Lia Nici, MP for Great Grimsby. Photograph by David Woolfall (CC-BY-3.0)

The general election in December meant the formation of a new parliament, and this was marked by the commissioning of a new round of members’ portraits.

There has been less publicity about the photographs this time: so far I have yet to even see a blog post about them by the parliamentary digital service, let alone the extensive amateur caption contest which kicked off in 2017. As with the previous rounds, my first awareness of the new series came from noticing the photographs on MPs’ and peers’ Wikipedia pages. Naturally, I again went through a long list of names adding as many of their portraits as were not already in place. Lacking much in the way of official confirmation I assume that this photo shoot was carried out in much the same way as the first one – a stall erected just beyond the chamber to catch members passing through after they take the oath. The key difference is that both houses have been covered simultaneously, whereas originally the Lords did not get their portraits until many months after the Commons.

We still do not have a complete gallery of parliament, for there are still a few dozen members who did not pose for either series. Conversely there are many MPs and peers for whom two portraits now exist. This caused Wikipedians a minor problem when it came to competing filenames. The files for portraits from the lower house now include “MP” at the end where they did not before, which allowed them to be moved from one Commons to the other easily. No change was made to the filenames for the upper house, which means that in cases of duplication the uploader has tacked “, 2019” onto the end so as to avert a clash.

Visually the main difference is in colour temperature – the portraits for the 57th parliament were done with stark blue-grey tones whereas those for the 58th are a less dramatic beige. There is also a slight change in aspect ratio for the full frame shots – the old ones were in 5:7 and the new 2:3. The automated cropped versions are come in the same ratios as before.

Left: The Lord Naseby in March 2018.

Right: The Lord Naseby in December 2019.

Note the fortuitous choice of tie colours to coordinate with the light and background on both occasions.