Lindsay Hoyle re-elected as speaker
Edward Leigh moves the motion, that Hoyle should be speaker. The vote is taken by acclamation. There are loud “ayes”, and no one shouts no.
Then Hoyle is “dragged” to the chair by Cat Smith and David Davis. That is a tradition intended to recall the time when speakers were reluctant to take the job, because several of them had their heads chopped off by the monarch.
Key events
Cat Smith (Lab) is speaking now, moving the motion that Hoyle should be speaker. She is a fellow Lancashire MP and she starts by saying he is a great champion of the county.
On his qualifications for the job, she says he is hugely experienced, and has championed the interests of backbenchers. He is “annoyingly right about many things”, which is a good Lancashire trait, she says.
Hoyle thanks Edward Leigh and Diane Abbott for their support. There is a particularly loud cheer for Abbott.
He says he has had a most unusual speakership, having to deal with Covid, and using new technology to allow President Zelenskiy to address the chamber. He had to deal with the death of the Queen, and the coronation, he says. He says he has been speaker during the tenure of three prime minister, two monarchs – and one Jim Shannon.
That is a joke about Shannon, the DUP MP, who is a particular assiduous attender of Commons debates – and well-liked too.
Lindsay Hoyle, the Chorley MP and speaker in the last parliament, is speaking now in the chamber.
He says this was the first election he fought without his father, Doug, to support him. He died earlier this year. Doug Hoyle was a Labour MP and peer, and a chair of the parlimantary Labour party.
After the clerk has finished his spiel, Smith tells MPs, on behalf of the king, that they should head back to their chamber and then find “some proper person” to act as speaker.
Angela Smith, leader of the Lords, addresses MPs in the Lords chamber. She says it was not convenient for the king to show up himself, but that on his behalf she has a message for them.
A clerk reads out the message in full. The gist of it is, again, that the king is sorry that he’s otherwise engaged, but that he has got a royal commission standing in on his behalf and that they are authorised to start a new parliament.
In the House of Lords a royal commission (for these purposes, five peers in robes and hats) has formed to send a message to the Commons saying they should attend.
The commission then despatched Black Rod to the Commons to summon MPs. That has just happened and they are now off to the Lords, led by Edward Leigh, the father of the House.
From the BBC’s Joe Pike
Labour MPs stand, applaud and cheer as Starmer arrives. Conservative stay seated but cheer as Sunak walks in.
Starmer walks across to Jeremy Hunt to congratulate him on his (perhaps unexpected) reelection.
— Joe Pike (@joepike) July 9, 2024
Labour MPs stand, applaud and cheer as Starmer arrives. Conservative stay seated but cheer as Sunak walks in.
Starmer walks across to Jeremy Hunt to congratulate him on his (perhaps unexpected) reelection.
MPs meet to elect speaker
The Commons is now sitting for the first time since the election.
They are due to elect the speaker.
But first they have to be summoned to the House of Lords, where a royal commission tells them to elect a speaker.
Rob Ford, a politics professor, says the electoral recovery strategy being set out by some of the speakers at the PopCons conference today (see 12.11pm, 12.35pm and 1.46pm) is unlikely to work. He has posted these on X explaining why.
The main opponents Conservatives need to defeat to win back seats are Labour (Con second to Lab in 219 seats) and Lib Dems (Con second to Lib Dems in 64 seats)
So naturally many in the party are arguing for an all out focus on Reform (Con second to Reform in…2 seats)
— Rob Ford (@robfordmancs) July 9, 2024
The main opponents Conservatives need to defeat to win back seats are Labour (Con second to Lab in 219 seats) and Lib Dems (Con second to Lib Dems in 64 seats)
So naturally many in the party are arguing for an all out focus on Reform (Con second to Reform in…2 seats)
Targeting the local winner is smart strategy because votes won from them count double – one off their pile, one on to yours. A smart Tory strategy would therefore start with “how do we win back votes from Lab and LDs?”
If you don’t understand the incentives and consraints of the electoral system and political geography you are competing with, then you can’t win. Squeezing Reform will achieve next to nothing if it puts off Con-Lab or Con-LD switchers, who count much more.
Given how volatile politics is now, I don’t think a substantial Con recovery can be counted out. But I don’t think it can happen until and unless the party develops an interest in speaking to the people and places who actually decide elections. The current Labour team has a laser focus on such voters and until you’re on the pitch competing for their favours, you’re going to get crushed.
Streeting says he wants to turn Department of Health into ‘economic growth department’
Wes Streeting has said that he wants to turn the Deparment of Health and Social Care into “an economic growth department”.
In his speech at the Tony Blair Institute’s Future of Britain Conference, Streeting said:
One of the things I’ve said to my department and to the NHS is we need to rethink our role in government, and in our country at large.
This is no longer simply a public services department. This is an economic growth department.
And the health of the nation and the health of the economy are inextricably linked. And that means we’re going to be a government that firstly recognises that fact, and recognises that as we get people not just back to health, but back to work, that’s a big contribution to growth.
This is not how the Department of Health has been seen in the past. But Streeting’s comments suggest he is fully aligned with Keir Starmer’s determination to lead a “mission-driven” government. The first, and most important, of Starmer’s five missions is securing the highest sustained growth in the G7, and mission-driven government is supposed to be about ensuring everything the government does is tailored around these goals, not just the work of the relevant government department.
Explaining how his department could promote growth, Streeting said:
I want to end the begging bowl culture, where the health secretary only ever goes to the Treasury to ask for more money. I want to deliver the Treasury billions of pounds of economic growth.
This government’s agenda for health and social care can help drag our economy out of the sluggish productivity and poor growth of recent years.
By cutting waiting lists, we can get Britain back to health and back to work, and by taking bold action on public health we can build the healthy society needed for a healthy economy.
We will make Britain a powerhouse for life sciences and medical technology. If we can combine the care of the NHS and the genius of our country’s leading scientific minds, we can develop modern treatments for patients and help get Britain’s economy booming.
The NHS and social care are the biggest employers in most parts of our country. They should be engines of economic growth, giving opportunities in training and work to local people, as well as providing public services.
When Keir Starmer said he would lead a mission-driven government, this is what he meant.
Lord Frost tells PopCons conference Tories lost election due to their ‘mishmash of sub-socialist ideas’
Peter Walker
A post-election gathering of the Liz Truss-ite wing of the Conservatives has been told that Reform poses an “existential threat” – and that the solution is for the party to move to the right and take back their voters.
With every MP associated with the Popular Conservatism (“PopCons”) group losing their seat, Truss among them, the gathering-cum-inquest heard from a former MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, two Tory peers, David Frost and Daniel Hannan, and assorted others. (See 12.35pm.)
The one sitting Commons member appearing, Suella Braverman, was not previously part of the group and appeared in a recorded video from Washington DC, where she had been making a controversial speech to another event.
It was Braverman who called Reform an existential threat, saying millions of Conservative voters “are now their voters”, and would only be brought back by the Tories pledging to quit the European convention on human rights, abolishing the Equalities Act and tackle the “lunatic woke virus working its way through the British state”.
This was strong stuff, and matched by several other speakers, among them Frost, who complained that his party had “followed the collectivist zeitgeist leftwards” and presented policies that were “a flabby mishmash of sub-socialist ideas”.
Manifesto policy was not the only topic discussed at the event in Westminster, and it also featured much slightly niche, if very necessary, discussion of how to better energise and engage Tory members, and give them more say over a dictatorial Conservative central office.
But a certain amount of the policy talk risked being filed under “no compromise with the electorate”, with talk about “educating” the electorate that was reminiscent of some internal Labour discussions in the 1980s. It was notable, too, with all the talk about Margaret Thatcher’s mentor, Keith Joseph, and the sovereignty of parliament, how much more ideological it felt than Keir Starmer’s Labour.
There was, however, also much realism. “We are now in opposition. We have no power,” Rees-Mogg began. Monday’s reshuffle of the Tory frontbench “doesn’t matter”, he said, bluntly.
To his former ministerial colleagues, he added: “The car doesn’t move, the chauffeur has gone, the red boxes have gone.” It was, he said, time for “humility but not despair”.