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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. Coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Should Westminster roll out the red carpet when Donald Trump arrives on a state visit later this year?

Mark D'Arcy: Light touch chairing or favoritism towards the government. Sir Lindsay Hoyle's conduct at PMQs comes under the microscope.

Ruth Fox: And total recall. MPs and Peers were wrenched away for the Easter holidays for a rare Saturday sitting to rush emergency legislation through Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: But before we get onto that, Ruth, a little community note. Before [00:01:00] Easter in our last podcast, before the holiday break, we announced that we were going to have two podcasts. One, an interview with Simon Hart, the former Conservative Chief Whip which did indeed appear, and another looking at the intricacies of Report Stage as a kind of preview towards the Report Stage of the legislation to enable assisted dying in England and Wales. And, and that one we didn't deliver. And the reason was that although we recorded it, the facts kind of changed under us. Kim Leadbeater, the promoter of the bill, decided to postpone the Report Stage day.

It's now going to be on May the 16th. Uh, it was going to be today, Friday the 25th, as we are recording today, and we had our recording for today set in stone so we couldn't easily change the date by this stage. So we're coming out a day late for our regular podcast this week, but we will also be releasing an additional podcast updated and looking at the, uh, procedure for Report Stage so that we can get ahead of the assisted dying bill and the procedural intricacies that lie in wait for it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So look out, uh, listeners for that updated revised [00:02:00] podcast on report stage,

Mark D'Arcy: The revised standard version you might say.

Ruth Fox: Which will be coming out in a few days with our procedural guru, Paul Evans, as our guest.

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, while we were away, there was a pretty rare event, a recall of Parliament, not just to discuss some great and unexpected event, but also to rush through what wasn't quite emergency legislation, but was certainly extremely fast track, uh, legislation to semi nationalize what's left of Britain steel industry.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, well, I'm not sure. If it wasn't emergency legislation, what would be? Because, uh, the Government recalled parliament to consider the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill. The bill was only published 90 minutes before the debate started. They had three hours of debate, and this was a rare Saturday sitting.

It was only the fifth Saturday, uh, sitting, I think since the war. The last time Parliament was recalled to sit on a Saturday was during the Falklands War 1982. So there had been a Saturday sitting during the Brexit period, but that wasn't [00:03:00] around, uh, an actual recall. It's actually rarer to recall Parliament to consider legislation.

Yeah. You know, it's only happened a few times. We can only find two other examples when both Houses have been recalled to consider all stages of legislation in a day.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Not unusual for the Commons to do it. Rather rarer for the Lords to do it.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So sometimes the, the commons will zap through a piece of legislation in a day and then their Lordships will be a bit more discursive and take a couple of days and won't quite suspend their standing orders to the extent that the Commons does and their Lordships have a, a rather more deliberative approach to legislation pretty much any time.

Yeah. Even when it's supposedly emergency legislation. So to whack a whole bill through both Houses in a single day and get it to Royal Assent before the Houses then rise. Yeah, right. King Charles signs on the dotted line.

Ruth Fox: A hotline to wherever he was, Balmoral or Windsor, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure where he was. I mean the last two times were the EU Future Relationship Bill back in 2020. That was New Year's Eve in anticipation of our exit from the EU. So that was, it was getting that deal through. [00:04:00] And then 1998, when they passed anti-terrorism legislation in response to the Omagh bombing.

So that's the kind of the context for emergency, as you say. This was really in essence to save the steelworks in Scunthorpe so that the blast furnaces did not shut down, because they're very difficult apparently to restart you,

Mark D'Arcy: More or less have to rebuild them at that point.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I mean, once the molten steel solidifies, it's going to take an awful long time to get it back up and running. So it was really to, to save the steelworks. It wasn't formally to nationalize them. That remains a possibility. Mm-hmm. But the bill doesn't require that, it wasn't a, a bill specifically focused on Scunthorpe. That was one of the things that a number of people were asking that day. It wasn't specifically about Scunthorpe, it's about the steel industry.

The reasons for that is it would've made it a hybrid bill and they couldn't have used the procedures for hybrid bills in a day because it, that would've targeted private interests.

Mark D'Arcy: So there would have had to have been a much more eLabourate process involving consultation and representation at committees, and you'd never hear [00:05:00] the last of it basically. Certainly not in that timescale.

Ruth Fox: No, no. So that, that I think was the reason for that. But I have to say the whole process made me very grumpy. I was, it was quite a grumpy Saturday during my holiday.

Mark D'Arcy: I think we're working around to your very, very favorite subject here of delegated powers. Indeed, because the powers that are given to ministers under this legislation are pretty sweeping.

It's, it's the old bug bear of the minister has powers to implement their policy once they've worked out what it actually is. Yes.

Ruth Fox: Not only that, it's the minister will have these powers to issue directions which are not subject to parliamentary scrutiny. So whatever happens, Parliament's not got further reach over them and, and further accountability.

These are what House of Lords committees in the past have described as disguised legislation. They're sort of like a form of tertiary legislation, not secondary and, essentially, Johnnie Reynolds is getting as, as the business secretary, bill it is. He is getting immense powers to determine what happens to what is essentially a privately [00:06:00] owned company, to direct it to do things or to direct it not to do things without fully taking state control.

Now there may be good arguments for that around it being a strategic industry, wanting you know not to, to have that kind of industry shut down at the behest of an overseas foreign company that may or may not be in the controls of the Chinese government. I. But that has huge implications that a privately owned company can be directed by the government to do something or not to do something.

Mark D'Arcy: Very nice 1970s flavor about it all you might say. But the other point about this was that there was a discussion, that because these are such extraordinary powers, maybe there ought to be an amendment to give what's called a sunset clause. Mm-hmm. So these powers would expire on a given date by which time Parliament would've been able to legislate properly at more leisure.

But there was no opportunity, certainly in the Commons for an amendment of that kind to be put down. And, and that's one of [00:07:00] the real grumps about this procedure. Yeah. That was, it was so expedited.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And that's what made me even more grumpy than the delegated powers. I mean, that, you know, the delegated powers I can kind of understand, I think it's contentious.

I think it's worrying as a, as a departure, a precedent for government to be getting powers to determine the actions of a privately owned company in the context of, you know, if you want companies to invest in the country that leaves questions about what might happen in the future if those powers which are on the statute book were in the hands of another minister.

As we said before, one of the issues about powers is that just because the minister today says they'll behave in a particular way, doesn't mean those powers in the hands of another minister will be used in the, in the same way. That's the risk, and that's why there's a desire in legislation to have sunset clauses to stop those powers being used after a certain period of time for them to expire so that you don't get that, that overage.

Mark D'Arcy: But if you, if you were going to put in something like that, if you're going to try and add that to a bill, you would need a committee stage, or a [00:08:00] report stage to do it in. And this was so fast track, yeah, that there wasn't really a committee stage.

Ruth Fox: And this is what I couldn't quite understand. On the Saturday morning, we got the business motion, so the motion that sets out how the amount of time for the Commons debate was going to be divided between the various stages for a bill and essentially it was a three hour debate and normally you'd get a business motion, which sort of sets in, there'll be so much time for second reading, then there'll be so much time for Committee and Report, and they could have had even just an hour of the three hours set aside for Committee and Report. But this business motion didn't set any, if you like, knives into the program. It was just a three hour debate whether the government had consulted with the opposition on it.

I don't know whether the opposition hadn't realized the implications of it. I don't know. Interestingly, the shadow leader of the house, Jesse Norman, wasn't there. Not all MPs could get back in time because it was a recall announced within 24 hours.

Mark D'Arcy: You caught in your Tuscan villa, you just can't get [00:09:00] back in time.

Yeah.

Ruth Fox: So Alex Burghardt was acting the shadow leader of the house. Whether the opposition hadn't realized the implications or whether they did and actually they weren't bothered because ultimately they knew that if there were amendments pushed to a vote, they weren't going to win them. I don't know. But the, the consequence of the business motion was that at the end of the debate, the second reading, which filled the whole of the three hours, you then ended up with this sort of nonsensical situation where the committee stage for amendments, normally clause by clause, consideration, consideration of amendments, and new clauses, new schedules, followed by report where the committee reports to the house, what changes may or may not have been made to the bill and allows the House to consider those, and then Third Reading, which is normally a bit of a formality, but where they approve the legislation.

The final product as it were.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: That all went through in about three or four minutes.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And you have this nonsensical moment where not having had a committee stage, a government whip [00:10:00] has to get up and say, I've been directed to report the committee. Yeah. Which is a bit.

Ruth Fox: Derisory. They clearly hadn't, uh, the committee hadn't really considered the bill at all.

Mark D'Arcy: So I'm reporting that a non-existent committee has directed me to report on non-existent proceedings, which are now done with.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And. The government obviously had published the bill 90 minutes beforehand, so the opposition had not had much time to consider amendments and to get them tabled. They did put down some amendments and one of the amendments was a sunset clause and there was clearly a desire on the opposition to part to have that looked at and to be considered, and at the end of the second reading when they realized that the deputy speaker wasn't going to be able to put the amendment to the house, so the deputy speaker said that they couldn't select an amendment for decision if it had not been debated. And because the whole debating time had been taken up by second reading, not on amendments, they therefore couldn't put the opposition amendment,

Mark D'Arcy: the full majesty of the legislative process unfolding here.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, [00:11:00] I'm worried about risking listeners' attention at this point and losing them, but yeah, it's an important issue because it meant that therefore no amendments in the Commons that came from the opposition parties could be put to the House. They just sort of skipped over it. So basically the only question that was put at committee stage was that all the clauses, all 10 clauses of this five page bill should be agreed.

Mark D'Arcy: So it was just waved through.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so it did seem all a little bit nonsensical. The opposition did seem somewhat put out that they hadn't been able to put this amendment to the House. And then what happens?

The bill goes to the House of Lords

Mark D'Arcy: where of course peers do actually get a chance to put amendments because they're a little bit more careful with process in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Right. Well, their proceedings will have had to have been agreed on a mutual basis between the parties. And if members want to debate an amendment, then they have that opportunity to do so, and the government doesn't have control of the agenda in the same way, so can't stop them.

And what happened is that the House of Lords adjourned for a period so that they could consider what amendments they wanted to table. They [00:12:00] rose for about, I think it was about an hour to consider and table those amendments, which was a sunset clause from the opposition, amongst other things they debated.

Then in the end they didn't press it to a vote. What they got was more clarity from the government about how they would respond,

Mark D'Arcy: Clarification from a Minister, that kind of thing.

Ruth Fox: I mean, to be fair to Johnny Reynolds, although I have reservations about the degree of power that has now been delegated to him without parliamentary accountability, he, at least in the debate, did indicate that he recognized the gravity of what powers he was asking for, and he said that he hoped a select committee, wanted the select committee, to scrutinize the implications of, of this action going forward.

He wanted and would make regular sort of monthly statements to the house, but there wasn't much clarity about what that would look like. And then he also said that they would repeal the bill at the earliest opportunity. Well, we'll see.

Mark D'Arcy: Those are the kind of promises [00:13:00] that are very easily made at the time, often a little bit more difficult to implement later.

And I suppose the underlying moral of this is you have to watch very, very carefully, when emergency legislation is being enacted because it can contain a multitude of high powered abilities for Ministers, yeah, that can be used again in slightly different circumstances. You give people this, these kind of high powered tools, and they will be used.

Yeah. And not just for the purpose they've been provided for in the first instance.

Ruth Fox: And the constraint in this bill is clearly, it's in the title, it is about the steel industry. So these are not powers that they're going to be able to take and use for any other kind of sector of the economy. But nonetheless, in the context of the steel industry, they're very big powers in the context of government's relationship with the private sector.

They're very big powers, but the House of Lords did get a little bit more clarity about what's going to happen as a result of their debate on their amendments. So, the ministers committed to making an oral statement to the House every month, or at least on the first occasion. This was the interesting bit, at least on the [00:14:00] first occasion.

It was a commitment to an oral statement, and then they said they would discuss in the usual channels, which essentially means the business managers, the party whips, what form those future statements might take. So not a guarantee of an oral statement every month.

Mark D'Arcy: It'll morph slowly into a written statement over time.

Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And of course, once the House resumed this week on Tuesday, there was indeed a ministerial statement then to update the House of Commons and then the Lords on what had happened since the recall. So we will see. It was interesting. It may be grumpy. The government got their bill. We still have a steel industry, just, so we'll see what happens with the powers in the future.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, Ruth, should we take a quick break?

Ruth Fox: Yes, Mark. But just before we go, we need to hear from our listeners, all our Parliament Matters listeners, so your feedback is crucial to the future of the show. Mark and I want to make it better. And the best way to do that is to hear directly from all of you.

So, we've got a short listener survey to help us understand what's working, what's not, and how we might grow the podcast. But [00:15:00] crucially, knowing more about our audience through your feedback will also help us, uh, attract sponsors. And, Mark, let's be blunt, it's their advertising revenue that keeps the podcast free to listen to.

So if you're enjoying Parliament Matters, please do fill out the survey. It's a great way to help us keep the podcast going, it's been designed by acast, the podcast publishing platform that we use. You can complete it anonymously. The link is at the top of the show notes in your podcast app, and it'll only take a few minutes, but it will make, uh, make a difference for us.

So, uh, please do that. We'll be very grateful and we'll be back in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back. And Ruth, another talking point that's emerged from Westminster very much since the Easter break is whether Mr. Speaker is perhaps batting a little bit for the Government, at least in the conduct of Prime Minister's Question Time.

The accusation was made in a, a column in the Times by Matthew Parris, a former Conservative MP and parliamentary sketch writer for the Times for absolutely ages. Mm. And a very shrewd [00:16:00] observer of what goes on in Westminster. And essentially the charge that he was making was that in the last PMQs, Kemi Badenoch, as leader of the opposition, was questioning Sir Keir Starmer and saying, given the Supreme Court's ruling on the status of trans women under the equality law, will he now apologize to the former Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, who, who walked out of the party over Starmer's handling of this very issue? They had their exchanges and they were pretty robust, but Rosie Duffield was sitting at the back of the chamber on the opposition side looking extremely cross.

There was an opportunity to call her to intervene in this debate, and it didn't happen. The Speaker didn't call her. And then people look back to an earlier occasion where Diane Abbott, another Labour MP, had been at odds with her party leadership, was the subject of debate, and she was bobbing up and down and she wasn't called to take part in the exchanges even though she was the subject of them.

And people are starting to suggest, or at least mutter under their breath, that, Sir Lindsay [00:17:00] Hoyle as Speaker is occasionally not doing things that would seriously inconvenience Sir Keir Starmer. Mm-hmm. And so is the Speaker really as neutral as a Speaker is supposed to be. And Matthew Parris concluded his article with the damning suggestion that he was becoming nostalgic for the days of John Bercow, which from a former Conservative is a pretty damning indictment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So in his article, Matthew has this line, any student of parliamentary practice would've expected the chair to let her speak. So I'd be interested to hear the views of clerks on this or retired clerks as to whether or not they agree with that. I mean, it's two cases. It's two very big and very obvious cases, and it does as a matter of courtesy, feel a little bit awkward that if you are the subject of a discussion

Mark D'Arcy: and you want to take part in it and you want to,

Ruth Fox: and you want to take part in, or you want to make a point that you don't have that opportunity to, and given the outcry, the row about what happened around, uh, Diane Abbott when she was not called, and remember that was about [00:18:00] a session when there was a discussion around the remarks of that Conservative Party donor who'd said some very rude and, and, and frankly, racist things about Diane Abbott, and Rishi Sunak was tackled at the dispatch box about it.

So this conversation was all going on about her and she couldn't say anything. And here we are fairly similar in relation to Rosie Duffield.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Well, to take as my text here, Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond novel of the same title. The first time is happenstance. Yeah. The second time is coincidence. The third time is enemy action. So, ah, will there be another incident of this kind? At which point the, yeah, the, the case law will be accumulating, you might say, that suggests that there's something going on. On the other hand, there's another side of this coin, because another part of Prime Minister's Question Time this week saw Kemi Badenoch saying that Sir Keir Starmer didn't have the balls to stand up to trans activists. Ooh. And that's language that certainly got the clerks looking to the speaker and thinking, oh, should you be ruling that out of order? Really? And the speaker didn't say anything [00:19:00] and just let it pass.

Now I would be willing to bet, that if that remark had been made at Prime Minister's Question Time or at any other part of a parliamentary proceedings by some no mark back bencher, they would've been squelched pretty quickly. Order, order. The Honorable Gentleman's not in the school playground now. Mm.

But, uh, Lindsay Hoyle was, perhaps understandably, slightly unwilling to say that to the leader of the opposition. Yeah. The sort of peak viewing moment of Prime Minister's Question Time. I would be very interested to know whether the Speaker has written a letter now to Kemi Badenoch or, or a message has been passed through the usual channels or whatever saying, don't do that again. Mm. Because it is a very, very big deal to question the leader of the opposition in those circumstances.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, no, it would be, I mean, it's not unparliamentary language as such, but in the context it's perhaps not appropriate.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, I mean, there used to be this list of things that you weren't supposed to say, which is actually a list of things that previous Speakers had ruled out all that.

So you couldn't call someone a jack o'lantern, for example. Gutter snipes. Another one. Yeah. And so all these various [00:20:00] archaic, Victorian terms of abuse that have been ruled out of order by generations of previous Speakers. Yeah. But all the same, there is a thought that really you don't want parliamentary debate, especially at a high profile moment like PMQs, to degenerate into that kind of language.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And as you say, I mean the playground language, one of the issues with PMQs is the way it's perceived by the public watching it and often it is that they are behaving like children in the school playground. So you don't want things that play into that analogy.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And John Bercow always used to get up and rebuke MPs who he thought felt had gone too far by saying, the public write to me and they say they hate this sort of thing and they do. And absolutely no doubt about it. The watching public, and there is a watching public for Parliament a lot of the time now, look very carefully not just at what is said, but how it's said and the manner and the language. Yeah. So I think MPs need to tred carefully. But wider issue here about protecting the independence of chairs. The Commons Procedure Committee at the moment is looking at the process for internal elections, including those for the deputy speakers [00:21:00] of the house. In recent parliaments, deputy speakers have been elected rather than kind of emerging through the usual channels as, as had previously been the system and the conduct of those elections was being examined by the Commons Procedure Committee, the committee looking at just whether it's a sufficiently elegant and sensible process, whether there should be hustings, whether indeed there might even be an extra deputy speaker bought in because there are so many minority party mps as they're described these days.

So not just Labour or Conservative, but from other parties as well that perhaps they ought to have a, a chance to have a deputy speaker too. Mm-hmm. And this raises all sorts of very interesting questions about the nature of the role. And people are saying that the key point here is that the deputy speakers are not delegates from their respective parties.

They're supposed to be representatives of the whole house. Yeah. And they've gotta be elected by the whole house.

Ruth Fox: But the thing about them is they don't give up their party ticket in the way that the speaker does. No. So they can go back to their back benches or indeed their [00:22:00] front benches, I suppose. But that's rare.

They go back to their, their party position if they cease to be speaker, which of course is what happened to Nigel Evans in the previous parliament, mm-hmm, when he had to step down because of a court case, he went back onto the Conservative benches, but he was subsequently reappointed deputy speaker.

So it's a, it's a different role to the speakership, but it has very strong elements of that, the same need for impartiality.

Mark D'Arcy: And it can of course be a stepping stone to the speakership. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And I think that's the interesting question here. I mean, we don't get too far ahead of ourselves, but Lindsay Hoyle will have been in office since what, 2019? When John Bercow stood down. So at the end of this parliament, he'd have done 10 years. So towards the end of this parliament, probably in the next but one last session, sort of 27, 28, 28, 29, you'll start to get questions about is he planning to step down and if so, who is the successor? So the interesting thing will be, will it be one of the deputy speakers that emerges as a likely contender or will the parties be looking elsewhere?

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, that's always one of the interesting runners [00:23:00] and riders questions. I mean, all the deputy speakers are kind of possible contenders for the chair, but equally the chair can come from completely outside of that. I mean, John Bercow, for example, was never a deputy speaker and was then a very long serving speaker.

So you don't absolutely have to take that role. Lindsay Hoyle, his successor, was of course John Bercow's deputy speaker for quite a long time.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I missed the procedure committee inquiry because as you know, I was on a train back from Scotland. I've had a quite a week, two select committee sessions this week.

One in front of the House of Lords Constitution Committee, and then 24 hours later I was in Scottish Parliament. So I was back on a train from Edinburgh, but, it was quite a high powered session and you, you'd got four former deputy speakers. Now, did they talk about the approach of the elections? Because one of the interesting things is the timing of them.

Yeah. Particularly in this Parliament where so many new MPs came in, 52%, they wouldn't have been familiar with the deputy speakers or their past work.

Mark D'Arcy: Or indeed what the role actually is. Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And yet the election is, is very early on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. There was a lot of [00:24:00] discussion of the pressure to try and get the deputy speakers in place fairly early so the Speaker doesn't have an undue burden on them chairing.

Most of the debates and what actually happened was that the Speaker was backed up by a couple of other senior MPs who sat on what's called the chairman's panel. The panel of Senior MPs who chair bill committees and things like that basically became acting deputy speakers in the interregnum. Yeah. But all the same.

There was a big rush on to try and get deputy speakers in place quite early, and one of the things that emerged from the session was that maybe they don't actually have to rush too much. I mean, the sky didn't fall in when they had acting deputy speakers for a while, chairing debates in the commons, chairing debates in Westminster Hall et cetera.

Mm-hmm. And so maybe you could take a little longer and make sure you had a full all singing, all dancing hustings event where MPs could question the deputy speakers.

Ruth Fox: Hansard Society is available to host it as we do for the Speakers. I'll just make that point.

Mark D'Arcy: But the point here is that with a vast lapse in the kind of institutional memory of the Commons because there's been such a turnover of [00:25:00] mps. It's actually fantastically valuable for those new MPs in particular to get a chance to sit down with and question people who want to be their deputy speaker about what they do, what approach they'll take, what the questions before them are.

Mm-hmm. It's a learning experience for everybody. Mm-hmm. And actually, you know, to be a deputy speaker, you tend to have to have been a reasonably senior mp. Already quite experienced, but they were all saying, all the various people who'd been deputy speaker, that they found it very important learning experience to find out what the rank and file wanted to know what they, the rank and file thought they did, how the rank and file thought the system worked and how the rank and file wanted the system to work.

Mm-hmm. So it's a very useful process if you can fit it in. There doesn't have to be a kinda gathering rush to get them in as soon as possible.

Ruth Fox: Did much emerge about the relationship between the deputy speakers and the speaker. I don't mean at a personal level, you know, I don't sort of, you know, do they get on with Lindsay Hoyle or John Bercow, I don't expect 'em to say that, but just in terms of the sort of the relationship and that the institutional role,

Mark D'Arcy: What it mostly was, questions about the workload and how they [00:26:00] managed to work together, that, the, for example, various points, various deputy speakers have had to take time out for medical treatment, for example, and the others in the team have kind of rallied around to fill the gap.

Mm-hmm. Perhaps chaired a few more sessions in the House and a few more Westminster Hall debates, et cetera, et cetera, to cover for that.

Ruth Fox: Um, which you'd find in any workplace.

Mark D'Arcy: Which you'd find in any workplace. The most important deputy speaker is, is the second ranking, is the chairman of ways and means, who is, has various sort of formal roles.

Ruth Fox: Chairs the budget debate.

Mark D'Arcy: Chairs, the budget debate, various things like that, which Lindsay Hoyle occupied in the previous Parliament, who is now Nusrat Ghani.

There's a certain amount of precedence there and, uh, you know, MPs not necessarily wanting to challenge the sitting senior deputy speaker for the seniority of the post in an election. So you actually had tales of Natasha Engle when she was running for deputy speaker alongside Sir Lindsay Hoyle saying to her supporters that she didn't want too many of them to vote for her just in case because she didn't want to seem to be a threat to Sir Lindsay's position.

She felt that was his [00:27:00] position as of right. So there, there are all sorts of quite interesting things going on there and that there's a, an established pecking order amongst the deputy speakers. There's also just this question of they're not party delegates, I, they're supposed to be above party. They don't want to get to a situation where you appoint a fourth deputy speaker just to represent the smaller parties, because that then introduces a level of kind of partisanship within the team that just shouldn't be there.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. One of the things that interests me at the moment is, whether or not partly through sort of lack of institutional knowledge, both amongst MPs but also amongst the, the deputy speaker team, I think to some extent also amongst the clerks is whether there's a developing situation where current practices, which have been regularized in recent times, are being treated as rules when in fact they're not rules.

They're just sort of recent practices. Just to go back to our earlier discussion on the steel industry bill, the reason that the then deputy speaker who was in the chair gave for not being able [00:28:00] to put the opposition amendments to a vote, because the second reading debate had filled all the time, and therefore there had been no debate on the amendments themselves, the chair said they can't select an amendment for decision if it has not been debated well. Is that an actual rule or is that just a recent practice that has developed? Because the whole point about procedure is that it's supposed to help the house. It's supposed to help the MPs arrive at the decisions that they want to arrive at.

It's not supposed to stifle debate and decision.

Mark D'Arcy: Your point here is that because you haven't got too many old lags who's ever seen it done differently, no one knows any different, thinks that's how it always worked.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think I can imagine some, perhaps, MPs in the past might have challenged that and said, well, okay, but the House wishes to reach a decision on, on this. Why can't they? But

Mark D'Arcy: Steady on, I remember when we nationalized the candle industry, we did it a different way.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, possibly. But I mean, I've spoken to a number now of current and former clerks about this, [00:29:00] the former clerks, and they, they're perhaps they're freer to speak obviously.

I did feel that some of these things that have become a matter of practice, this idea at report stage where you group all the amendments in one group.

Mark D'Arcy: Didn't always happen that way.

Ruth Fox: Didn't always happen that way. It is a recent practice.

It is not a rule that it has to be done that way. There may be good reasons for why it's being done at the moment in that way, but it's not a rule and I think that you have to be quite cautious about what becomes regular practice in a Parliament, where there isn't institutional memory, becomes sort of set in stone as if it is a rule when in fact it's not.

Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well that's one of the downsides of the massive turnover of MPs we've had in recent elections and may indeed have at the next set of elections as well for all we know.

Ruth Fox: But historical nugget for you, Mark, before we finish this section, the Pope died this week, and as you do on your bank holiday, causes you to look up what happened when previous Popes died in in parliament. So I discovered that you have to go back to 1939 [00:30:00] and the death of Pope Pius the 11th to find an occasion when Parliament was sitting at the time the Pope died, wasn't adjourned for four days or more.

So in the past, John Paul II, for example, he died during the 2005 general election. Parliaments have been on long recess periods previously, so there's been no parliamentary reference to the death of the Pope. 1939 when Pius the 11th died, it wasn't mentioned, it just passed Parliament by, which I think says something historically about the relationship with the Catholic Church.

Probably they also, I suppose, in 1939, had other events to distract them. Um, other concerns, it was February, 1939, so a few months before the Second World War started, but unsurprisingly, this time the Speaker did make a statement from the Chair to mark and commemorate the death of the Pope. So there you go.

Historical nugget for you.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. And all the, all of those who've watched the film Conclave will of course be now watching it with great interest to see what happens next.

Ruth Fox: And I haven't seen it yet.

Mark D'Arcy: And all the, all the ardent political professionals take the same view on this, that in the end, the result of [00:31:00] the next conclave will all be down to turnout.

And we have another break, I think.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute. Well, Mark, we're back. And, um, another example of deja vu this week with the news that, um, all over again, all over again, and the news that, um, parliamentarians are organizing against the prospect of an address to Parliament by President Trump, when he arrives on a state visit. It's very clear that, uh, quite a number of MPs and Peers are not keen on the idea of him coming into Parliament to talk to them.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, first of all, I suppose you've gotta ask, does President Trump actually care in the slightest whether or not he gives a speech to Parliament and as part of his state visit. In the initial Trump,

Ruth Fox: It's quite a big event.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, oh, well, it, it's, it's quite a big event, but I, I suspect that what the Trump White House will care about is the pictures of them shaking hands with a monarch, going in a state coach through the streets of [00:32:00] London, banquet at Windsor Castle or wherever, all those kind of things, much more than going into Westminster Hall and delivering a stirring or possibly not stirring oration. But of course, back in the first Trump term, when it was suggested that, uh, President Trump might be doing a state visit, the then Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow moved very fast to announce that he didn't think that President Trump should be invited and that he didn't think that he wanted him in Westminster Hall because he was a very bad man who'd done lots of bad things and shouldn't be let in. That caused a bit of a difficulty because there isn't really a precedent for the Speaker of the Commons or indeed the Lord Speaker raising a majestic hand and saying, we are not going to let this state visitor in.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: And no one really quite knew what would happen.

Ruth Fox: As I recall, there was quite a big response from the public as well. because there was an e-petition, wasn't it?

That, yeah, eventually ended up being debated because it was something like one and a half million signatures on it. Mm-hmm. It's demanding that Parliament not let him [00:33:00] in. And I think he acted unilaterally. He preempted the Lord Speaker, Lord Fowler, who was then in the sort of awkward position of whether he agreed with John Bercow or not.

Mark D'Arcy: I, I suspect that Lord Fowler, Norman Fowler, was not particularly amused by that. The point here is that speeches in Westminster Hall are taking place in a venue that's controlled by a kind of triumvirate. There's the Lords, the Commons, and the Crown, all have a voice in the running of Westminster Hall, and normally that's not a problem.

They all pretty much agree on what they wanna do, and it's all fine. But what would happen if, you know the Lord Speaker said yes, and the Crown said yes, and the Speaker of the Common said no. Would there be a vote in some committee somewhere? I mean, no, no one knows. It's never happened.

Ruth Fox: Well, well, I, I can't even see circumstances in which it would get that far, because as a state visit, the arrangements are in the hands of the Monarch and the representatives of the Monarch, in this case the Lord Chamberlain, the Foreign Office, and as I understand it, for a state visit, there's sort of three core things that you get in a [00:34:00] state visit. You get obviously the meeting with the Monarch, whether that's at Buckingham Palace and an overnight stay over or Windsor Castle, wherever it may be.

You get the parade in the carriages down the Mall, you get the inspection of the troops, and then you usually get a banquet at the Guild Hall hosted by the City of London, by the Lord Mayor. An address to Parliament is not a formal requirement of a state visit. Yes, it's optional, and there have been very, very few of them.

Mark D'Arcy: I think Barack Obama did.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So there have only been three formal state visits by a US president since the war. That was George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and then Donald Trump. Most US presidents have come on, if you like, a working visit. Mm-hmm. Not a formal state visit. Of those three state visits, George W. Bush, they talked about having an address to Parliament, but that was, you know, the Iraq war protest. It was, it was an awkward moment and

Mark D'Arcy: It was probably not a good idea.

Ruth Fox: Uh, President Obama did address Parliament in Westminster Hall, which we can come [00:35:00] back to. Donald Trump on his previous state visit, uh, didn't for the reasons you've just said, but you can't imagine a scenario in which the Lord Chamberlain thought, um, uh, following discussions with the Monarch in the Foreign Office, that he'd approached the Speakers of both Houses to request that Parliament make provision for a speech as part of the visit, to then be told no by one or both speakers. Yeah, I mean, they just agree it. Yeah. Verbally between them. If you thought the answer is going to be no, you wouldn't ask the question.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I can't see that happening. You can address Parliament when it's not a state visit, so there have been occasions, so both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton addressed Parliament, but they were not on a state visit. As we said, Bush didn't because of the Iraq war protests. You can address Parliament, whether you're on a state visit or a working visit, but it doesn't have to be in Westminster Hall, and this is a common mistake everybody just assumes, oh, Westminster Hall. The number of addresses in Westminster Hall is very few. Yeah. There've only been five, that have not been given by, essentially, the Monarch.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, wasn't there an occasion when Nicholas [00:36:00] Sarkozy as president of France did an address to Parliament and he did it in the gallery, flanked by paintings of the Battle of Waterloo on one side and the Battle of Traflagar on the other?

Ruth Fox: Yeah, the Royal Gallery.

And that is actually the more common location for speeches by visiting heads of state. So the only heads of state that have addressed a joint session of Parliament in Westminster Hall. So for listeners, Westminster Hall is the biggest single room on the parliamentary estate, and it is the historic medieval bits of Parliament that that remains

Mark D'Arcy: Dating Back to William II, William Rufuss, who built it shortly after the Northern conquest.

Ruth Fox: And it is there, of course, where the Queen's coffin lay in state, where the public visited to pay their respects three years or so ago. It's that big cavernous hall, the only heads of state that have given an address from there, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, and Charles De Gaulle. And of course there was President Zelensky from Ukraine who gave a speech from Westminster Hall, which was absolutely packed to the rafters to see him.

Mark D'Arcy: Uh, he even [00:37:00] presented the Speaker of the House, I think with a Ukrainian fighter pilot's helmet. He did yes. So there are all sorts of, uh, very cunning bits of politics in that one.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. You then had sort of the, the monarchs have given, you know, the Jubilee addresses the, the King gave his accession address there.

There are only two non Heads of State who've given an address from there, and that was Pope Benedict and the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi. So to give a, a speech in Westminster Hall is rare. So, you know, even if they decided Donald Trump should come into Parliament, they don't have to facilitate it in Westminster Hall.

As you say, the uh, Royal Gallery was much more likely. And part of the decision would be about size. I mean, Westminster Hall, to use my footballing passion, Westminster Hall is sort of like the Wembley of the parliamentary circuit. The Royal Gallery is smaller and can accommodate fewer people. So there isn't going to be, frankly, the huge demand to listen to Donald Trump, that there was to listen to Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.

Mark D'Arcy: You could imagine, uh, some, some groups of MPs announcing that they were going to [00:38:00] boycott the whole event as well, and you wouldn't want, sort of vast, yeah, chunks of empty seating where they should have been.

Ruth Fox: The other option that's used sometimes is the royal robing room. It's a very beautiful ornate room, which is where the king goes when he arrives for the state opening and gets the full robes and crowns on before he has to parade through, through the palace

Mark D'Arcy: Flanked with naff wooden carvings of King Arthur, if I recall.

Ruth Fox: Not sure naff is quite how I would describe it.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh, pretty naff, victorian carvings as I recall.

Ruth Fox: It's also the little throne that Queen Victoria used, and you realize when you look at it how small she, she was. But there's also been examples of heads of state being relegated to committee rooms. I mean, poor old King Abdullah of Jordan, he didn't get either of these ornate locations.

He got a committee room. So we'll have to see. But I mean, the rumors are that the state visit will be in September.

Mark D'Arcy: Um, so it might actually be during the conference break when Parliament isn't sitting anyway and everybody's off the hook.

Ruth Fox: Yes. You might suddenly sort of find that the timing could be nicely aligned.

As I said at the beginning, these MPs are coordinating letters to the Speaker and the Lord Speaker to try and sort of [00:39:00] preempt any move. The arguments they're making is that Donald Trump shouldn't be allowed, uh, into Parliament because of his attitude towards and comments about the UK, about parliamentary democracy, the NATO alliance and Ukraine.

Mark D'Arcy: And, and of course, apart from anything else, I suppose there's a bit of inter parliamentary solidarity absolutely to consider here. If you think back to Joe Biden taking office and the congressional proceedings to certify the 2020 presidential election, the January the sixth invasion, of the buildings of Congress with Donald Trump kind of sitting on the edge, refusing to intervene for a very long time to protect members of Congress and indeed his own vice president.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I understand that the government has got to deal with Trump. They've no option. He's the person that the American people have chosen, but Parliament's not in the same position. And I do think that question about inter parliamentary solidarity is important. I mean, should Westminster be rolling out the red carpet for a man who was involved in trashing his own legislature, or at least inciting others to trash their legislature [00:40:00] to threaten, as you say, the lives of the vice president, I mean the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was effectively run out of, of the building. Her offices were trashed, and we shouldn't forget in all of this that a Capitol Hill police officer died. So I do think the idea of rolling out the red carpet to a man who was at the, the heart of that and has since pardoned the people who were responsible, frankly is, is a step too far. We, we don't need to go that far and all power their elbow. I say, let's not do it.

Mark D'Arcy: A rare example of this podcast coming firmly off the fence.

Ruth Fox: I don't think it's a partisan issue.

Mark D'Arcy: And with that, Ruth, I think that's probably a time to draw this podcast to an end, but just a reminder that we will be talking to our resident guru on parliamentary procedure, retired clerk Paul Evans, about the intricacies of report stage procedure in advance of the next stage of consideration of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the bill that would enable [00:41:00] assisted dying in England and Wales.

It's due back in the House of Commons for its Report Stage on May the 16th. So seemed like a good moment to look at exactly how that system works and what it might deliver this time around. And that should be with you in the next couple of days. Until then, Ruth, time to say goodbye.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And just a, a reminder to listeners before we go do, please use the link in the show notes to complete that survey for us. Audience survey. Just really help us to get a sense of, uh, what you like about the podcast, what you don't, but it's also important, I'm afraid, for advertisers. And, uh, we do have the bills to pay for this podcast. So please do that and of course, really help. If you could rate and review us as well on whatever podcast app you're using, five stars, really help other listeners find us and to get through those pesky algorithms.

Mark D'Arcy: And in the meantime, goodbye from us.

Ruth Fox: See you soon. Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk or find us on [00:42:00] social media at Hansard Society.