What happens when you lose the party whip? A conversation with Neil Duncan-Jordan MP

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What happens when you lose the party whip? A conversation with Neil Duncan-Jordan MP - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 131

13 Feb 2026

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Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan reflects on rebelling against the whip and calling for Keir Starmer to resign, as we assess the fallout from the Mandelson–Epstein affair and its implications for the Government’s legislative programme and House of Lords reform. We examine Gordon Brown’s sweeping standards proposals, question whether they would restore public trust, revisit tensions over the assisted dying bill in the Lord and discuss two key Procedure Committee reports on Commons debates and internal elections.

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Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan joins us this week to reflect on his experience as one of the new intake’s most prominent rebels. He describes defying the whip over the means-testing of the Winter Fuel Allowance and proposed disability benefit cuts, the fallout from his suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the personal and political pressures that come with rebellion. He also discusses his relationship with the Whips and explains why he has twice called for Sir Keir Starmer to step down, most recently in the wake of the Mandelson affair.

In this week’s episode, we also assess Starmer’s increasingly fragile position following the Mandelson–Epstein controversy, examining the risk of further damaging disclosures about Mandelson’s contact with Ministers and the potential implications for the Government’s legislative programme. We untangle the constitutional confusion surrounding proposals to strip Peter Mandelson and other disgraced peers of their titles, exploring weaknesses in the House of Lords’ Code of Conduct, and the broader dangers of legislating in response to a single scandal.

Gordon Brown has called for sweeping “root and branch” standards reform – from a new anti-corruption commission to greater use of citizens’ juries on parliamentary standards and enhanced select committee scrutiny of ministerial and other public appointments. Ruth and Mark question whether such changes would genuinely rebuild public trust, pointing to nearly two decades of Hansard Society polling showing consistently low levels of trust in politicians and in the effectiveness of the political system. They also argue that the current focus on expelling disgraced Peers from the House of Lords misses a fundamental issue: the Prime Minister’s largely unchecked power to appoint them in the first place.

We return to the slow progress of the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords, where disagreement continues over whether the pace of debate reflects legitimate scrutiny or amounts to filibustering. Some MPs are calling for accelerated Lords reform in response – but would a wholly elected second chamber be more likely to block legislation rather than less?

Finally, we discuss two significant reports from the Procedure Committee: one recommending against the introduction of call lists for debates in the Commons Chamber, and another proposing changes to the way select committee chairs and deputy speakers are elected in the House of Commons.

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Our guest

Neil Duncan-Jordan MP

Neil Duncan-Jordan MP

Neil Duncan-Jordan is the Labour MP for Poole, having been elected at the general election in 2024 after beating the sitting Conservative MP by just 18 votes, becoming the town’s first non-Conservative MP since the constituency was created in 1950. Before being elected to the House of Commons he was a trade union official for Unison and previously worked for the National Pensioner Convention. In July 2025, after rebelling against the Government line on welfare cuts, he was among four Labour MPs who had the party whip withdrawn, for what were described as “repeated breaches of party discipline”. The whip was restored in November 2025. He is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Chess.

Resources

House Magazine

Until it respects its backbenchers, the government will not turn things around, Neil Duncan-Jordan MP and Chris Hinchliff MP, 18 January 2026

The Guardian

We owe it to Epstein’s victims and to British democracy to demand historic change, Gordon Brown, 6 February 2026

Transcript

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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 pod.

Ruth Fox: Keir Starmer is still standing, but for how much longer?

Mark D'Arcy: Gordon Brown calls for root and branch reform of parliamentary standards, but has he got the right approach?

Ruth Fox: And the loneliness of the rebel. Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan on the punishments and rewards of defying his party whip.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, last week we were in a state of febrile Westminster excitement, saying that the Mandelson affair had inflicted terrible damage on the Prime Minister. And Keir Starmer's position was now [00:01:00] incredibly precarious, and a week on Keir Starmer is still the Prime Minister. So were we panicking? Did we get it wrong or is the damage there and it's just the cracks are slowly spreading through the edifice?

Ruth Fox: I think if we were panicking, I think we're like everybody else in Westminster, at least, in our defence. Everybody else in the parliamentary lobby and in and around the Palace of Westminster was also in something of a bit of a meltdown. There is this sense that you can get overtaken by these events, can't you, and that everybody can lose their head a little bit.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. When in danger, fear, or doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Ruth Fox: Yes, rationality goes out the window, but here we are. As I say, he's still here. Very clearly, the absence of an alternative is a problem. Who is the alternative leader? Not at all clear. And in the times when the MPs themselves can't decide that, as we've talked about on previous podcasts, that obviously also is, an issue for them, because they can't determine who's gonna emerge from [00:02:00] whatever the wreckage of a leadership election might be.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not going to be, whatever happens, it's not going to be just a Westminster coup in which a handful of MPs overturn one Prime Minister and seamlessly replace them with another without reference to the party membership. And I think this is one of the things that frightens MPs off a leadership coup is the thought that if they did get rid of Keir Starmer, there would have to be several candidates crisscrossing the country, having debates and so forth. The whole thing would take months culminating in a ballot of the membership. And that would take an awfully long time. And there would be a long period when the government was effectively headless.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We talked last week about the breadth of the Opposition Day humble address motion that Kemi Badenoch had tabled and how broad the demand and request for papers was in that. And I think... Full transcript →

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