Category Archives: Politics

Realms and Revelations

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When writing and reviewing textbooks, encyclopedia entries and anything else to be considered authoritative, it is important to be able to cite one’s sources of information. You may learn and know things from what you’ve heard and seen in person (or, in my case, on Zoom meetings) but this is almost worthless if it cannot be verified by the rest of the public – or at least the academic community.

For matters which relate to government and politics, Parliamentary questions and statements are very useful in this regard as they are recorded in Hansard. Of course, such statements are only made at all if MPs and peers are minded to discuss those topics. For the lay citizen, an alternative can be found in Freedom of Information requests, the principal avenue for which is the website WhatDoTheyKnow.

I recently tried my hand at resolving three questions through this method, with varying degrees of success:

Scottish Arms of the Royal Family

I have blogged many times before about the uncertainty of the armorial status of Queen Camilla, Prince William and various other royals in Scotland since the end of Elizabeth II’s reign. The obvious body to ask was the Lyon Court. WDTK lists the Court as a body which is not subject to the FOI act but which they believe ought to be. I have of course, interacted virtually with some Scottish officers of arms before, but that was in a much less formal context. It appears that I am the first person to attempt to contact the Court through this avenue. As expected, my request was refused. I found Kevin Greig’s use of the term “research” a little ill-fitting in this particular instance, though understandable if dictated by consistency with more general policy. He suggested that Scotland’s People would be the more appropriate place to look. The most surprising part of his response was the final sentence, implying that the Court only controls the sovereign’s undifferenced arms and that those of the other royals, including the Scottish versions, are held by the College in London.

Membership Quotas on Orders of Chivalry

After the death of Dame Maggie Smith got me thinking about the topic, I sent the question to the Cabinet Office, as they are the government department responsible for the management of the larger honours list. They got back to me a month later to say that while they maintain statistics on the numbers of new appointments to each order each time, they have none relating to the cumulative totals. They suggested that the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood might know, but their data were probably also incomplete and that in any case they are not subject to the FOI Act either.

The King’s Honours in His Other Realms

This request also concerned the honours system, or rather systems, for I noted that many “British” honours (such as the Royal Victorian Order, or the Order of St Michael & St George) are also awarded in other countries with Charles III as monarch. I wanted to know whether his awards given to e.g. Canadians and Papuans were formally granted in his capacity as monarch of those countries or as monarch of this one – including what royal style and insignia were used on the relevant letters patent.

I initially sent this one to the Cabinet Office as well. They didn’t hold the necessary information here either, recommending that I instead ask the Crown Office in Chancery (within the Ministry of Justice) and if that failed then the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. I asked both simultaneously to save time. The Crown Office held none of the information at all, but the FCDO was able to supply most of what I wanted. Crucially, they confirmed the the sovereign honours the other realms’ subjects in his relevant local capacity not his British one. They also clarified that these appointments are done by warrant rather than by patent and that the documents don’t display coats of arms but do include the seals of the orders of chivalry themselves.

It was a long trek but it was nice to eventually get something out of all of these requests. I will consider chasing up the Chancery at a later date.

The Sovereign’s Crown and the Southern Cross

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The King & Queen in Sydney (NSW Gov, CC BY 4.0). The King’s mouth is unfortunately hanging open in this shot, which combined with the opaque glasses makes for a bit of a Hubert Farnsworth look.

The King & Queen have just spent the past nine days on a tour of Australia and Samoa. Bizarrely, the Palace’s press release called this an “Autumn Tour” even though in the destination countries it was spring. The tour was originally supposed to have included New Zealand as well, but His Majesty’s cancer diagnosis earlier this year forced the itinerary to be severely reduced.

Charles wore three distinct metaphorical “hats” during the course of the tour: First as King of Australia conducting domestic business, second as King of Great Britain & Northern Ireland conducting a bilateral state visit, and third as Head of the Commonwealth presiding over the biennial Heads of Government Meeting.

Photographs of the sovereign couple at these events are unfortunately few and far between. Australian governments both federal and state lack official Flickr accounts with clear licensing indications as their British counterparts have, and the paltry few hosted on their websites are also of uncertain origin – at time of posting a handful have been accepted on Wikimedia Commons but these all look so suspiciously similar to those on Getty and Alamy that I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up getting deleted shortly afterwards. There seem to be no free-licence photographs of the state visit to Samoa at all. Number 10 and the FCDO both have albums from the CHOGM, but only one picture of the lot actually shows Charles and none at all show Camilla.

I do not know the full details of the travel arrangements, but what I can gather is that Their Majesties and a small entourage took a commercial flight from Heathrow to Singapore, whence they were picked up by the Royal Australian Air Force and taken to Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport in New South Wales.

The tour marked the first in-the-fabric appearance of the Australian royal banner of arms (known officially as “The King’s Flag for Australia”), which was seen flying from the cockpit window and then later from several road and watercraft. The Australian banner follows Canada’s example by reverting to showing the national arms undifferenced, in contrast to the practice followed during Elizabeth II’s reign of defacing the banner with her own personal cypher. The King approved the present version on 30th August.

The current coat of arms of Australia was formalised in 1912. The shield is a composite in “quarterly of six” format, representing the six constituent states of the federation. The states of South Australia and Western Australia did not yet have full coats of arms at the time but all had heraldic badges (which are also shown on their respective civil flags) so these were used instead. The whole is surrounded by a bordure ermine.

The whole federal armorial achievement is normally depicted with the crest on a torse hovering some distance above the shield – omitting helm, mantling or coronet – but the Imperial Crown appears as a charge on the badges of Victoria and Queensland, notably at different sizes.

As in Britain (though unlike Canada) the depiction of the crown in Australian royal symbols has changed from St Edward’s Crown to the Tudor Crown, though this has not yet entirely filtered through to all the state arms and flags themselves. I dimly remember – but can no longer find the proof – that the flag as approved on the government’s website in August still showed St Edward’s Crown, and that the graphic on Wikimedia Commons did likewise until photographs of the real flag caused an update.

The King at several points on the tour wore the sovereign’s badge of the Order of Australia along with a hefty line of other honours I will need time to identify. The Governor-General gave him honorary commissions at the top ranks of all three branches of the Australian armed forces. This is is a little perplexing from a legal perspective: One would have thought that the reigning monarch would hold these ranks substantively ex officio and would not need to be appointed to them by his own deputy.

The Queen is another story: For months now I have been looking out for signs of Camilla being granted the use of her own banner of arms – being the royal arms of the sovereign impaling those of her father Bruce Shand. This was finally seen to be the case during the Australian tour, flying from the bonnet of her car on a few occasions when she travelled without her husband. The videos did not show the flag long enough (and the stills tended to have it covered by the watermark) but from what little I can determine of the artistic subtleties of its design I reckon it is actually a printout of the vector file on the Commons. The car itself was a black Audi (I think a Q8) and the regular numberplates were obscured with plates bearing an image of the Tudor Crown. That image looks to have been taken from Wikimedia too, though I can’t find the exact image. The glaring problem here, of course, is that this banner shows Shand impaled by the British royal arms rather than the Australian, resulting in a mismatch with her husband. There is a burning irony that after all this time, the one occasion Camilla can be seen using a personalised banner of arms as Britain’s royal consort is the one occasion in which it was not appropriate to do so.

This unfortunately seems to be far for the course with royal tours – with the notable exception of Canada (probably because that country has its own heraldic authority), banners of royal arms in the other Commonwealth Realms seem to only be made for the reigning sovereign himself, with the rest of the royal family defaulting to their British blazons instead of coming up with a local variant. This may be marginally more convenient from a logistical and fiscal perspective, but it can be constitutionally misleading as it implies that they are representing a foreign state instead of that country’s own crown. If creating a personal one for each prince or princess is too onerous, it at least would be relatively easy to create a generic ermine-bordered version which they could all use when in the country. Admittedly that might not work in Australia where the sovereign’s own shield and banner have an ermine bordure already. For the royal wives, it might even make more sense to use banners of their paternal arms unimpaled so that they needn’t change based on location at all.

During the visit, His Majesty attended a service at St Thomas’s Anglican Church in North Sydney, made addresses to both the state Parliament of New South Wales and the national Parliament of Australia (sadly not from the throne in either case) and undertook a review of the fleet. God Save The King was played by a brass band while Charles inspected the troops and also by a solo amateur flautist during his walkabout but I can’t find any clip of it actually being sung at any point, in contrast to Advance Australia Fair which was sung by a children’s choir at Parliament House. That the monarch made no remark about his late friend Barry Humphries (a.k.a Dame Edna Everage) was also a little surprising.

When the royal party landed in Samoa they switched back to their British identities and the British royal banner was flown from the cockpit window alongside the Samoan flag, although the aeroplane itself was still very obviously branded as Australian.

While in Samoa Charles was invested with two honorific titles – Tui Taumeasina (King of Taumeasina) and Toa’iga o Tumua (Paramount Chief). The Queen was seen using a hand-fan with her royal cypher printed on it, which was given to her by Stewart Parvin in February. Both switched for much of the visit to bespoke white outfits in the local style.

Charles attended the CHOGM in his capacity as Head of the Commonwealth. Elizabeth II adopted a personal flag to represent herself in this capacity with no reference to any particular country. Her son so far appears not to have done so, which is a pity.

The official royal YouTube channel has uploaded some videos from these events. Not only are they continuing to use the outline of the British royal arms as the channel logo, they have also taken to including a new drawing of the arms in the thumbnails of individual videos. This, again, is a little problematic when the contents of the videos relate to other realms. I am left to wonder what recognisable symbol could be used here to avoid this problem. The livery badge of the House of Windsor might work, but even that technically has the British banner of arms included in it. The only solution that would truly work is, I suppose the CIIIR cypher on its own, without even a crown above it. Indeed, that could work for other family members’ flags and banners too.

New Government Arms

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The latest development in a long-running story, yesterday the Cabinet Office announced the rollout of a new rendering of the British royal arms, based on an illustration by Timothy Noad, for use by HM Government, including in all departmental logos on the website. It will presumably also appear in the letterheads of governmental paper publications, but of course the appearance of those example will be less instantaneous.

The most obvious, and important, change is of course the change from St Edward’s Crown to the Tudor Crown, about which I have written before. The crown is also now depicted much larger relative to the other elements. The lion and unicorn supporters have also been redrawn in a much more chunky, angular style than in the old version.

The escutcheon is restored to a more traditional heater shield shape, poking out in front of the Garter circlet, whereas the old depiction had it as a fully-enclosed cartouche. The circlet itself has been enlarged and the motto typed in a serif font as well as having the colours inverted – it now matches the shield, supporters and crown by having the field depicted in negative while the charges and outlines are positive. The fleur-de-list at the end of the strap is gone.The motto scroll is now much flatter, but anomalously retains the old font and colour scheme.

Comparing the two overall, I would say that the new version looks better as an example of heraldic art due to the shield itself no longer being denied its due prominence, but the old version may work better as a corporate logo due to its stronger outline, especially when shrunk for low resolutions.

In other heraldic news, The Heraldry Society recently released a digital upload of 244 pages from Volume 6 of The Coat of Arms, and I have discovered the Fellowship of the White Shield, whose blog currently has nine articles on the subject. I will not be short of reading material in the foreseeable future.

Photographs of the State Opening

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One of the recurrent themes of this blog is the inconsistency of licensing in British governmental and parliamentary photographs. Without rehearsing the entire story again, I will note that yesterday I made a wonderful discovery:

Since the day of the event itself I had thought that the only photograph of the 2024 State Opening of Parliament to be released under a free licence was this one of His Majesty in procession through the royal gallery. It is fairly tightly framed, with only the middle ground in focus so that Charles and the page boys to his flanks appear a little too sharp while the Duke of Norfolk in front and the Marchioness of Lansdowne behind are entirely blurred.

The House of Lords Flickr account had a generous album of high quality shots, but these were released under a Non-Commercial and No Derivatives licence, rendering them useless for Wikimedia Commons*. When this happened last year I was able to get around it by using those which had been re-issued under a looser licence by the Oireachtas, although some other Wikipedians challenged the legitimacy of these. No such republication existed this time around.

Happily, yesterday when strolling through the relevant category on Wikimedia Commons I came across a second photograph of the event, taken from inside the upper chamber and showing the speech being read. The source was given as parliament.assetbank-server.com, and the link revealed a page from what seemed to be an official Parliament-owned website with twenty-eight of the forty-five photographs in the Flickr album, but this time very explicitly licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0), which meant they could be used on Wikimedia Commons. Of course, I took the opportunity offered by the handy “DOWNLOAD ALL AS ZIP” button to transfer the lot of them. I had to give new names to all of them as the file originals were mostly gibberish and I noticed that the metadata were inconsistent as well (some had timestamps and others didn’t, some were taken by Roger Harris and others by Annabel Moeller). Some more editing may well be required in future to rectify this.

Though I am reluctant to look this gift horse in the mouth, I am a little perplexed by the existence of this website, which bears the UK Parliament logo but is not at the parliament.uk domain, and whose individual pages can be seen freely once you have the direct link but which cannot be navigated without a login. It could be the case that the majority – or indeed entirety – of the recent House of Lords photograph collection is actually released under a usable licence and these pages would prove it, if only we ever manage to find them.

*The irritating thing about photographing licensing in a parliamentary context is that one must continually differentiate between Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons and the House of Commons. The presence of Their Majesties in these images means that “royalty-free” isn’t very practical either.

Don’t They Look Younger Now?

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Fresh from attending special sittings of the States of Jersey and the States of Deliberation in Guernsey, today Their Majesties returned to Westminster for the opening of the first session of the fifty-ninth Parliament of the United Kingdom.

This was the first King’s Speech under a Labour government since 1950. There is some symmetry, perhaps, between Charles III’s second speech and George VI’s second-to-last.

This is the only free-licence photograph of the event so far.

While the content of the speech was very lengthy and stood in radical contrast to the one delivered for Sunak’s government in November, in ceremonial terms there was very little change. The King’s getup was identical to that worn last time. The Queen’s changed a little – instead of her coronation gown, she has reverted to the style of dress she wore in 2019 and earlier. Reeta Chakrabarti, presenting the BBC’s coverage, described it as “very fine, off-white silk crepe embroidered by Fiona Claire”. She has not taken to wearing a sash again, but the star of the Order of the Garter appears around her left hip. This was also, incidentally, her 77th birthday.

Shabana Mahmood appeared as Lord Chancellor. Being a barrister, she wore the full-bottomed wig. This is the first time a woman has performed this role at a state opening, for Liz Truss’s brief tenure in the role did not include one. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, can be seen for the first time wearing the collar of the Royal Victorian Order.

The most striking visual difference was in the change of pages – last time King Charles’ train was carried by Nicholas Barclay, Ralph Tollemache, Charles van Cutsem and Lord Oliver Cholmondeley (three of whom also appeared at the coronation). This time Tollemache returned but the other three were replaced by William Sackville, Alfred Wellesley and Guy Tryon. I don’t know any biographical detail about them beyond what I can guess from their surnames but they all appeared to be several years younger than the boys whom they replaced. Queen Camilla continued to use William Keswick and Arthur Elliott as before. As at last year’s ceremony Her Majesty’s two pages held her robe in the middle rather than at the end so that the end still dragged along the carpet, whereas His Majesty’s four pages kept the whole garment elevated (despite it being longer than his wife’s).

Some other things of note – as is custom after the first state opening of a new parliament, the lower house appointed three temporary deputy speakers. The senior of these is Sir Edward Leigh. I don’t think a Father of the House has ever been appointed as a deputy speaker before. These three will hold office for the brief period until new deputies are elected. All three of the deputy speakers sitting before dissolution have now left the house (one against his will), which was last the case in 1997. There will thus be no continuity except for Sir Lindsay Hoyle himself. Also today the first life peerages of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership were patented – Lord Vallance of Balham and Lady Smith of Malvern. It appears that the ministerial appointments will be taking priority over the dissolution honours after all.

EXTERNAL LINKS

 

Notes on the Transition

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In the eight years and two weeks since the EU referendum, Sir Keir Starmer is the fifth person to be appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This means we have a lot of recent precedents against which to compare the events of the last few days.

The Palace

Up to and including 2010 it was the norm for the invitation of a new premier to form a government to take place entirely off-camera, with the politicians only being seen as they came in and out of the door and the monarch not to be seen at all.

Beginning in 2016 it became custom for the monarch and the new prime minister to be photographed at the start of their meeting and for this photograph to be shared with the press (May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak). Starmer’s appointment goes a little further by even having a short video clip of His Majesty speaking to him. I’m not familiar enough with internal layout of Buckingham Palace to know precisely where each meeting takes place (and the photographs themselves are not labelled in that way) but it’s clear that May, Johnson and Starmer all met the sovereign in the same room while Sunak was in a different part of the palace. Truss’s, of course, took place at Balmoral Castle and is famous as the last time Elizabeth II was photographed before she died. The sight of the two men in adjacent armchairs is reminiscent of scenes with outgoing and incoming Presidents of the United States in the Oval Office.

The Cars

From Thatcher until Johnson the cars used by Prime Ministers were various generations of Jaguar XJs. During Johnson’s tenure the government began phasing these out in favour of Range Rover Sentinels and then Audi A8Ls. In this instance Sunak arrived at the Palace in an Audi (KN23 XFE). Starmer arrived in a Range Rover (0Y20 CFU), then left in the same Audi. It is not clear where the limousine was hiding between Sunak’s meeting and Starmer’s, or which type of car was used to drive the Conservative leader away as his departure was apparently by a rear exit, off-camera. At some point I may do another post comparing the vehicles used in all these moments.

The Cabinet

At this point the full extent of Starmer’s first cabinet is known, though there is still some way to go with the appointment of all the junior ministers. New cabinet ministers overwhelmingly occupy the same post they had been shadowing before the election, with exceptions few enough to list individually:

  • Thangam Debbonaire (Culture, Media & Sport) and Jonathan Ashworth (Paymaster General) lost their seats, replaced by Lisa Nandy and Nick Thomas-Symonds respectively.
  • Anneliese Dodds (Women & Equalities) was a Shadow Secretary of State but is now only a Minister of State (both for that portfolio and at the FCDO).
  • Emily Thornberry (Attorney General) was dropped from the frontbench and replaced by Richard Hermer. She doesn’t seem to have been offered Debbonaire’s or Ashworth’s place either, and now sits as a backbencher.

Some of those who were full members of the shadow cabinet have been demoted to “also attending” the real one. Starmer has followed David Cameron’s example from 2010 in avoiding immediate changes to the machinery of government – while new ministers have been appointed, the ministerial departments themselves are as the previous government left them.

Whereas Blair’s cabinet of 1997 was desperately short of prior ministerial experience (the late Lord Morris of Aberavon being the only veteran of the Wilson-Callaghan years), Starmer’s cabinet of 2024 has quite a few people who served under Blair and Brown. The most prominent example is Ed Miliband, who returns to his old job as energy secretary. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was previously Chief Secretary to the Treasury and then head of the DWP, Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn formerly headed DfID and DEFRA while a few others held multiple junior roles.

Some other New Labour grandees have returned to Parliament after a long absence to serve as lesser ministers e.g. Douglas Alexander (Business & Trade) back in the Commons, (although not for the same constituency) and Jacqui Smith (Education) to be appointed to the Lords.

Smith’s is not the only peerage required to facilitate a ministerial appointment – Hermer is not currently in Parliament either, nor are Sir Patrick Vallance (Minister of State for Science, Research & Innovation) or James Timpson (Minister of State for Prisons, Parole & Probation). It is not clear if these last three are expected to actually join the Labour Party as they were not in political roles before. Vallance in particular (famous from the COVID-era press conferences) has spent five years as a civil servant in the position of Government Chief Scientific Adviser. It is also not clear if these peerages will be created before or after those already announced in the dissolution honours.

The Council

Secretaries of State and some other officeholders are appointed at plenary sessions of the privy council. This time, unusually, the installation of the new cabinet seems to have been spread over two meetings.

The first meeting, on Saturday 6th July, saw Lucy Powell declared Lord President of the Council, then Rayner, Lammy, Cooper, Healey, Mahmood, Kendal and Nandy appointed secretaries of state. Lady Smith of Basildon was appointed Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. The contents page preceding the actual orders in council (an innovation since the last government) splits the secretaries of state into four sections rather than as one bloc so as to have Rayner (the Deputy Prime Minister) above Reeves (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), with Mahmood given her own section due to her distinction of also being Lord High Chancellor. The contents page (though not the actual order in council) also bizarrely describes the Chancellor of the Exchequer as being a Secretary of State, which it isn’t. To make matters worse, the tab header for the PDF says “Lis of Business” rather than “List of Business”! I suspect the Privy Council Office needed some extra proofreading here.

The order in council refers to the new head of government himself as follows:

This day the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC (Prime Minister) did, by
His Majesty’s command, make solemn affirmation as First Lord of the Treasury.

Writing it this way depicts Sir Keir as already being Prime Minister at the time of his appointment as First Lord, making clear that these are distinct titles. Notably Rayner is not described as (Deputy Prime Minister) in the same fashion. Rishi Sunak’s appointment on 27th October 2022 is written the same way, as were Liz Truss’s on 12th October 2022 and Theresa May’s on 19th July 2016. Boris Johnson’s presumably happened on 25th July 2019 but the file seems to be missing. David Cameron’s happened on 13th May 2010 but the document only shows the contents summary. I find it interesting that May and Truss both delayed their swearings-in as First Lord until the meeting after that in which most of their cabinet ministers were sworn, with Truss’s in particular being so delayed that it was closer to the end of her premiership than to the beginning.

The second meeting, on Wednesday 10th July, shows the appointment of secretaries Streeting, Phillipson, Miliband, Reynolds, Kyle, Haigh, Reed, Benn, Murray and Stevens, followed by Reynolds again as President of the Board of Trade – this showing a contrasting approach to the ordering of business.

The ‘Clature (alright, I’m reaching here)

In keeping with David Cameron’s example as already mentioned, Starmer has still renamed one ministerial department even if he hasn’t seriously reorganised any: At the Saturday council Angela Rayner was sworn Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. At the Wednesday council she was sworn again as Secretary of State for Housing, Communites and Local Government.

This department has been in existence since 2001 without major changes to its functions but it has had multiple changes of name. I will list all of them now.

Notably GOV.UK treats the 2018 and 2024 establishments as distinct entities despite them having the same name. The (il)logic of when to say “office”, “ministry” or “department” is probably worth an article in itself at some later date. To change the Department for Children, Schools and Families into the Department for Education in 2010 required an eight-page statutory instrument. To change the MHCLG into the DLUHC in 2021 required twenty pages. Who knows how long it will take to change back again. The problem of “shopping list” department names has been noted for some time. It was reported that the “Levelling Up” part of the name was dropped because it was regarded as merely an empty slogan. Personally I would prefer that the vague “Communities” part be dropped as well, to restore the 1951-1970 name.

I mentioned in a previous post that most of my written and photographic output (online and off) post-dates Gordon Brown’s resignation. I should note now that this is also the case for most of the present digital profile of His Majesty’s Government. GOV.UK itself only dates back to 2012 (although Martha Lane Fox had started working on the project in 2009), and online minutes of the Privy Council only go back to the start of 2010. ParliamentLive.TV only dates back to December 2007 and most government Flickr accounts were in their infancy or non-existent at the time of the 2010 general election. Parliament.uk was very heavily redesigned during the later New Tens. This is not a perfect correlation, let alone a causal relationship, but it does indicate how novel it is to have all these online accounts operating under a Labour regime rather than a Conservative one.

Hello Mother, Hello Father

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The fifty-ninth Parliament of the United Kingdom assembled for the first time today. As usual the first business was the re-election of the Speaker of the House of Commons.

The custom is that proceedings for the election of a speaker are presided over by the member, present in the chamber and not being a minister, with the longest continuous service. As of last week’s general election that member is Sir Edward Leigh, an MP since 1983. His predecessor, Sir Peter Bottomley (MP since 1975) sought re-election but was defeated. Had Leigh also been defeated then the task would have fallen to Jeremy Corbyn of Islington North (formerly Leader of the Labour Party, but now sitting as an independent).

This person also usually has the honorific title “Father of the House”. I say usually because the Father need only be the member with the longest continuous service, and there can be times when that person is also a minister and/or not present in the chamber for the speaker’s election. So far the title has always been Father and never Mother, for no woman has yet achieved this distinction.

In 2015 Harriet Harman declared herself Mother of the House on account of being the female MP with the longest continuous service (since 1982 in her case) and this caught on with a few other senior members (including prime ministers Cameron and May). It is not quite clear why Harman only claimed the status in 2015 given that it was already true a parliament earlier, nor whether this title ought to be applied retroactively all the way to Nancy Astor.

Harman would have been the actual Mother of the House and the member presiding had she been returned at this election, but she chose to retire and ascend to the Lords instead, as did runner-up Dame Margaret Beckett. That left Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, the most senior female member and the fifth most senior overall. She was called Mother of the House several times during speeches, and given a place of high precedence during the day’s events – i.e. taking the oath before the cabinet ministers did.

Despite the timetable not being as urgent, the fifty-ninth Parliament copied the fifty-eighth in having two royal commissions on the same day, one to actually open the session and the other to give the speaker-elect his approbation. In previous parliaments the approbation commission was deferred to the next day of sitting. As in 2019, the letters patent appointing the Lords commissioners were not read again the second time MPs arrived at the bar.

I noticed that the expedition from the lower house to the upper for the first commission was unusually small, consisting only of Leigh, Abbott and six other members (plus Black Rod and the Clerk of the House of course).

Finally I will note that the coordination of the hat-doffing by the commissioners themselves was frankly woeful. On the first occasion Lords Laming and True forgot to do it at all!

FURTHER READING

Passing the Post

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My 2020 article on the Political Colour Wheel has proven to be one of the most popular on this blog, so today I thought I’d try another idea in that vein.

The results of this month’s general election have generated another series of discussions about proportionality, given the historically-low vote share on which Sir Keir Starmer’s party has ridden to victory. I have put together a graph showing how far the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties have risen or fallen above or below the waterline at the last ten general elections.

The data themselves are scraped off Wikipedia. I have cheated a little by backdating the name “Liberal Democrat” to 1987, when it was still the alliance between the old Liberal Party and the Social Democrats under Davids Steel and Owen. The “divide” column is of course the seat share divided by vote share. The formula to produce the score is a little arbitrary – to make the final numbers a little nicer (and perhaps more memorable) I have subtracted 1 from each answer in the Divide column then multiplied the result by 10.

CONSERVATIVE
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 42.2% 57.85% 1.37 3.71
1992 51st 41.9% 51.61% 1.23 2.32
1997 52nd 30.7% 25.04% 0.82 -1.84
2001 53rd 31.7% 25.19% 0.79 -2.05
2005 54th 32.4% 30.65% 0.95 -0.54
2010 55th 36.1% 47.08% 1.30 3.04
2015 56th 36.9% 50.77% 1.38 3.76
2017 57th 42.3% 48.77% 1.15 1.53
2019 58th 43.6% 56.15% 1.29 2.88
2024 59th 23.7% 18.62% 0.79 -2.15
LABOUR
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 30.8% 35.23% 1.14 1.44
1992 51st 34.4% 41.63% 1.21 2.10
1997 52nd 43.2% 63.43% 1.47 4.68
2001 53rd 40.7% 62.52% 1.54 5.36
2005 54th 35.2% 54.95% 1.56 5.61
2010 55th 29.0% 39.69% 1.37 3.69
2015 56th 30.4% 35.69% 1.17 1.74
2017 57th 40.0% 40.31% 1.01 0.08
2019 58th 32.1% 31.08% 0.97 -0.32
2024 59th 33.8% 63.23% 1.87 8.71
LIBERAL DEMOCRAT
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 22.6% 3.38% 0.15 -8.50
1992 51st 17.8% 3.07% 0.17 -8.27
1997 52nd 16.8% 6.98% 0.42 -5.85
2001 53rd 18.3% 7.89% 0.43 -5.69
2005 54th 22.0% 9.60% 0.44 -5.64
2010 55th 23.0% 8.77% 0.38 -6.19
2015 56th 7.9% 1.23% 0.16 -8.44
2017 57th 7.4% 1.23% 0.17 -8.34
2019 58th 11.6% 1.85% 0.16 -8.41
2024 59th 12.2% 11.08% 0.91 -0.92
COMBINED
Election Parliament Conservative Labour Liberal Democrat
1987 50th 3.71 1.44 -8.50
1992 51st 2.32 2.10 -8.27
1997 52nd -1.84 4.68 -5.85
2001 53rd -2.05 5.36 -5.69
2005 54th -0.54 5.61 -5.64
2010 55th 3.04 3.69 -6.19
2015 56th 3.76 1.74 -8.44
2017 57th 1.53 0.08 -8.34
2019 58th 2.88 -0.32 -8.41
2024 59th -2.15 8.71 -0.92

It is striking that the Labour and Liberal Democrat lines are almost parallel throughout, while the Conservative line neither follows nor mirrors them. The Conservatives fell below the waterline during the Blair years, then were inconsistently high above it from 2010 to 2019, falling below again in 2024. The Labour party were always above except for 2019 (albeit very slightly). The Liberal Democrats have always been below, albeit very nearly touching this year. 2024 is also the first time that they have been less disadvantaged than the Conservatives were. Labour’s score in 2024 is of course a record high.

My Political Life So Far

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Thursday 5th May 2016, © my father.

Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment as Prime Minister, following the general election in which the Labour party won a landslide victory and the Conservatives lost almost everything, leads naturally to recollections of (and generally unfavourable comparisons against) the Blair landslide of May 1997. Many people will cite this as a defining moment in the course of their lives. In particular, many ask “Were you up for Portillo?”.

I wasn’t. I only know this period from documentaries and diaries. I hadn’t quite been born yet.

I think it was around 2003-ish that I remember hearing mentions of the name Tony Blair and the office of Prime Minister for the first time, as well as of George W. Bush as President of the United States. Blair cropped up a few times in fictional television, such as his cameos with the Simpsons and Catherine Tate. Expy versions of him also appeared, most famously in Little Britain, but also the titular “Sinister Prime Minister” in the premiere of M. I. High and in the first revived series of Doctor Who, the latter as a hollowed-out skin suit. That whole two-parter, of course, was a fairly explicit parody of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

When Blair resigned and was succeeded by Gordon Brown there were quite a few skits on television about it. I mentioned it in an ICT lesson that week (the task being the formatting of a newspaper). As far as specific events, the aforementioned Iraq invasion is something I only really learned about years later and I have no contemporary memories at all of 9/11, only learning about it from a documentary in the late noughties discussing conspiracy theories about it, but I was very aware of newspaper and television reports about the “Credit Crunch” and parliamentary expenses scandal as they happened. The bird flu and swine flu pandemics late in that decades were recurrent stories.

I think most of my political knowledge probably came from Jeremy Clarkson, both in the form of his many “World According To” books we’d accumulated at home and to the references he would make on Top Gear, frequently complaining about Blair, Brown and Prescott for their ideology in general and their approach to motoring and environmentalism in particular. Though I recognised Prescott’s name and face I probably did not appreciate that he was Deputy Prime Minister and represented a constituency very close to where I lived – nor that Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for a great many things, was also next door. The series includes quite a few references to (and impressions of) Margaret Thatcher, who was also mentioned in at least one storybook read in school, but it was not until years later that I heard of John Major.

Despite not really being that interested in politics as a subject, I still ended up watching a lot of political comedy – especially Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week. Possibly Russell Howard’s Good News was in there as well.

I dimly followed the 2010 general election, by which time I was in secondary school. I didn’t know or care what the parties were but there were a few others in my year who had already nailed their colours to the mast. Graham Stuart’s campaign posters could be seen at several points along the route of the school bus. I and a friend of mine would count these as we went back and forth. We would also comment “Vote Tory!” upon the disembarking of another pupil, purely because he’d ranted negatively about them beforehand. We kept that up for some years afterwards.

Of course, the 2010 election was not a clean break between Labour and Conservative – it produced a hung parliament, so there ensued a five day hiatus while coalition negotiations went on. David Cameron did not actually get to the lectern outside Number 10 until late Tuesday evening, with Nick Clegg not being named as his deputy until Wednesday and other ministerial appointments completed on Thursday.

Recently I went back through the records to see what I was up to in that week. In theory that should have been easy since I’ve kept all my school books from that time as the source material for Homework Direct. Unfortunately it seems that there are no entries at all for that month, with only one each for April and June. This is likely to be because we were headed towards the end of the year with internal examinations looming so much of our activity at that time would have been centred on revision. I look through my exercise books again is not so revealing:

Food Technology
Nothing at all from this period, it seems.
French
6-13: Some vocabulary tests and a series of answers to textbook exercises. I don’t have the textbook anymore and the test questions were given orally so I don’t really have any contextual detail.
Geography
7-12: The exercise book runs out here and the new one doesn’t start until September. All I found were a crude diagram of the courses in a river showing where erosion takes place and a wordsearch for related key terms.
History
6-13: An analysis of sources on the role of the monasteries in England and Henry VIII’s reasons for dissolving them, then about the wider consequences of the break with Rome.
Latin
6-12: A crossword (although the worksheet bizarrely calls it a “criss-cross puzzle”) translating some vocabulary from Latin into English and a wordsearch vice-versa. A short scene from the textbook translated.
Mathematics
10: A small paragraph of notes about surface areas of cuboids.
Music
Nothing at all from this period, it seems.
Science
10-13: I actually change exercise books on 13th May itself. Lots of worksheets and quizzes about the rock cycle, the three different kinds of rock and the types of weathering to which they can be subjected.

It should be noted that I could not actually find my Religious Studies exercise book. I’m sure I don’t have my English book for that year, as our teacher took them home for marking in February and mysteriously never handed them back. My planner page from that week is little more than a list of textbook chapters.

Even so, it is good that I kept so many paper records from this time as the digital trail almost disappears before 2011 (at least until I can hunt down the old memory sticks on which it was saved). Looking through my school’s online records from that time through the Wayback Machine is hopeless due to link rot. I have some surviving copies of the school’s newsletter from that year, but none from the time of the election. The closest edition is the one sent out on 15th March, on the back of which is a group photograph from BBC School Report 2010 (not to be confused with BBC School Report 2011, which actually got me on television).

It’s a shame I couldn’t straighten my tie. From the poor quality of this photograph you might well think this came from a much earlier era than it really did.

For most of the period of 2010-11 I followed American politics more closely than British, mainly through the YouTube extracts of Real Time with Bill Maher. American issues, and some that were international, came to me indirectly – a lot of my favourite reviewtainment channels were facing constant blocks and deletions due to copyright policy, and this was the age of PIPA and SOPA (later followed by CISPA and ACTA) which threatened the whole existence of such a hobby, as well as online freedom more generally.

2012 had the big British events of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, followed by the Obama-v-Romney election in the states. Late in that year I started the GCSE course on Russia & the Cold War which was the first time I had studied recent(-ish) politics in detail. As Bolshevism and its fallout continues to cast shadows on world affairs even today, naturally this was a segue into a great many other adjacent topics. Not only did I carry my reading forward to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to see the lingering effects of e.g. the Russian Revolution and the Word Wars, I also went backwards to the eighteenth and nineteenth to find their roots. I also discovered the Russia Today channel at this time. It was of course in RT’s interests to look for and present stories (not always true) that Western media would avoid. Obviously it was during this time that I had my first experience reading Orwell.

By 2013 this had led me back around to the politics and government of the United Kingdom. I followed contemporary stories as they came out and filled myself in on what I’d earlier missed using whatever documentaries I could find. Sacrilegious as this may be to some, you really can teach yourself a lot just by reading (and later writing) the relevant Wikipedia pages.

This all happened during the tenure of the Cameron-Clegg coalition, explicitly not a normal time in politics (not that “normal” ever truly exists, of course). Cameron is therefore “my” prime minister in that sense, though I was not eligible to actually vote for or against him during that time. The 2015 general election was the first one that I watched live.

My first actual ballot cast, as pictured above, was for Humberside Police & Crime Commissioner (not otherwise that important), followed swiftly by the EU referendum. At that point the story might as well end, for it was during Cameron’s second term that this very blog got going, and thus memory lane merges back into the main road.

Last year (around 20th May) the Conservatives from Cameron onwards passed the point where they had been in power for longer than New Labour. Slightly ahead of that they passed the point of having been in power for more than half my life.

The purpose of this exercise is to recall what I was up to the last time the Labour party governed Britain, to determine what parts of my life already came about before Brown’s resignation and what would come after.

Much of the comparison is not really a political comparison of Labour vs Conservative but more a cultural comparison of the noughties vs the new tens. As aforesaid, the first red years included Top Gear up to Series 15, as well as the first five series of revived Doctor Who (with The Vampires of Venice airing during the post-election negotiation period and Amy’s Choice being the first under Cameron). They also involved all three films of The Lord of the Rings, plus all seven Harry Potter books and the first six film adaptations. The blue years included The Hobbit trilogy and an explosion of new Star Trek spinoffs. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and Newswipe came before the switch with Weekly Wipe coming after. 8 Out of 10 Cats dates back to 2005 but ‘Does Countdown only to 2012. David Starkey’s Monarchy series (as well as many smaller documentaries about the Tudors) came in the noughties whereas Lucy Worsley started in the tens. Peep Show skews to the Labour end and is strongly associated with that era. That Mitchell and Webb Sound and Look had four seasons each made under New Labour, while John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme exclusively exists under the Conservatives. This isn’t a perfect guide, though, since many of the programmes made in the former period are ones I didn’t actually watch until the latter. I’m also fudging the lines a bit for series whose production and broadcast dates fall either side of the border.

On a personal level Conservative government has been a constant throughout adolescent and adult life while Labour had the whole of my childhood. I’m obviously not in the same frame of body or mind now as in 2010, and I’ll be following Starmer’s government in real time in a way that I didn’t for Brown or Blair. There are some psychological tricks at play here – if, during the 2010-24 period, you recalled something that happened during the Thatcher-Major years, it would be easy to feel on some level that there was continuity in the partisan situation and forget that the Labour government interrupted it. Conversely, it might now be possible to think back to 1997-2010 and forget about Cameron-Sunak. This is especially the case if policies, styles of government and indeed people are carried over and political situations from long ago are restored, which is often the case. For some people it may be like finding the last decade was all a dream, for others the nightmare is just beginning.

Time to sleep… or are you waking up?

Jumping the Gun Again

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It is normal, following the dissolution of a parliament of the United Kingdom, for a Dissolution Honours list to be published, conferring peerages, knighthoods and other decorations on members of the former legislature.

Sometimes these have been published swiftly following the dissolution itself, early in the general election campaign. In more modern times these lists have tended not to emerge until many months after the new parliament has already been formed.

This time the list has been published on polling day itself, very close to the publication of the exit poll.

There are nineteen new life peers included, most of whom are recently-retired MPs (including Theresa May, the former prime minster). There are also five knightly awards – Oliver Dowden, Julian Smith and Ben Wallace all become KCBs, Alister Jack a KBE and Thérèse Coffey a DBE. The latter is especially intriguing because she is the one still standing for re-election in Suffolk Coastal, meaning her name as it appears on the ballot paper will have become out-of-date while people were crossing it.

The Wikipedia pages of the latter five were already updated before I even came across the announcement, but of course the titles of the new peers will take several weeks to confirm. It is still up in the air whether this is the last squeezing of the font of honour by Rishi Sunak or if a separate list of resignation honours will arrive later on.