House of Commons

• Armed Forces Bill, Session 2024-26

UK Government

• Armed Forces Bill 2026, collection page

House of Commons Library

• Armed Forces Bill 2024-26, Research briefing, 21 January 2026

• Appointments to the Chiltern Hundreds and Manor of Northstead Stewardships since 1880, Research briefing, 24 April 2024

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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up in this week's edition.

Ruth Fox: Should you have to apply for an obscure medieval sounding office in order to leave the House of Commons?

Mark D'Arcy: Checking Sir Keir Starmer's legislative scorecard just weeks before the expected end of the parliamentary session.

Ruth Fox: And stand by your beds. MPs prepare to renew their permission for Britain to have an Army and Navy and a Royal Air Force.

Mark D'Arcy: But Ruth, let's start with another week of Westminster churn around the issue of by-elections and [00:01:00] defections. This week we saw the calling of the Manchester Gorton by-election, illustrating for a start the power of the Whips of the party for which the MP who's leaving sat to set the date of a by-election.

It's going to be late in February. They're not waiting till May. They're not allowing other parties to get in there and get on the ground campaigning. Labour have set the date for pretty much as early as they could possibly set it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, much earlier than we thought. We thought they'd wait till the local elections last week, didn't we, when we were suddenly struck by the news that this was all gonna be taking place, shaping up, I think, to be a three-way fight between Labour, Reform and the Greens, as we said, but not with the candidates we expected.

Mark D'Arcy: Andy Burnham has been blocked. As we were discussing last week, the National Executive Committee has the power to stop sitting metro mayors and police and crime commissioners from running as parliamentary candidates before the end of their term, and they've used that power to say that Andy Burnham can't use this particular route to return to the House of Commons. So the King of the North is gonna have to stay in the North running greater Manchester for a while [00:02:00] yet and won't be an immediate threat to Sir Keir Starmer should the local elections in May be the debacle that the polls suggest they might be for Labour.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Zack Polanski also isn't standing, so he hasn't decided to take up the cudgels. Reform UK have however picked their candidate, and that is Matthew Goodwin, who is a controversial figure, particularly among some of my academic friends and colleagues. A political scientist.

Mark D'Arcy: Author of several books on the rise of UKIP and its various subsequent iterations.

So he studied the populist right in Britain and has now joined it.

Ruth Fox: Yep. I think it's fair to say that's been quite some time coming, for those of us who've been following his career. Should say Matthew's known to the Hansard Society as well because back in his very early days when he was just starting out at, I think he was at Nottingham University, he was the book review editor for our journal Parliamentary Affairs.

Mark D'Arcy: The Hansard Society's dabs are on him.

But there's another thought here too, which is, should Matthew Goodwin win the forthcoming by-election, and that is [00:03:00] far from being a done deal, the Reform Party will suddenly have a number of alternative leaders in its ranks because not only would they have Robert Jenrick who had been aspiring to the leadership of the Conservative Party not all that long ago, not only would they have Suella Braverman, a former Home Secretary and a genuine big political beast. Some people would rather criticise the BBC for calling her a big beast. She's a former Home Secretary. That qualifies for big beast I think in most political lexicons.

Ruth Fox: It's one of the top three officers of State, isn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So you may or may not have a good opinion of Suella Braverman, but I think if you get to be Home Secretary, it's a fairly legitimate description, but potentially you'd also have Matthew Goodwin as well. And so there'd be a number of people who would be aspiring to the crown of Nigel Farage. At such time as he might decide to step down from the leadership of the Reform Party. That may be quite some time away, but it changes the dynamic of a political party in Parliament and outside it when there are plausible alternative leaders knocking around.

That might just have an [00:04:00] interesting effect on the way the Reform Party operates in Parliament and beyond.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But Mark, we've had, in response to this development and the resignation of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP that prompted to the by-election and all of these political manoeuvrings. This week we've had a couple of questions from listeners, interestingly anonymously. Always makes me wonder who are. Are they MPs? Are they civil servants? Parliamentary staff? I doubt it's parliamentary staff because they probably know this stuff, but the questions are, why can't MPs just resign their seat? Why do they need to take the Chiltern Hundreds?

As one of the listeners put it, what on earth is the Chiltern Hundreds? So I think we need a little explainer, Mark. Full transcript →