of the royal family or indeed of diplomats in quite the [00:21:00] way that this particularly requires. And there's a whole series of reasons why we haven't, and I don't need to go into that.

But the truth is, the Mandelson and Mountbatten Windsor affair raises questions, not just about them, not just about the royal family, not just about the diplomatic service, but actually about the whole of government. There are accusations, and I wouldn't say they are any more than that, there are accusations that, for example, Royal Air Force bases were used for the landing of planes, which may have carried children who are being trafficked.

You know, I don't need to tell you that's somebody's daughter, that's somebody's child. We have a responsibility to look into it and I wanna be very careful. I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but were that to be true, it wasn't the two individuals concerned who did that, there was a pilot, there was a plane, there were ground staff, there was somebody at the gate, there was a driver. See what I mean? There was, at each stage there's another somebody else who isn't the two [00:22:00] individuals accused and it's very hard to draw the line.

So a traditional committee would look for example, at the actions of the Embassy in Washington, or might look at the role of a Trade Commissioner or whatever it happens to be. But this isn't just about that. It's also about which permanent secretary knew and did or didn't write to the cabinet secretary, which ministers knew and didn't or did write. The problem with this is this is a scandal which encompasses or potentially encompasses much more than any individual department. Or indeed the royal household. And so it demands different questions. And that's where, in a funny way, this isn't about the individuals themselves, it's about the way in which government is responsible for the supervision of individuals.

And if I may, the only comparator I can really come back to is something like the Cambridge Spy Scandal of the 1960s, because that was one of those moments where if we're honest, the reason why it was allowed to happen was because it was [00:23:00] too much of the what Peter Hennessy calls the Good Chaps theory of government. You know, he's one of us. Of course he wouldn't do that. And when you look at the vetting, when you look at the supervision, when you look at the agreements, you know the way in which it is alleged some ambassadors may have signed off different receipts or different expenses. Is that what it was? Is it the good chap theory of government that we wouldn't do that to a Prince? We wouldn't do that to a peer. So I think there's quite a lot to ask around the subjects, and I think that's why a joint committee, which has access to the data and actually can ask the questions, including in public, which of course the Intelligence Security Committee isn't really geared to do, would be very useful.

Mark D'Arcy: Now, one of the things that such a committee would have to do is drive through a quite important parliamentary taboo around mentions of the royal family and discussions of the activities of members of the royal family, which is something that very, very seldom is permitted on the floor of the House of Commons, or in a select committee. You would have to find a way to find out what the King knew, when he knew it, what his [00:24:00] advisors knew, what advice they gave, a whole series of things that Parliament would never go within a mile of normally.

Tom Tugendhat: Well, I think that's both right and wrong, if I may. Of course, it's right in the sense that it would go into areas where Parliament and committees don't normally go, which is why I think you would want to think about the membership of this committee in a very particular way. Unusually for a committee, you wouldn't want it to be elected. You'd want the party leaderships to come together and to choose people, to nominate people who were responsible in their own way. You might want committee chairs on it. For example, you might want the Foreign Affairs Committee chair, the Trade Committee chair, perhaps the Standards chair, just to name three, to be ex-officio members, and you'd probably want somebody in the House of Lords who had been a Law Lord or the equivalent, to make sure that you weren't straying too far in justice terms.

But this isn't really an inquiry into the King or the royal family because the system of government in the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. If we want [00:25:00] to keep a constitutional monarchy, it's our responsibility to make sure as Parliament that that monarchy has the integrity and the respect which it needs in order to continue its duties.

And that means we need to make sure that the individuals who support it are of the suitable caliber and standard and, you know, oversight and all the rest of it that is required. So this isn't about the King himself, it's about the organization. We can't, I know we do a bit, but we don't really choose the King. Not in the same way as we choose anybody else, but we can assist the King in making sure he has the right staff around him, private secretaries, and so on. We can supervise the work of permanent secretaries, we can supervise the work of government ministers, and so what we're talking about is not just, the monarchy as an institution, meaning the individual, but the monarchy as an institution, meaning the Constitution of the United Kingdom.

Ruth Fox: Before we get into the sort of practicalities of how it might work, can it work in the context now [00:26:00] where we've effectively got two live police investigations that frankly might go on for quite some time and may result in charges being laid and court cases?

I think there are already concerns about whether the two individuals concerned Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor would be able to get a fair trial in the current context. So could a committee like this do the kind of investigations you're talking about when these investigations by the police are still live?

Tom Tugendhat: Well, Ruth, certainly not all of it. Of course not. But you and I both know that it does take quite a while to negotiate these things. And if you want this to be up and running and ready and all the rest of it, you are gonna start to need to talk about it now if you want it up and running in a year.

I don't know how long the police investigation will take. I don't know if it's gonna result in charges. I don't know if it's gonna result in a trial. I don't know if the trial is gonna result in a conviction. So there's a hell of a lot of questions before we get there. But the point is I think we need [00:27:00] this, whether or not this results in a conviction, because the problem with scandal of this nature is there are many accusations, I'm not saying I support or deny any of them. I have no idea. I have no better idea than anybody else what's true. All I know is what I read in the newspapers, I see on TV, like everybody else. But this has asked huge questions already about the way in which our state works, who may or may not be able to cover up what, who may or may not be able to vet whom, and how different aspects work. So I think it is important that we are structured, we're ready to conduct such an inquiry, whatever the outcome of the police investigation.

And I think that means thinking about it now. It means beginning to think about what the membership of such committee would be. It means beginning to think of who you would and wouldn't be able to summon for inquiries. I strongly suggest that His Majesty the King and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales would not be subjects of that. But you may feel that you want to have conversations in different ways [00:28:00] about how you can talk to members of the royal household. Are there ways in which you could talk to the principal private secretaries to His Majesty? You wouldn't do it in public, whereas you might summon a permanent secretary in public, for example. So I think these are questions that need to be discussed and debated and it's, you know, not something I'd like to do in a rush. So it's something that I'd like to begin to think about now, so that when we are ready to do it, we are actually ready to do it, and we don't just start in two years time or three years time, or whenever it is.

Mark D'Arcy: The last time there was a mega scandal and a Parliamentary committee was created to investigate, it was during the banking crisis. There was, I think David Cameron set up, a special banking commission, which was a kind of super select committee with all sorts of powers that normal select committees didn't have. They could have questioning led by barristers, for example. Is that the kind of template you have in mind for this?

Tom Tugendhat: I think that's a bit more inquisitorial, because actually I think the reality is that aspect will be being done by the police and then one can only assume, maybe I'm wrong, but by the courts or any barristers. So that's not what I mean. What I mean, this [00:29:00] is a political committee and I think the bit that we forget is, you know, constitutional monarchies are unusual beasts these days because they demand a level of trust and confidence in various different individuals and ways of overseeing them that are, they're difficult, let's be honest.

Now, I happen to be a believer in constitutional monarchy. I happen to believe it's the right system of government for us. I think it provides a level of stability and endurance that I think is important. But I think we should also recognize that it's our responsibility as parliamentarians to maintain the system of government that we want to have. And that is a political test, not a legal one. And that's why this is not a matter for the classic call for a judge led public inquiry. That's a legal thing. This is a political inquiry, into how the politics, the supervision, the stability of our constitutional settlement should and can endure.

Ruth Fox: What is your thinking about the membership? Because if this is a joint committee, we're talking about both MPs and peers, [00:30:00] think about how on a normal select committee the membership is comprised, it would reflect the political balance of the House, which would be predominantly a Labour membership in the House of Commons element of the committee.

But that might itself cause its own problems because of course in terms of Peter Mandelson and sort of looking into this, we're talking about looking into the history and political culture of Labour that facilitated his constant reappearance in government office after past scandals. So what's your thinking?

Tom Tugendhat: I think it's easy to look at these things as party political, but I think that's a mistake in two senses. One, I think you can get some really good public servants and people like Lord Beamish who chair the Intelligence and Security Committee who party affiliation in that sense is behind them. But it's also true there may be many people in the Labour Party who still want to defend Peter Mandelson, I dunno any of them, but it's possible. There are plenty of people in the Labour Party who never liked Peter Mandelson and never agreed with Tony [00:31:00] Blair when he said that new Labour will have won when Peter Mandelson is accepted or loved or, I can't remember what phrase he used.

So I think one's gotta be careful. I don't think this is a party or a partisan issue, but I do think it's one of those issues where, you know this as well as I do, when Parliament works well together, there are some things which are partisan and should be. Your debate over how much you spend on healthcare or defence or education or how you structure various things can be very partisan in the sense that they go back to the way in which you view the world and you affiliate with other people.

But there are many other issues which are not. Assisted dying is one where people look at these issues from first principles. And I think this is one of those issues where I think you could pull together a committee reasonably, and you'd do it as you would put it through the usual channels where whips and leaders would suggest individuals from their own party, people who have a particular status or voice in these areas [00:32:00] who could be seen quite literally as a proper representation of Parliament, even if the party balance isn't exact, because the mood of the house in this sense is not partisan. It's for the governance of the United Kingdom. And so I think you could do that, actually vote through a committee, but, and I say again, it would take time and that's why it's not something I would want to do in short order. It's something I'd like to do in slow times that people can think about it and, you know, who is the right member of the House of Lords who has judicial experience? I don't think we should be appointing people in. I think we should be looking for people who are there who have

Mark D'Arcy: You think a judge should be chairing it perhaps?

Tom Tugendhat: No, I don't. I don't think a judge should be chairing it, but I do think people who have a real depth of legal understanding should be. What about people like Lord Geidt, who now sit in the House of Lords?

My initial inclination is probably not somebody who's worked in the royal household, but maybe there's somebody who's been affiliated to the royal household, and here maybe somebody like Lord Parker, Andrew Parker. Forgive [00:33:00] me for not giving you an answer, but you can see what I'm doing. I'm thinking about people who would understand the challenges within which you are operating and would therefore be able to help you ask proper questions. So maybe former diplomats, former national security advisors, or former generals, but also people who are active, if you like, politicians.

Mark D'Arcy: Should it be chaired by someone who's in the House of Commons? I mean, would you fancy the job yourself?

Tom Tugendhat: I wouldn't, but my inclination would be that given the likelihood that it would need to sit for a while in different ways, my inclination would be that it would be somebody from the Lords, but again, that would be a matter of debate.

Ruth Fox: You mentioned possibly bringing in people like members of the Royal Household, Permanent Secretaries, civil servants and so on, to give evidence. Is this kind of scenario, given that it's a political inquiry, that you could imagine, for example, bringing in former Prime Ministers to give evidence?

Tom Tugendhat: Yes, exactly.

Mark D'Arcy: Gordon Brown's certainly been active in this so far, hasn't he?

Tom Tugendhat: Well, you know, Gordon Brown has been. It's quite clear that he feels very badly betrayed by Peter [00:34:00] Mandelson, and it's quite clear that he has been suggesting areas of inquiry for others, and it's quite clear that the Speaker has been active in his own way as well.

So other people are active in this and finding ways to make sure that people either contribute or are present or, you know what I mean? There may be ways of doing it. Maybe indeed that Baroness May would be somebody who would be good at chairing it. But whether or not she'd accept I don't know.

Mark D'Arcy: One of my problems with this whole affair is that Westminster and in particular the Westminster lobby, the journalists, have for best part of 40 years, been totally mesmerized by Peter Mandelson. And maybe we need to lift our eyes just from his particular person and look at the wider scandal, which is a ring of kind of insider trading influence, pedaling sex trafficking, a whole load of things that go far beyond the person of Peter Mandelson. And that is almost getting ignored because people are so fascinated by him.

Tom Tugendhat: I mean, this is my point. [00:35:00] It's that the focus is entirely on Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson, when the real question is how do you get various different appointments and positions and you know what I mean? We know, I won't list them because it wouldn't be fair, but I know of politicians who've been named ambassadors or high commissioners who've come back with a hell of a stink around them. Now, I'm not saying that the stink is fair, maybe it's not, but what is the oversight? How do you, where is the vetting? And in other relationships, there have been accusations about other members of the royal family and the problem that they have, of course, is, you know, they didn't choose to be there in the same way as a Minister chose to be there or whatever.

But the reality is, if they're not going to be part of it, how do they opt out? What is the appropriate way of thinking about it now? You know, in a constitutional monarchy, you grant effectively to a family, a huge prestige and privilege. Even if you grant no cash or financial benefit. How do you handle that? Where is the accountability for [00:36:00] that? How do you not just supervise in the sort of governance sense, but how do you think about it? These are serious questions because it'd be quite wrong for an individual who claims no title, takes no stipend, and has effectively only a family personal relationship with the royal family because they are part of it, to be in any way supervised more than you are.

I mean, you are not elected, you haven't stood for office. I should be supervised because I've put myself forward and it's a choice, but why should they be supervised differently? There's a lot of thinking here.

Now, you can end up quite quickly down a sort of Dutch or Spanish route, you know, the sort of bicycle monarchies as I think the Dutch call it. Or you can find yourself in a very different place. But I think the point that we've got here is that it is up to the British people to choose the system of government they want. We have maintained a constitutional monarchy and it is on the representatives of the British people in the House of Commons and Lords to make sure that it operates with the integrity that people would expect.

Ruth Fox: Am I [00:37:00] reading this right, tom? So what you want in terms of the focus, if you were kind of writing terms of reference, would be something that effectively is looking at the political and democratic culture surrounding constitutional monarchy a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

And whether or not the rules and the governance structures and how we treat monarchy and the royal family perhaps needs updating, particularly in relation to Parliament, perhaps needs updating compared to what we've had in the reign of the late Queen for example.

Tom Tugendhat: I think there are two aspects actually, and that's one of them, and I would argue that would be something that would follow on from the first.

The first would be an inquiry or at least a series of investigations into the way in which the administration, and I don't mean the two individuals, the two individuals should not be tried by Star Chamber, but the way in which the administration dealt with the appointment and support for these and other individuals who found themselves in unusual [00:38:00] positions of political influence, but who are not, if you like, traditional civil servants or traditional holders of those offices.

So that's where I'm thinking about it. And then were that to follow on, then you'd follow on with a new series of questions about how you maintain those positions.

Mark D'Arcy: Is there a real prospect that the powers that be in Parliament, in the Commons particularly are prepared to go along with this? Or are you just gonna get into a turf war with lots of select committees who think, no, this is our business, Simon Haw in Pack Act, the public administration and constitutional affairs committee may think that this is his bailiwick, for example.

Tom Tugendhat: Well, my experience of chairing a select committee is everybody thinks everybody's bailiwick is their own, if you see what I mean. So I'm afraid that's slightly the nature of the beast. The reality though is this is very all encompassing, and I think this isn't something you can just do from the Commons for various different reasons.

And I've cited a few. I think you do need senior judicial input. I don't mean oversight, I do mean input. You need that experience around the table, not in the chair, if you see what I mean. I think you need the [00:39:00] kind of experience that actually the House of Lords is very, very good at providing, that sort of form of senior diplomat who can give you that ground experience of, that's not the sort of thing that would happen, or when so and so gives evidence on this area, actually, that wasn't a reasonable answer, I know because I've been in a similar position. That's where I think we're into that sort of space

Mark D'Arcy: And the chances of this actually happening.

Tom Tugendhat: Well, I don't know. I mean, if you asked me a year ago, I'd have said zero. If you asked me today, I'd say it's greater than zero.

You know, the problem is that we have, as politicians, as Parliament, we have been quite noticeably behind the curve on this. You know, funnily enough, I wrote about this for the first time in the Sun on Sunday, and on that day I was contacted by two former diplomats, both of whom gave me horror stories about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, insulting their hosts in two different countries, really rather grotesquely in one case.

I was told [00:40:00] within dinner of Irish American senators, and as you know the Irish American caucus is quite understandably proud of its origins and has strong Irish connections, and he cracked incredibly insulting Irish jokes to the point where the Senators, did not get up and walk out, but only outta respect for the Ambassador, not out of respect for him, yet he maintained his position. And so we are behind the curve here. We need to think hard about what it is that we and our predecessors have let slip because it would be unwise to ignore the damage that that and other similar incidents have or could have done to the interest of the British people and you know, that can cost us in various different ways, as we all know.

Mark D'Arcy: Tom Tugendhat, thanks very much for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, Tom.

Tom Tugendhat: Thank you.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, I wanted to spend a couple of moments following on from that conversation with Tom on the curious case of Mr. Speaker Hoyle, or shall I say, [00:41:00] Inspector Hoyle of the Yard because he was put in the rather bizarre position of having to explain to the Commons that he had provided the tip off that led to Lord Mandelson's high profile arrest, where the former lay Deputy Prime Minister was more or less doing a perp walk into a police car. And Speaker Hoyle had somehow gleaned that Lord Mandelson might be about to flee to the British Virgin Islands and warned the Metropolitan Police of this and the rest is history except for the fact that the Metropolitan Police seemed a bit confused as to whether it was Speaker Hoyle or Lord Speaker Forsyth who had told them that and managed to let the information slip to Lord Mandelson during the course of interviews. It's absolutely bizarre keystone cop saga here.

Ruth Fox: Well, of course, Mark, if the police actually listened to Parliament Matters, they wouldn't make that mistake, would they? I mean, we can start with police incompetent and ineptness about telling somebody under questioning where their sources got their information from, then apparently mistaking, as you say, the Speaker of the House of Commons for the Lord Speaker. [00:42:00] Can you imagine what Michael Forsyth must have thought when he woke up to all these news reports saying that he'd stopped Peter Mandelson for fleeing to the British Virgin Islands? And he hadn't a clue what this was all about.

Mark D'Arcy: He's not a man who likes to have his name taken in vain, I don't think

Ruth Fox: No. So I imagine he was both mystified and somewhat angry. But then of course that meant that there was pressure on the Speaker of the House of Commons, he had to come and acknowledge in the House that in fact he was the source, not Lord Forsyth.

How was he the source? Apparently he was, it was recess last week, he was in the British Virgin Islands as a guest because it was their Parliament's 75th anniversary and he had been invited as the Speaker to give the address at the celebrations for this event. And he clearly received some information from somebody, a source there, that Mandelson was going to flee to the British Virgin Islands.

Now the fact that we've got an extradition treaty with the British Virgin Islands, so it wouldn't have been a safe place to flee to apart. I think [00:43:00] a couple of things come up. I mean, one, did he try and persuade that source? He clearly thought it was credible enough for them to tell the police about their information and where they got it from. Why did he wait until he came back to the UK several days later to convey the information to the police? If the prospect of fleeing was such a big issue, why the delay? Who knows? But once he got back to the UK, he clearly contacted the Met and passed the information on, and then Lord Mandelson found himself being arrested. So it's all a bit curious.

Mark D'Arcy: It's very curious indeed. Now, I suppose we should say that Lord Mandelson flatly denies that he had any such intention in the first place, but it is all the same, for a Speaker to be so publicly being embroiled in a criminal investigation is almost unprecedented, I would've thought.

Ruth Fox: Oh yeah. On the other hand, you know, to look at it from the Speaker's perspective, if he received the information and he got it from somebody who thought was a serious, credible source,

Mark D'Arcy: What else could he do?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. What else could he do? If he'd sat on it and Lord Mandelson had indeed fled and it had come out that he'd known and had done nothing about it, I mean, his [00:44:00] credibility and reputation would be ruined.

So I don't think he probably had any alternative. It is all a little bit mysterious.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, we can't really say a great deal more than that except that I can't help wondering whether when it comes to the House of Lords sitting next week, whether the Lord Speaker might just have to update peers, I didn't say any such thing, it wasn't me gov, I was on holiday at the time or words to that effect.

Ruth Fox: Well, perhaps Mark, we should also do a quick update on the situation with the assisted dying bill. So apparently the House of Lords Chief Whip, apparently at a meeting of the Labour Lords, confirmed that no more time would be given in this session to the assisted dying bill.

So in effect, it is not going to make it through in time before the end of the session, which we're still expecting to be shortly after the local elections in mid-May. And therefore, again, all attention turns to whether or not an MP or the government is gonna pick it up in the next session and try and Parliament Act it, which we've discussed at length on [00:45:00] a previous special episode of this podcast. But it confirms what we were saying some weeks ago. This is not going.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. I mean, I've got into a certain amount of trouble for calling this a filibuster, but the filibuster, in my view, has now succeeded in its strategic objective. All those speeches about the weaknesses and defects in the bill have had the effect that the bill hasn't managed to emerge from committee stage. Probably isn't going to emerge from its committee stage. Certainly isn't going to get as far as a third reading and will then therefore fall at the end of this Parliamentary session, which we now know is going to be in mid-May. That's it. This iteration of the bill, it now looks pretty much doomed to failure.

The Government wasn't prepared to find more time. It's already allowing sittings on every available Friday. The only way it could find more time would be either to postpone the planned prorogation and the entire government legislative timetable would thereby be thrown out of whack or alternatively to eat into government debating time in earlier weekdays in the House of Lords, which might mean that some government legislation was lost to try and [00:46:00] maintain a futile effort. Because the point about this is you could find a few more days, I dare say, if you're prepared to squeeze other bills, but if the people who are talking out the bill just continued talking, it wouldn't do any good.

Ruth Fox: As listeners, regular listeners will know, I have a slight disagreement with you on this question of the filibuster. I think there's certainly been an effort to string things out, given the number of of groups of amendments that have been discussed over the course of, this is the 10th day in committee, but a traditional filibuster would be peers standing up and speaking at length, droning on. That isn't what has been happening in a sense. It's a more sophisticated approach. A more strategic approach than that. The speeches have not, when you look at it, have not been that long, but there have been a lot of peers speaking a significant number of times on issues, and obviously there's a huge number of amendments, so I think it's a more sophisticated approach than a traditional filibuster. But it's still taking up an enormous amount of time [00:47:00] for certain.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, it's certainly not just a dronathon. People are just talking irrelevantly, but allowed to get on with it. You know, in the US Senate, I think you traditionally, you read out recipe books and things, and you hold the floor and you can't be removed it's a matter of physical endurance as much as anything else.

In this case, they've been making speeches about the bill, they've been making points about the bill, and they've been continuing to do this day after day after day. And as you say, the speeches haven't been individually of excessive length. There's just been an awful lot of them. And the strategic aim, I think almost from the start of this process, was they weren't gonna let this bill out of Committee. They were just gonna go on and on till all possible available time was exhausted.

And then you are in a position of seeing whether the political energy exists to have another go from the House of Commons in the next parliamentary session. Whether someone wins a ballot or comes close to the top of the ballot and is prepared to pick up this bill and have another go at getting it through the Commons and then through the Lords and potentially invoking the Parliament Act. Whether the government is going to be prepared [00:48:00] to do the sort of procedural path smoothing that it did with the current bill in the next session, whether they want to expend all that political energy again, or whether they will start to think this is a distraction from our main agenda and it's just causing more problems than it's solving.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well again, another watch this space. Because it's gonna fall into the legislative and political dynamics of the next session.

Whole questions about who's gonna be the Prime Minister and who's gonna be in cabinet, and who's gonna be making those decisions about the extent to which the government support, even from a neutral position, government support for procedural issues, if not policy issues, how that might all fall out.

Well, Mark, shall we park it there and look to next week's activities in Parliament? Because there's some big spending decisions that are to be made in the estimates, which we've talked about in the podcast before, but we've got another round of decisions to be made.

Mark D'Arcy: And indeed we've got the Chancellor's spring statement, the sort of update on the government spending plans, and usually a set of forecasts and a glimpse of what the government sees in the fiscal future lurking there.

So there's [00:49:00] a lot of hot financial action coming up in Parliament next week. The estimates are the way that the Commons approves public expenditure, so that there's a lot of outstanding expenditure that has to be kind of ratified by MPs before the end of the financial year. And there's also a series of debates which are allocated through the Backbench Business Committee on specific chunks of expenditure that particular select committees want to raise as a matters for concern. So you've been looking at those. There's a number of quite interesting primal screams coming out the committee corridor about particular bits of expenditure.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So, as you do, I've been looking at the discussions that took place a few days ago in the Backbench Business Committee, where select committee chairs or senior members of those committees go to make their pitch to have a debate on their departmental estimate.

As ever it was oversubscribed. But the Backbench Business Committee has chosen debates on the Business and Trade Department's estimate, the Foreign and Commonwealth and Development [00:50:00] Office's estimate, and the Ministry of Defence's estimate, and there are some really interesting things that come up.

First of all, in terms of just the overall picture, bless the House of Commons Library as ever, they're a wonderful, wonderful resource. It says that the changes in what's called the supplementary estimates, which is the stage in the late financial year of the estimate cycle, where Government comes to Parliament with additional requests to authorize new funding or to amend existing levels of funding or to authorize changes in the purpose for which funding has been sought by departments. It says that the requests this time are significant by historical standards, and we're talking about, broadly speaking, I think about 37 billion pounds worth of spending is involved across government and

Mark D'Arcy: Not quite the kind of change you find behind the back of the sofa cushions.

Ruth Fox: No, quite. What was interesting about the submissions from the select committee chairs to the Backbench Business Committee, and remember, because of the political balance in the House of Commons after the general election, [00:51:00] most of the select committee chairs are Labour chairs, most of the members of committees are Labour members, there was sort of general thread theme running through the discussions with the Backbench Business Committee, select committees struggling to scrutinise ministers, not getting answers to questions about spending, concern about a lack of strategy within departments, and then a lack of clarity about the allocation of spending to priorities. Is the money being spent on the right things? And some pretty devastating comments frankly, about the level of failure in key policy areas. And remember, this is senior Labour backbenchers about their own government.

One that stood out. Liam Byrne, chair of the Business and Trade Committee, they are getting one of the biggest increases in these estimates, about a billion pounds, about 17.8% increase in their departmental day-to-day spending. And he said, is it being spent on the right things? And essentially it's being spent on three big things. One is steel. A lot of support for the steel industry.

Mark D'Arcy: Keeping our remaining steel plants open.

Ruth Fox: Yep. But you know, he says, there's [00:52:00] no steel strategy yet been published, so we're pumping out all this money supporting the steel industry, but how strategic is it? What is the purpose of it?

Secondly, he points to the British Business Bank. Getting scale up financing is important and businesses talk about it. But he says there's a whole load of other stuff that business talks about. AI productivity, problems with an industrial strategy, inward investment, employment rights, cutting red tape. None of this is kind of in these estimates.

And then of course, he points something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, the Post Office. The fact that there's more money going in to cover post office compensation. No end in sight. And one of the questions he asked is, you know, when is the government gonna basically put the pressure on Fujitsu, who produced the Horizon IT software that's at the heart of this scandal? When are they gonna put the pressure on that company to put its hand in their pocket?

So I would expect all of that to come out in the debate next week on [00:53:00] the Business and Trade estimate.

Mark D'Arcy: It'd be very interesting to see whether answers are actually given on the floor of the House to some of those questions. And equally, there's a lot of peculiar stuff going on in the Ministry of Defence estimates.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So there's two aspects to this. So the chair of the Defence Committee, Tan Dhesi, he expressed concern that the fact that there's basically in the MOD estimate, a 9 billion pound increase for what's described as depreciation and impairment costs, for the impact of a non-routine accounting adjustment.

Now again, talk about money down the back of the sofa. 9 billion is a lot of money. And as he said, these are mind boggling numbers. And it's important that all these things are brought to the House, floor of the House, where members are able to hold the executive to account. But interestingly, there's no explanation of what this 9 billion quid is for. What is the non-routine accounting adjustment?

Mark D'Arcy: Maybe if they told us they'd have to kill us.

Ruth Fox: Well, we'll find out. And [00:54:00] then I'm not sure of the timing of this, because I haven't heard the business statement for next week confirming the business yet. But there's also just been published this week what's called the Statement of Excess.

Now this is, if you like, the next stage of the estimate cycle, which is exceptional requests made by government if a department spends money basically beyond the level of purpose for which they've got approval by Parliament.

Now, do you remember, Mark, a few months ago we had this discussion about the scandal of the super injunction at the MOD related to the Afghan data breach. And this whole question about what successive governments Conservative and Labour had known about this data breach. They'd got a super injunction, which had gone on for several years. One of the issues in the fallout of this is that the Government was spending money on an Afghan relocation scheme and related costs for which they did not have parliamentary authorization, because they hadn't been able to be upfront with Parliament about the fact that this [00:55:00] scheme existed.

Mark D'Arcy: Because of the super injunction.

Ruth Fox: Because of the super injunction and because of the need to protect as they saw it, these Afghans, because there'd been a data breach and they were worried about basically their safety.

And it seems that in this statement of excess that has been published and which Parliament will have to retrospectively approve, basically, the MOD is acknowledging that there's about another two and a half billion pounds of expenditure that's been allocated for this program about which Parliament didn't know that it's now having to approve.

Retrospectively, we talked about this at the time of the super injunction. It's incredibly difficult and complicated involves important questions about democratic accountability. But if government departments can just basically spend two and a half billion pounds for something they haven't got parliamentary authorization for and cover it up and then get retrospective approval and that there's very little discussion about it, I do think that's a problem at the heart of the accountability debate in the Commons about the way that the [00:56:00] public finance system works.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm intrigued to see actually how MPs in the chamber react to this when it happens. Is this all just tamely voted through on a whip vote, barely a whimper? Or do people actually get up and protest about being asked to authorize multi-billion pound allocations of public expenditure with minimal information about them?

The Commons once fought a civil war over its right to control the purse strings, and now it seems to be almost just a piece of routine ritual that they go through without bothering to properly understand it. There should be mechanisms for financial accountability, and I've seen this too often in local authorities as I used to cover. Tamely votes for a billion pounds worth of public expenditure on some county council or other and then spend five hours arguing about the paperclip budget.

And this seems to be the House of Commons equivalent of that. I do hope that there is actually some effort them put into these debates, not just by the chairs of select committees and a few top loyalists on those select committees, but by a much wider cross section of MPs showing that they're [00:57:00] actually doing their job.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. The other debate that will take place will be on the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office estimate and that was Dame Emily Thornberry up in front of the Backbench Business Committee making the case, and she basically said, while the world is on fire, we are seeing in the Foreign Office the biggest cuts of any department overall, even if we park ODA, overseas development assistance. So this is the government cuts to the sort of the aid budget. They are the biggest cuts.

And she talked about the fact that there are significant staff cuts happening in the Foreign Office, almost like a salami slicing of departments. And what she argues is it's not strategic, it's just cutting off the top layers of staffing and it doesn't relate to the priorities or needs of the department and the sort of the strategic challenges we face in the international environment.

And she talked about the fact that at a time when China, Russia, Iran are engaging in disinformation and so on, we're busy cutting back on things like British Council funding and BBC World [00:58:00] Service funding. So she clearly wants to have a strategic debate about how to support the Foreign Office in terms of both our diplomatic presence, our soft power presence, and then that would obviously relate to the MOD and the hard power politics.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, again, a very, very interesting debate to be had. I grew up on talk of Britain's soft power and how you could punch above our weight in the world because of our Rolls-Royce diplomatic service and the pervasive cultural influence of the BBC World Service and the British Council and so forth, and all those things now seem to be going down the drain with very little discussion of their importance to this country.

It's just, you know, we've gotta save a few billion this year. This is how we do it. Slice, slice, slice.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And one of the interesting submissions to the Backbench Business Committee, which wasn't approved for a formal debate, but I suspect will be rolled into certainly the Foreign Office debate and could pitch up also in the context of the MOD discussion [00:59:00] on their estimate was unusually, there was an application for a debate by Matt Western, who is the chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And he wanted a debate on the estimate of the Cabinet Office, but specifically he wanted a debate about this increase in spending on the security services. So essentially MI5 and MI6, the spooks, the domestic and international spooks, GCHQ, what that's gonna look like and how that's gonna relate to the defence budget.

And he said, our committee has put challenges to the government and those who have expertise in this area about what this should look like and what is being done by government. And he said, unfortunately, so far we have not had direct answers to those questions. And he said, you know, we're talking about an international environment that people draw parallels with the 1930s. And he said, you know, the security threat, the nature of conflict, is changing and Parliament needs to be able to hold the government to account for how it's gonna fund our security services and on what. Because of the nature of their work, the [01:00:00] security service estimate is not actually published in detail. Unlike the other departments, their funding plans are scrutinised by the Intelligence and Security Committee. So he didn't get the debate, but he made the point, and I suspect he'll be making the point in the Foreign Office debate next week.

Mark D'Arcy: So I think in next week's pod, we ought to give Mark's artistic impression and technical merit for MP scrutiny of all these interesting subjects and see whether they actually do rise to the lofty level of doing their job and scrutinising the spending properly.

Ruth Fox: Interesting to see. So I think that's probably all we've got time for Mark this week.

I'll see you next week.

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

Ruth Fox: Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk or find us on social media at Hansard Society.

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