Category Archives: Politics

Paws, Peers and Poor Processes

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The Chief Mouser

Tomorrow will be a significant anniversary in British politics: It will be fifteen years since Larry, the cat pictured above, was appointed Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. If he makes it another three years he will be the hold the record in that office. Already he is on a record six Prime Ministers and will soon greet his sixth Cabinet Secretary as well (see next paragraph). Actually, it would be interesting to do a census of the human officials currently working in Downing Street to see how many predate him. Larry, who was adopted by the Camerons just as the government’s modern web presence was being established, is the first to officially hold the title, but culturally it goes back just over a century to Rufus (or Treasury Bill), who performed the role during the premiership of Ramsay MacDonald. Larry is now well-established as an international celebrity in his own right, to the point that the government is rumoured to have made special plans for the announcement of his eventual death (he’s 19 years old). Despite this, there have also been reports that he is rather lazy and incompetent in his actual job of killing vermin. Yesterday Larry’s own Twitter account acknowledged the passing of his former colleague Palmerston, who was Chief Mouser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 2016 to 2020.

The Cabinet Secretary

Sir Chris Wormald succeeded Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service fourteen months ago, having previously been Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health & Social Care since 2016. Whereas his tenure in that job was on the long side, his time as Cabinet Secretary is the shortest in the history of that post. Last summer there were already leaks from Number 10 suggesting that the government regretted his appointment and wanted him out. Two days ago it was announced that he would step down “by mutual consent”. Before the announcement had even been made there was speculation in the press that Sir Keir Starmer intended to choose Dame Antonia Romeo as his replacement. Romeo has spent the last ten months as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, and for four years before that she was at the Ministry of Justice, where she concurrently held the ancient office of Clerk of the Crown in Chancery which among other perks gave her a prominent seat at the coronation. While she is a favourite among constitutional scholars (such as Elijah Granet of Legal Style Blog), there were also briefings against her by some former colleagues. So far, Starmer has not named a successor to Wormald, but has said that Romeo will form a troika with Catherine Little and James Bowler while the position lies vacant.

The Lord Doyle

Matthew Doyle is, like Peter Mandelson, a figure from the Blair years brought back to help Starmer’s government only to quickly bring the regime into serious disrepute (and for very similar yet unrelated reasons). Doyle was appointed Downing Street Director of Communications (a role created in 2000 for Alastair Campbell and later satirised with the fictional Malcolm Tucker) after the 2024 general election and stayed until 28th March last year. On 10th December it was announced that he had been nominated for a life peerage. He was created Baron Doyle on 8th January and took his seat in the upper house four days later. Four weeks after that he was suspended from the Labour Party. Given that the government was already embroiled in the Mandelson scandal, this was particularly embarrassing for Starmer. Conservative backbencher Lord Harper pointed out that Doyle’s letters patent were not sealed until after the revelations came out and thus it would have been possible for the Prime Minister to postpone or withdraw his ennoblement. This was confirmed by House of Lords authorities.

Discussing this on the Parliament Matters podcast, Mark D’Arcy made an observation that I have long held:

Even though the House of Lords is half of the legislative process in Parliament, it’s remarkable how little most people in the House of Commons actually know about how it works. It’s another country from whose bourne no traveller returns as far as the Commons is concerned. Not quite true actually. A couple of them have. But it is this very strange feature of Westminster life that there is so much ignorance in the Commons about the workings of the Lords and very little inclination to learn much about it either.

He had earlier brought up a speech made in the Commons by Darren Jones, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, about proposed legislation to allow disgraced peers to be deprived of their baronies. I’m a little surprised D’Arcy didn’t highlight what the minister actually said, because at one point while bringing up the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 he managed to get World War One and World War Two confused. Worse still, nobody else in the chamber at the time pointed this out.

The Next State Visit

Nothing about Their Majesties’ outbound diplomacy has yet been confirmed for this year, but already we have one inbound state visit on the cards: The President & First Lady of Nigeria will be coming to Windsor Castle on 18th March. This is unusually early in the year for such an event (as they normally don’t start until the autumn) and is only the second time in the present reign that a Commonwealth president has been received in such a way. President Tinubu last had a royal audience in September 2024, and before that was visited in his home country by James Cleverly in 2023.

The Palace of Westminster

It has been over six years since the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration & Renewal) Act was passed, yet progress on the actual restoration has been negligible. The House of Commons and House of Lords Commissions recently put out a joint report predicting that the work could take up to sixty-one years and cost up to £39 billion. This naturally has caused widespread outrage and been held up as the perfect symbol of the British state’s incapability of getting anything done in the modern age.

The R&R Programme in its current state was savaged in The Critic by Nicholas Boys Smith, Founding Director of Create Streets. Smith’s article seems to have been taken up by Parliamentarians themselves, with Lord Hannan of Kingsclere in particular claiming

Rarely have I seen an article taken up by politicians as swiftly and as thoroughly as this one. Every MP and peer is talking about it.

although of course that will be hard to objectively verify. Although Smith himself does not mention it directly (despite the article name), I have seen a few commentators bring up the possibility of Charles III personally taking charge of the project. While that may seem outlandish by the conventions of modern politics, there is a logic to it: Charles has been dedicated to the cause of traditional architecture for many decades, and has arranged the construction of two entire towns (Poundbury and Nansledan) in less time than the Westminster restoration is expected to take. Given that the Palace is technically a royal residence, it is also worth bringing up restoration works on other royal residences which the royal family still occupy: The rebuilding of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire was completed in five years without a government grant, and the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is expected to be completed next year with relatively little disruption along the way. It may solve a different problem, too: It has been known for a long time that the royals themselves are not all that keen on Buck House and have long wished to shift the emphasis to Windsor as the main residence. Elizabeth II & Philip Mountbatten were happily embedded at Clarence House before the death of George VI and would have continued living there had Churchill not insisted they move. As the 2020 pandemic seized the nation, the late sovereign decamped to Windsor for the duration of the lockdown, and as restrictions eased she decided not to move back. Charles & Camilla are likewise still at Clarence House, even continuing to use it for their private social functions and all the charities they founded as Duke & Duchess of Cornwall. The refurbishment has given them the perfect excuse not to move, as well as to redirect state visits to Windsor. As the building returns to an available state next year it could be a canny strategic move for him to graciously offer it to MPs and peers while he takes back control of Westminster. Caroline Shenton’s book Mr Barry’s War details the reconstruction of the Palace in the nineteenth century following the great fire. It mentions that Parliament turned down an offer from William IV to move to Buckingham Palace. This time around it may prove harder to refuse. Furthermore, a lot of the delay in the current project is due to some MPs’ and peers’ reluctance to commit to a full decamp, understandably fearful that once they take their foot out of the door they may never get it back in again, or that by the time they do their old home will have changed beyond all recognition. The King’s own hand at the tiller may be just the reassurance they need.

UPDATE (15th February)

Professor Norton has put out an article on the matter of peerage nominations and their opportunities for withdrawal.

The Return of Mock the Week

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By the time it was decommissioned by the BBC in 2022 (the last series kicking off just as Elizabeth II died), Mock the Week had been around for seventeen years. It started after Tony Blair’s re-election for a third term in 2005 and ended just as Rishi Sunak was about to take over from Liz Truss. It had become a mainstay of British political comedy, and no true successor emerged in its absence in 2023, -4 and -5.

Last month it was revealed with little notice or fanfare that the series had been recommissioned, but not on the BBC this time. Instead it now airs on the multinational but lesser-known TLC, as part of a major relaunch of that channel’s British offerings. There is also a small change of recording venue, from the BBC Elstree Centre to Elstree Studios a few hundred metres away.

At time of writing, two episodes of the revived series have been aired, with perhaps another five scheduled.

By and large, the new episodes are the same as the old with no changes to the fundamentals of the formula, so the segments and rounds are all familiar to those who saw the original. Notably the latest series features a revival of the “Between the Lines” which the BBC series dropped a long time ago.

Many of the panellists are also carried over, including late-stage regulars Angela Barnes, Sarah Pascoe and Rhys James; perennial recurring guests Ed Byrne and Milton Jones; and late-stage semi-regular Ahir Shah. The only brand new guest so far is Lou Sanders. Dara Ó Briain of course returns to host. There was no return of Frankie Boyle despite much public clamouring, though the premiere did feature a one-off comeback by early-regular Russell Howard, who acknowledged that it had been more than fifteen years since he last appeared on the old show. This is all important for establishing a sense of continuity. The one glaring absence is Hugh Dennis, who was a constant presence on the original series but had scheduling conflicts for the first two episodes of the revival.

As I have written before, a lot of British comedy panel shows are now experienced primarily as a series of online compilations of short segments, often many years removed from the context of their original air dates. This works even if, as is the case here, the jokes and commentary are in direct response to weekly events and thus in theory should be locked in time. Because so many years are mashed together like this, one’s mental cache of what the programme was like can become a vague blend which averages at somewhere about a decade ago. This is also true of the appearances of the panellists, and thus seeing them in new recordings can be quite a shock to the system as they seem to age a great amount very suddenly. I found this to be especially true in Howard’s case.

This still the main photograph on Howard’s Wikipedia page. I screenshotted it from a promotional video he did in 2017.

Also, I found that something was… slightly off about the set. It almost looked the same as the old one but a few little details had changed, the most obvious being that the main desk looked smaller and tighter than before. The font on the SWLTS topics looked different too. It was as if the old set had been recreated by sight, or even from memory, without access to the blueprints.

The overall effect of the sum of these little details was to make the first episode feel like something of a fever dream. I had to check online the next morning to reassure myself that the experience was real and not just something my brain had extrapolated out of desperation. Luckily it is real, and it looks set to be around for some time to come (although actually finding TLC to watch it at the correct time is difficult as the panellists themselves acknowledge).

The only major and deliberate departure from the old format is the increased runtime: Each episode is now three quarters of an hour long (padded to a full hour with commercial breaks) instead of half. Ó Briain says this is not a case of filming more material than before but rather of cutting less of it out before broadcast. While it is difficult to turn down the chance to see more material from the team, especially after a drought of three years, I was conscious sometimes that the lack of tight editing occasionally caused a segment to drag on too long and lose momentum, and that the panellists were sauntering back-and-forth too many times between the main desk and the performance area. Still, these issues are very minor and hopefully will be sorted as the series progresses. 

The Dark Lord Falls

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He won’t be smiling much anymore.

Peter Mandelson is no stranger to scandal-induced resignations: He resigned from Blair’s cabinet twice in the space of three years and lately he resigned as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States after a tenure of just seven months. He was dismissed from the ceremonial office of High Sheriff of Hull at the same time.

Today he announced his intention to retire from the House of Lords, having already taken leave of absence on Saturday. He additionally resigned from the Labour Party on Sunday, meaning he briefly had the designation of non-affiliated peer.

His departure from the upper house will not make much practical difference as he had long ceased to be a regular contributor to proceedings — he spoke in the House just five times in the past five years and thirteen times in the five years before that. In a break from normal procedure, the Lord Speaker announced Mandelson’s gave advanced notice of his retirement, “given the public interest”. This, incidentally, was the first retirement announcement of Michael Forsyth’s speakership, which only began yesterday. On the woolsack he must obviously remain studiously neutral in such matters, but I can’t help wondering what his personal feelings are, given that he lost his seat in the House of Commons in the 1997 New Labour landslide in which Mandelson played such an important role.

The retirement is obviously a case of jumping before he was pushed, as many of his political enemies (always a sizeable group, now an enormous one) had been threatening that if he did not leave of his own accord then they would take measures to force him out.

The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 (by which he retired) allows peers to be expelled if sentenced to prison terms of at least one year while the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015 allows the House to evict members who breach the code of conduct, but the necessary investigations — both by Parliament itself and by the Metropolitan Police — would have taken too long to satisfy the public’s bloodlust. In any case the former act only applies to convictions for crimes committed after its own commencement, whereas most of Mandelson’s alleged offences are from well before.

Even after this announcement, there are still some calling for him to lose his title. As with the former Prince Andrew (and for many of the same reasons), this could most quickly achieved by him writing to the Lord Chancellor to request his name by omitted from the Roll of the Peerage. This may not satisfy his opponents, some of whom are explicitly calling for an Act of Parliament to formally revoke the letters patent of 2008 by which his peerage was created. Perhaps the old-fashioned Bill of Attainder will come back into fashion after all.

UPDATE (4th February)

Mandelson’s retirement was announced properly today. I note that the words “On behalf of the House, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his valued service to the House.” which normally accompany such announcements were omitted on this occasion.

It was also reported today that the Prime Minister wishes to remove him from the Privy Council. It appears he came to this decision just after yesterday’s meeting as nothing to that effect is listed in the agenda or the minutes. Either the enactment of Mandelson’s expulsion will wait until next month’s meeting or a special session will shortly be convened for this purpose.

The New Lord Speaker

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Following the slightly-expedited retirement of the Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Forsyth of Drumlean today sat on the woolsack for the first time as Lord Speaker.

Michael Forsyth’s political career began with a five-year stint (beginning 1978) on Westminster City Council, followed by a fourteen year tenure as Member of Parliament for Stirling, where he was unseated in 1997. In the 1990s he served in a rapid succession of Minister of State roles before peaking at Secretary of State for Scotland in 1995.

He spent two years out of Parliament before receiving a life peerage in 1990. He never returned to ministerial office but did serve in a lot of important (if unglamorous) committees. He was declared Lord Speaker-elect on 12th January, having beaten the crossbencher Baroness Bull (former creative director of the Royal Opera House) by 383 votes to 297. His royal confirmation was notified to the chamber by the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, Lord Benyon. A hustings for the election was filmed by the Hansard Society in December.

Now that the office of Lord Speaker is nearing its twentieth anniversary and is on its fifth holder, it may be prudent to review some statistics:

  • The office has been held by two Ladies (Hayman and D’Souza) and three Lords (Fowler, McFall and Forsyth).
  • Three were born and raised in England (Hayman, D’Souza, Fowler) and two in Scotland (McFall, Forsyth).
  • Two came from the Conservative party (Fowler, Forsyth), two from Labour (Hayman, McFall*) and one the Crossbenches (D’Souza).
  • Hayman and Fowler attended Cambridge (Newnham and Trinity Hall respectively), D’Souza UCL and then Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), McFall Paisley College of Technology, then the Open University, then the University of Strathclyde; Forsyth the University of St Andrews.
  • The five have had varying levels of prior political experience: Fowler spent thirty-one years in the Commons, eleven of them as Secretary of State; Forsyth had fourteen years, of which two as Secretary of State and five as Minister of State; McFall twenty-three years, of which two-and-a-half as a very junior minister then nine as a very senior committee chair; Hayman spent under five years as an MP (all on the backbenches) but then had four years of ministerial experience in the Lords, of which two in cabinet. D’Souza is the only one never to have been a minister nor a member of the Commons.
  • D’Souza was a peer for seven years before becoming Speaker, Hayman ten, McFall eleven, Fowler fifteen, Forsyth twenty-six.
  • Hayman took office aged 57, D’Souza 67, Forsyth 71, McFall 76 and Fowler 78.

As I have mentioned before, no armorial bearings are known for the first four Lord Speakers (despite Hayman having been on Flags & Heraldry group). Forsyth breaks this trend, as I found his blazon on page 470 of Debrett’s Peerage 2015. The illustration below is by Cakelot1.

  • Escutcheon: Argent a chevronnel engrailed Gules between in chief two griffins respectant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and supporting a square block of roughly dressed sandstone Proper with a ring at each end Sable and in base a hurt charged with a mascle Argent.
  • Crest: A griffin sergeant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Supporters: Two griffins Azure armed and membered Sable crowned Or and each charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Motto: Learn From The Past

It is worth noting also that McFall interviewed Forsyth on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast in December 2023. Last week, in the final episode before the handover, McFall was himself interviewed by the Baroness Hazarika (incidentally he interviewed her almost exactly a year before).

*Although McFall had left the Labour group and sat as unaffiliated from 2016.

Reformare vel Florere

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Photograph from 9th July 2024 in the House of Commons Chamber

It has been widely reported in the past few months that Reform UK has experienced significant growth in Parliamentary representation. In July 2024 its caucus in the House of Commons had five members:

  • Lee Ashfield (Ashfield)
  • Nigel Farage (Clacton)
  • Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth)
  • James McMurdock (South Basildon & East Thurrock)
  • Richard Tice (Boston & Skegness)

(Anderson is not included in the photograph above because it was an event for new MPs and he had already served since 2019. More on that later.)

Given the history of parties with which Farage has been associated, it should be no surprise that this combination did not last long.

Lowe was the first to go: On 7th March 2025 he was suspended from the party due to bullying allegations. On 30th June that year he launched his own party named Restore Britain. Oddly, on 1st December he then launched a second (though as yet unregistered) local party named Great Yarmouth First. I don’t know of any precedent for the same person leading two self-founded parties simultaneously.

Mc Murdock wasn’t long behind him: On 5th July, the anniversary of his election declaration, he was suspended due to allegations that he fraudulently claimed state loans for his businesses during the pandemic. Three days later he resigned from the party and now sits as an independent.

Losing forty per cent of your original parliamentary party in the first year of that Parliament’s sitting is, to say the least, unfortunate, but the party gained MPs faster than it lost them:

On 1st May 2025 Reform candidate Sarah Pochin narrowly wrought the seat of Runcorn & Helsby in a by-election, following the resignation of disgraced Labour MP Mike Amesbury. On 15th September the shadow junior minister Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) defected. In January 2026 there were three further defections from the Conservatives to Reform:

  • Robert Jenrick (Newark) on 15th.
  • Andrew Rosindell (Romford) on 18th.
  • Suella Braverman (Fareham & Waterlooville) on 26th.

Rosindell has been mentioned on this blog once before. He is relatively-low profile, being a junior shadow minister under both Cameron and Badenoch (the latter right up until his defection) but missing out on any actual post while his party was in government. Jenrick and Braverman are relative high-flyers, having both been Secretaries of State since 2019 and both contested the Conservative Party leadership at least once.

On 6th December last year, the Lord Offord of Garvel (a junior minister from 2021 to 2024) joined the party, and on 15th January was appointed head of its Scottish branch with the intent to lead the party into the Holyrood elections in May. This gave Reform its first representation in the upper house, but the experience was short-lived because he formally retired on Friday.

Looking at the Reform group in the House of Commons now, this is what we get:

  • Lee Ashfield (original)
  • Suella Braverman (defection)
  • Nigel Farage (original)
  • Robert Jenrick (defection)
  • Danny Kruger (defection)
  • Sarah Pochin (by-election)
  • Andrew Rosindell (defection)
  • Richard Tice (defection)

Nineteen months from the general election, the original group have already become a minority, outnumbered by the newcomers — which feels oddly poignant given how much of the party’s support is based on anxieties about immigration. It’s worth remembering that even among the original group, Ashfield was not new to the House of Commons, having been elected as a Conservative candidate in 2019 and served as that party’s Deputy Chairman as recently as January 2024. It remains to be seen how stable this association will be given that it involves at least two people who only joined the new party after trying and failing to win the crown of the old, and who may not be comfortable for long submitting to the authority of Farage when he has so much less legislative and governmental experience than they do.

As has been pointed out in numerous articles and editorials by now, this illustrates the dilemma facing Reform: They have long leaned on their “outsider”, “anti-establishment” status under their charismatic leader, but now as it looks ever more likely that they could actually win power they obviously need to start acting more like a serious party of government rather than a protest movement, which means getting people on board with experience of how to operate in Whitehall and Westminster. Unfortunately for them, the Conservatives aren’t necessarily sending their best people, so that Farage could end up being forced to present the electorate with a supposedly-revolutionary government composed in no small part of the very same individuals who created the mess against which he’s revolting!

As a counter all this, a new movement has recently emerged called Prosper UK. This is a group within the Conservative Party, rather than a new party in its own right, though ironically the same name was used in 2018-20 for an unrelated (and unsuccessful) minor party under Alan Sked, the original founder of UKIP.

Prosper is predominantly a campaign for the liberal, moderate, “One Nation” (and also Remain-voting) Conservatives who have found themselves increasingly marginalised following the referendum ten years ago.

The Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Prosper

I found the group’s Wikipedia page with a simple list of the names of its supporters taken directly from its own website. Bit by bit I transformed the simple list into a sortable table with photographs and notes. Unlike the ill-fated Change UK/Independent Group from 2019, Prosper launches with seventy prominent names attached, many of whom have held senior government posts. The downside is that the group looks to be mainly a collection of yesterday’s stars: Among the seventy names in that list I found only three who are currently holding an elected public office (one council leader and two police commissioners). There are no incumbent members of the House of Commons at all, instead the vast majority are former MPs who either stood down or were voted out out some time ago. Fifteen of the former MPs now sit in the House of Lords, as do two of the party’s former leaders in the Scottish and European Parliaments (Davidson and Kirkhope respectively).

Shortly after the launch, Kemi Badenoch gave a speech explicitly rejecting a return to centrism, which means that their prospects of meaningful influence over the direction of the wider party are likely to be very limited for the foreseeable future. Still, at least this whole exercise helped me to bump my edit count up. Labutnum rank, here I come!

Notes on the German State Visit

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Last week Windsor Castle hosted the last of three state visits this year, featuring Frank-Walter Steinmeier & Elke Büdenbender, President & First Lady of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This one made the news far less (most likely because it was far less controversial) than that of Donald Trump in September. Unlike Trump, Steinmeier was able to partake in the public-facing elements of a state visit, such as the carriage ride through the streets of Windsor and an address in the royal gallery of the House of Lords.

This was in some ways the reciprocation of the state visit which our King & Queen made to Germany in 2023. In his state banquet speech Steinmeier said to Charles

“the fact that your very first trip abroad as King brought you to Germany was a special symbol of the German-British friendship, a gesture of appreciation which meant a great deal to me and to us Germans.”

This is not strictly true as Their Majesties had been planning to visit France first, but that visit was postponed a few months as Macron dealt with protests over state pensions.

The King’s speech at the same event included this quip

“our languages, English and German, [ ] share such deep common roots, but now do sound a little different. It is undoubtedly true, that your language contains a very large number of very long words. As someone who has spent some time trying to learn a little Welsh, I have some sympathy for the proposition that needless gaps between words are a dreadfully inefficient use of paper… “

There was no exchange of honours this time, as Steinmeier had already been appointed an honorary GCB during the aforementioned 2023 visit. He and Charles both wore their red sashes to dinner. The Prime Minister, a KCB, notably continues not to wear his badge.

The Duke of Kent did not attend the state banquet but he later separately met the Bundespräsident at a service at Coventry Cathedral, to commemorate its bombing during the Second World War. It is worth remembering that the Duke is now the only living British prince to have been born before that war started. We got a rare glimpse of his royal cypher on a wreath lain at the old altar.

Steinmeier also had a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street. While his state visit was still going on Starmer also had an unrelated meeting with the Prime Minister of Norway, and already since the President’s departure he has held another “Coalition of the Willing” meeting including Chancellor Merz.

From a ceremonial perspective there is little innovation here (bar a lot of stories about tiaras), as the proceedings stuck closely to the template established by recent precedents. The most interesting parts are His Majesty’s and His Excellency’s speeches, which I think, well, speak for themselves.

Recent state visits have been good opportunities for uploading free-licence photographs to Wikimedia Commons but sadly on this occasion the pickings have been very limited as the government Flickr accounts’ only pictures of Steinmeier are of his visit to Downing Street, leaving out anything involving the royals. Those on the Parliamentary accounts are not released under the correct licence, and it doesn’t look as if the German government has the same attitude to copyright that the British one does so finding anything from their end is also unlikely.

David Lammy and Bleak House

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David Lammy, in his new role as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice, has recently announced plans to tackle a long-running backlog of cases in the English & Welsh judicial system by severely narrowing the circumstances in which juries are used for deciding the verdicts in criminal cases, transitioning trials for less serious offences to relying solely on the judge. These plans are highly controversial, with detractors expressing suspicion that he will undermine long-standing principles of English constitutionalism as well as scepticism that the move will actually save any time or money.

Lammy has attracted particular ridicule for a comment in an interview that was reported in The Times two days ago:

I remember studying Bleak House for my A-levels, and the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case that went on and on and on. We cannot go back to a Victorian system in which all new people who are the victims of crime don’t get justice.

The 1853-2 novel Bleak House is a satire of the English court system of the early nineteenth century and is credited with spurring on reforms later in that century, but to use the Jarndyce case (or any of the real one inspiring it) as a justification for Lammy’s proposals is nonsensical as this was a probate case in the Court of Chancery (later succeeded by the Chancery Division in the High Court of England & Wales) not a criminal case, and crucially it did not involve any juries!

Then again, the Lord Chancellor is not the only one to fail to understand that story: Over recent years (well, decades really) there have been growing concerns among the intellectual classes that their own numbers may functional literacy among the populations of developed countries is going into decline. One particular alarm bell was sounded last year in A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities, entitled “They Don’t Read Very Well“, which used the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House as the yardstick. A worrying proportion of English majors (for whom reading literature should really be a specialist skill) struggled to understand it.

I listened to the LibriVox recording of Bleak House in 2022 and watched the BBC adaptation of it in 2024. I know from reading through Great Expectations that Dickens, being paid by the word, had a habit of using far too many when far fewer would do, but the idea that his works may be slipping out of human comprehension, even among those who have specifically chosen literature as a course of study, has implications which themselves are bleaker than the house could ever be.

Belize, Paddington and Royal Variety

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The Royal Variety Performance for 2025 was held last night, though it won’t be broadcast until next month. This time the Prince & Princess of Wales attended, as they have done in every odd-numbered year since 2015. I mentioned last year that the Royal Variety Charity was extensively using Sodacan’s Wikipedia illustration of Elizabeth II’s British heraldic achievement. Looking at this year’s photographs it appears nothing has changed.

I mentioned last week the oddity of having the Prince of Wales and his aunt the Princess Royal both undertaking prominent overseas diplomatic visits to different places at the same time. This week the Firm leaned further into this by having a married couple, the Duke & Duchess of Edinburgh, simultaneously touring different continents.

The Duke flew to Nigeria to meet with the President and attend a meeting of the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award programme, founded by and named after his father Prince Philip.

The Duchess went on a tour of South and Central America. She visited the Republics of Peru, Panama and Guatemala, finishing in Belize. The first three were standard-fare bilateral diplomatic visits on behalf of Britain, with the Palace news page explicitly saying they were requested by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (specifically the Foreign part in this instance). In some of the photographs we can see her meeting the host president with a Union Flag prominently displayed beside that of the host state.

The visit to Belize is the more interesting one as, unlike the others, this is a Commonwealth Realm, and indeed this is highlighted multiple times in the press releases, with the Palace Twitter feed even calling it “the Realm of Belize” despite the country having no official long name. By strict Commonwealth constitutional logic Sophie should have been there in her capacity as sister-in-law to the King of Belize, acting on the advice of the Belizean government. Despite this, many of the official reports mentioned bilateral ties between Belize and the United Kingdom, which suggests a deliberate straddling of both thrones. I can’t see any royal standard flown by the Duchess on the other visits, but in Belize she was clearly photographed flying the generic ermine-bordured version. As I have lamented before, royals other than the sovereign himself do not have dedicated heraldic flags for each specific realm save Canada so must default to their British arms even where this causes constitutional confusion.

It is also worth remembering that recently there have been reports of Guatemalan military personal making illegal incursions onto Belizean territory, which was condemned by the Commonwealth. It is a little strange, therefore, that a senior royal should visit both countries in such rapid succession without the incident being brought up.

On a final note, two of the aforementioned stories featured appearances by Paddington Bear: The Duchess of Edinburgh posed with a plush toy of him at the British Embassy in Lima (Peru of course being the character’s country of origin), then the Prince & Princess of Wales greeted an actor in costume at the Royal Albert Hall. Paddington Bear has long been an international icon of British culture. Since his appearance in a video for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022, he has been particularly associated with the royal family. Some have criticised an apparent cult forming around him. This year Spitting Image created a parody of him to appear alongside the Duke of Sussex in a spoof podcast, which at time of writing is the subject of a lawsuit by Studio Canal.

EXTERNAL LINKS

DUke of Edinburgh

Duchess of Edinburgh

Paddington Bear

Royals and Remembrance

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Once Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night have passed, poppy season is all that remains to block Christmas from achieving total domination for the rest of the year. There are, of course, two separate dates for this occasion — Armistice Day (always 11th November, the exact anniversary of the end of the First World War) and Remembrance Sunday (second Sunday in November, a broader commemoration of war dead). Both of these events involve two-minute national silences… assuming, of course, that a silence actually falls. Due to the logistics and practicalities of the working week, some organisations have to hold subsidiary events outside the universal dates. Silences here can be hard to regulate if everyone around isn’t coordinated with it. I remember quite a few occasions from childhood when a reverent, contemplative peace was anything but. Even the highest are not immune to this: The Queen attended a service at Westminster Abbey last Thursday, but it was immediately outside rather than inside the main building. As you would expect from an open-air event in central London on a weekday, the “silence” was actually filled with a lot of traffic noise as well as two different emergency sirens. The only blessing was that at least there were no dogs barking. I’m actually a little surprised that this phenomenon hasn’t been the subject of a Family Guy cutaway by now, given that it would be an easy way to get two minutes of padding with minimal animation.

Another big event in November is the United Nations Climate Change Conference, now taking place in Belém, Brazil. The Prince of Wales flew down some days in advance to present his Earthshot Prize, which Sir Keir Starmer also attended, though neither stayed for COP30 itself. This is the latest in a long line of solo overseas engagements undertaken by the heir apparent since his wife’s cancer diagnosis last year*. William was back in time for the Sunday cenotaph service but he missed the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night. Prince George attended for the first time, in his father’s place. The festival includes the religious and patriotic music expected for a solemn occasion, but also a handful of modern entries. One of these was a cover of Avicii’s The Nights. I can’t work out whether it adds to or detracts from the spirit of the event to know that Avicii himself, err, left this world behind some years ago, his life clearly remembered but tragically brief, and predeceased his father. He was from Sweden, a country formally neutral in both world wars. The festival featured multiple performances from Sir Rod Stewart, who sported the unusual sartorial combination of a knight bachelor’s badge hung from an open shirt.

The cenotaph ceremony in Whitehall traditionally involves the laying of wreaths by senior royals, senior servicemen, cabinet ministers, diplomats, various officials representing the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, and leaders of the significant political parties in the House of Commons. This has always been a bugbear for Nigel Farage, because his parties have so far never met the threshold of six MPs needed to qualify. UKIP in 2015 got 12.6% of the popular vote but only one seat. Douglas Carswell, as the party’s sole representative in the Commons, was regarded for procedural purposes as an independent rather than a leader. Reform in 2024 got 14.3% of the vote and five seats. The cruel twist here is that since the election the Reform caucus has gained two members (one from defection, one from by-election) but also lost two of the originals, so that when November came they were back as they started. It should be noted that the six-member rule, introduced in 1984, has exceptions for the Northern Ireland parties to avoid the appearance of sectarian bias. It is also possible for two or more parties to coalesce for this purpose, as Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party have done since 2001**.

The Princess Royal was also absent from the London commemorations, having gone on a royal tour of Australia. She instead paid her respects at the ANZAC memorial in Sydney. It is a little extraordinary for two royal overseas visits to take place at the same time, especially when both of those away from the United Kingdom are counsellors of state. Recently I have been constructing a Wikipedia page listing all of Anne’s official overseas travel (similar to those which already exist for other senior royals) but it has quickly become a little overwhelming to see just how busy she is, with twenty such journeys listed in the Court Circular just for the last two years.

One ought probably to discuss heraldic matters now. In some of the photographs of Anne’s visit I can see her two crosses and a heart flying in various places. I didn’t see William or Camilla flying theirs in the outings aforementioned. Close-up shots of the wreaths laid and crosses planted also show royal symbols. The Queen’s monogram appeared on hers, complete with the Tudor crown. William’s, even now, still uses the pre-Carolean design (note the oak leaves and lack of arch on the coronet). The King’s wreath did not use his monogram, but instead the full royal achievement with BUCKINGHAM PALACE underneath. Once again it was the old-style illustration with St Edward’s crown.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle is something of a vexillophile and has taken to Tweeting whenever a new flag is flown from New Palace Yard. In 2021 he began making a point of raising the flags of the Overseas Territories. His most recent example was the flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory, allegedly celebrating its national day. I can’t find photographic evidence (including on Parliament.UK) of the flag actually flying in the yard, so I can only go on the image shown in the Tweet itself. The BIOT flag includes the Imperial crown, sometimes with a cap of maintenance and sometimes without, but always in the St Edward form. Hoyle’s picture had a Tudor crown. I cannot find this version on the territory’s website or any other source. Is it a custom make? The BIOT is currently the subject of a slow-moving but high-stakes political controversy as Starmer’s government intends to cede sovereignty of the landmasses to Mauritius. This would mean that the territory as a political entity ceases to exist, hence no point updating the flag. I notice that there was not a representative of the BIOT among all the other BOT representatives laying wreaths at the cenotaph. The flag of the BIOT has been widely used in the campaign against the handover, including by the displaced islanders themselves. The bill to ratify the handover passed the House of Commons and recently had its second reading in the Lords, but then there were reports that the government has paused its progress due to public resistance. In this context it is tempting to read Mr Speaker’s Tweet as a not-so-subtle dig at the Prime Minister.

Finally, a point about Flickr: The cenotaph ceremony and the Earthshot prize both produced plenty of government photographs which can be moved onto Wikimedia Commons. The former had two photographers: Simon Dawson for the Prime Minister’s Office and Gunter Hofer for the DCMS. After migrating both albums across I quickly realised that the time stamps given in the metadata were wrong. Dawson’s were one hour too late (probably not adjusted for daylight savings) while the DCMS ones were in some cases out by a whole year! This feels like an elementary mistake for a professional photographer. Sadly there are not likely to be many photographs of Anne’s excursion to Sydney for the reasons I explained last year.

FOOTNOTES

*The Princess of Wales appears not to have gone abroad on official business since 15 October 2023.
**The SNP alone has won at least six seats in every subsequent general election, so in practice the utility of this alliance is one-sided.

McFall Bows Out Early

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The Lord McFall of Alcluith has served as Lord Speaker since 2021. Today he announced in Parliament that he would be stepping down early because Lady McFall has Parkinson’s disease and he needs to spend more time caring for her. He has arranged for his successor to take office on 2nd February next year.

The office of Lord Speaker came into being as a standalone position as a result of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, having previously been one of many duties undertaken by the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. According to Standing Order 18 (paraphrasing a little for simplicity):

  1. The first election of a Lord Speaker was held on 13th July 2011. Subsequently, elections shall be held in the fifth calendar year following that in which the previous election was held, on a day no later than 15th July in that year. A Lord Speaker elected under this paragraph shall take office on 1st September in the year of election.
  2. Where a Lord Speaker (including a person elected as Lord Speaker who has not yet taken office) dies, resigns or is deemed to have resigned, an election of a Lord Speaker shall be held within three months of the death, the giving notice of resignation or the deemed resignation. For the purposes of paragraph (1), this election is then “the previous election”.

The first Lord Speaker was the Helene, Baroness Hayman, who served from 4th July 2006 to 31st August 2011.

The second was Frances, Baroness D’Souza, who served from 1st September 2011 to 31st August 2016.

The third was Norman, Lord Fowler, who served from 1st September 2016 to 30th April 2021. He stepped down slightly early to focus on independent political campaigning.

The fifth, who has not yet been decided, will presumably serve from 2nd February 2026 to 31st August 2031.

It is a little strange to think that, despite the intention to have fixed term-lengths for the office, only one out of the first five incumbents has actually served the standard period on the Woolsack. McFall’s decision to leave office in February rather than much sooner is probably to allow the election of his successor to take place in January. If the election took place in December or November then the fifth Lord Speaker would only serve until August 2030, and thus every subsequent Lord Speaker election would be one year earlier than was originally intended. No candidacies have yet been declared for the forthcoming election.

Incidentally, Lady D’Souza has been in the news this week for almost the first time since her own speakership ended — she is facing an eight-week suspension from the House for using a Parliamentary letterhead when appealing speeding fines.