Transcript: Why would anyone want to become an MP?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Why would anyone want to become an MP?’

Lucy Fisher
Why would anyone want to become an MP?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome to Political Fix from the FT with me, Lucy Fisher. Unedifying, playground politics, political theatrics — just some of the comments after the UK’s parliament descended into chaos this week, leaving the future of the Commons Speaker in doubt. In a week when MP security has been thrown into the spotlight, we’ll be asking why anyone would sign up for the job and looking at those who are still keen. And joining me in the studio to discuss this is a very special guest, veteran journalist Michael Crick. Hi, Michael.

Michael Crick
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
And we’ll be coming to you shortly to talk about some fantastic data that you’ve collated around candidates for the next parliament. And also joining me are Political Fix regulars, the FT’s Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
So let’s start talking about the main subject of the week: the absolute chaos we’ve seen in parliament over a debate on a Gaza ceasefire, and how that’s left the future of the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, hanging on the line. So let’s talk about how these events are related and just how they happened. Let’s start first with the ceasefire motion. Now, that has been nodded through parliament, hasn’t it, Miranda? What’s your take on this? Is it now important? Can we fairly say the UK parliament has spoken and it has passed a motion for a ceasefire, and that is a substantive outcome this week? Or was it just a ridiculous, unedifying spectacle of game-playing that, you know, can’t be treated as anything more serious than that?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s a really good question, and I’m not actually sure of the answer, because the fact is what the UK House of Commons says on a ceasefire or otherwise in Gaza bears very little relation to the international crisis that we’re living through and the tragedy that has everyone so upset. What you can say is that in the end, the House of Commons made its collective view known on this, which I think is an interesting moment, even in terms of sort of watching David Cameron tour the world speaking for the UK as foreign secretary. There is now some sort of idea of where the balance of views lies in the Commons, but how much that is actually to do with the circumstances around this chaotic set of votes, the pressure from local electorates, the pressure from activists, the fact that MPs seem to feel under threat from their own constituents, and the fact that the Speaker then seems to have bowed to pressure to change the way that parliament operates during these opposition debate days, as they’re known. That is another matter, and I think it sort of colours what you can draw from the fact of the vote on a ceasefire, how opposition days usually operate, which is something I remember very well from my own days working in the Commons. You’re supposed to let the opposition party whose turn it is.

Lucy Fisher
Because that’s what an opposition day is. Just for listeners not familiar, the opposition party are given their own day to debate a motion they choose.

Miranda Green
Exactly so. And it was the Scottish National party’s turn. And opposition parties, particularly the smaller parties — and the SNP is the third-largest party in the Commons at the moment — they tend to use it to try and expose either the government or the other opposition parties on a topic, so that then they can use it in their political campaigns. The opposition days are always kind of campaigning tools, but obviously on this topic of Gaza, tensions are running high and emotions are running high as well. So I think there’s both sort of down and dirty politics going on, but also people are very upset about the topic.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. So Stephen, as Miranda pointed out, this was an opposition day that was for the SNP. They had initially put down a specific motion calling for an immediate cease fire in Gaza. Labour then tried to supersede them by laying their own Labour motion also calling for an immediate ceasefire, but with more caveats: talking about the importance of pursuing a two-state solution, of working with international partners, a few other criteria applied. And then, of course, the way things panned out on Wednesday, it was the Labour one that was nodded through. So you can understand in one sense why the SNP were angry that on their day they didn’t get to have a vote on their specific motion. But have they nonetheless succeeded in dragging Labour into changing its position? You know, it’s been a long debate and we’ve discussed it on this podcast about Starmer refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire heretofore. Is it a win from the SNP, even though publicly they are very angry indeed?

Stephen Bush
No. The SNP have an entirely legitimate gripe that one of their very few opposition day debates, they don’t have very many because they’re the third party, essentially was allowed to become an opposition day debate for the Labour party, the largest opposition party who therefore has many, many more days in the sun with a Speaker who I think it’s fair to say that Lindsay Hoyle was maybe not the first choice of SNP MPs last time around. But the SNP had a legitimate expectation of how this day would play out that it didn’t, and they did not get their moment of victory over the Labour party.

I think what’s interesting about these opposition day debates is that the internet has really changed how they operate, right? So the government didn’t lose an opposition day debate from 1978-2009, when the then Labour government was defeated over the treatment of the Gurkhas, who were having their visas messed about with in ways that most people in the United Kingdom felt ran contrary to the principles of natural justice. But that is because in that era there was not much accountability on individual voting records. So if the opposition went, we’re in favour of loving kittens and the government, when actually we’d love punching kittens, that was the end of the story. Whereas now, because there are, you know, an oodleplex of voting record websites, not least the official parliament website itself now, MPs do have this sense of well, I don’t wanna vote against the loving kittens motion because voters do make moral judgments about their MPs voting on that. And that is why opposition day debates have slightly changed. And there has been this conscious attempt by the government since about 2017 to try and downplay them because they were struggling to win them. But they do therefore matter because they suggest something about what you can get through the floor of the House of Commons. So it does, I think, suggest quite a lot that you can’t get a non-ceasefire motion through the House of Commons.

Lucy Fisher
And Michael, what did you make of the scenes on the floor of the Commons — the SNP walking out, the Tory government withdrawing participation, withdrawing their own amendment, jeering, shouting, yah booing. We’ll just say one thing. You know, the FT were a very global, outward-looking media organisation. But to my surprise and interest, this was the most-read story on our website. Across the entire world on Wednesday, I think people were tuning in from, you know, the States, across Europe, just fascinated to understand what this extraordinary spectacle was all about.

Michael Crick
I think the scenes look dreadful, both to a British audience and an international audience on an extremely horrific and serious issue like Gaza, and where tens of thousands of people have died and are dying, and it is being used by political parties for their own election purposes in the knowledge there’s going to be an election called this year. And I think it will add to the huge amount of public disgust that there is amongst our voters with the political class and which leads to abstentions at election time and undermines public respect for the politics. It’s awful. And now we’ve also got this added problem that it seems that the threat of violence against members of parliament and of course, a couple of MPs have been murdered in the last few years. Jo Cox and David Amos and others have been attacked or threatened, large numbers have been threatened, that this is starting to change behaviour in the House of Commons. And that is incredibly worrying, not least because nobody really knows what you do about it.

Lucy Fisher
So what you’re referring to here is Lindsay Hoyle. He’s accepted now that he made a mistake in breaching convention in his handling of those chaotic scenes. And that’s because initially, he wasn’t supposed to, under the usual terms of convention, to allow the Labour motion to be debated. He changed that. He said that was because he wanted to allow a wider debate because he understood the intensity of feeling on this specific issue, the Israel-Hamas war, and in part he was worried about the safety of MPs. He thought allowing a wider debate, allowing MPs of all parties to debate their own proposition, would help the safety and defuse the danger to MPs. So you’re pointing out that that is essentially what some Conservative MPs have said, some MPs across the board actually, that this is the House of Commons bowing to the mob, changing the way it’s behaving because of the threat to parliamentarians.

Michael Crick
Worse than that, it’s encouraging the mob because if they feel they’ve had one success here, they’ll carry on. It will get worse. I mean, I have to say, it does seem to me that actually the basic principle behind what Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, was deciding, which was that we need a wide range of debate is a sensible one. And, you know, it should be allowed that the Speaker decides from time to time that this is of such an important issue that I’m gonna allow more than one motion to be debated. So, but it’s so complicated and parliament, you know, does get set in its ways sometimes. And you just sit there thinking, you know, a little bit of flexibility here would be sensible. But if that flexibility is because of threats from the mob rather than because you genuinely want a wider debate. And that is worrying.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, can we just pause on this issue of security for a moment? Michael mentioned the two MPs who’ve been murdered in the last eight years. On top of that, we saw last week, Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative MP, 60-odd pro-Palestine protesters demonstrated outside his family home. Now, he wasn’t there and police warned him and his family to stay away. We also heard from Mike Freer, another Tory MP. I think we mentioned this on the podcast, in fact, that he said that he’s stepping down because he cannot tolerate the threat to his personal safety after his constituency office was arsoned in December and he believes he may have escaped death by the skin of his teeth, he said. What can we do about this? We already have measures like stab vests, close-protection officers, panic buttons, reinforced steel front doors offered to MPs and increasingly, their staff. But isn’t this just going to deter more people from wanting to take part in public office?

Miranda Green
Well, I don’t know what really will draw the poison out of the political atmosphere now, because I do think that what’s changed in the last few years is really significant. It’s become very toxic. You know, I used to work in MPs offices in the ‘90s and you would always get threatening letters. There would be always people who targeted MPs. They’re public figures, they’re kind of local celebrities and also someone you can blame, right? So they’re a sitting target for anyone who has a sort of grudge and a grievance against the system. But it was largely kind of 90 per cent comic characters at that point, and only in extremis would you kind of call the police or report something. And gradually over time, that has really changed.

And of course with the murder of Jo Cox, which Michael referred to, that is of a different order because that was a political killing, essentially. This is somebody with a political motive, a far, you know, nativist, nationalist. And, you know, there is this sense when you talk to MPs now that their relationship with the public has changed. And I think that as well as the sort of pressures that Michael’s talked about is dangerous, the pressures on whether parliament changes its behaviour because of the message from a threatening mob. It’s also the idea that MPs, rather than having this relationship — complex relationship always, of course — with their constituents that they’re actually scared of the people they’re trying to represent. I mean, I think it affects policymaking. It affects the quality of people that we will have representing us because so many people will think, why would you want to do this job to become the target in this way?

Michael Crick
And they’ll be thinking, you know, I’m potentially endangering my family as well. And the spontaneity of the relationship between a member of parliament and their constituents is threatened here in that, you know, in the old days it would be advertised in the local library, the MPs holding the following surgeries in the following locations over the next few months. And you just turned up. Now you have to book it in advance. It’s not advertised where it is, and people would go up to the MP walking down the street and so on and raise issues and gripes and so on. And a lot of that is endangered by a world where the MPs are having to live in fear of physical attack or worse. And it’s very sad and it’s undermining democracy.

Lucy Fisher
But Stephen, some on the left — Momentum, for example, have said, of course, the safety of MPs is paramount — but they’re kind of accusing some in the political class of over-egging this threat and conflating the idea of political violence with legitimate protest to try and shut down the pro-Palestine demonstrations that, you know, are very condemnatory of Israel. I mean, how much grist do you give to that line of argument?

Stephen Bush
Well, not much would be my short answer, but I guess my longer answer is that, look, the two causes of political assassinations in the UK in the last decade have been a far-right extremist and a jihadist lone wolf. And the reason why that is important context is broadly speaking, the two types of hostile letters and tweets you get if you are an MP are the, you know, Enoch was right far-right stuff and the you’ve disgraced Islam, you know, kind of jihadist-adjacent stuff, right? And you know, this played out in the Brexit vote too, right? Lots of MPs would say privately that one of the reasons why they did not want a second referendum is they were worried about what would happen to them in a second referendum campaign.

Now, it is, of course, true that the overwhelming majority of people who were campaigning against a second referendum or campaigning, you know, in part for a Palestinian cause, are obviously never going to do political violence. But if you are an MP with this huge mail bag and you know that those are the two biggest terror threats in the UK, you don’t look at it and go, oh, well, probably my hundred letters are fine. You go, well, statistically, I know that two of my colleagues have been killed by these two causes of terror in the country. So that of course it does shape how MPs think.

Miranda Green
Well also and members of MPs’ staff have also been murdered as well so it does make people feel vulnerable. I just want to add another thing as well, which is there’s a kind of third strand of the threat, which is also the kind of violent misogyny, because a lot of female MPs also get not just death threats but sexual violence threats. And again, you know, weighing up whether the threat is real is almost impossible to do.

Michael Crick
But there’s also have been certain issues that have become much more violent or much more aggressive. You know, the whole Scotland debate, I think, was pretty aggressive, as witnessed by that huge demonstration outside the BBC against Nick Robinson and the BBC. And it got very personal. The whole Europe debate and the trans debate as well. And, you know, some of the demonstrations on all of those three subjects have been much more unpleasant and aggressive than I remember from the ’80s and ’90s. So it’s just becoming a much more commonplace nastiness, really.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on. As I speak, we’ve passed the threshold for 10 per cent of the House of Commons signing an early day motion of no confidence in Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Stephen, I mean, you can’t command 10 per cent of the MPs’ confidence. The SNP has said all together, as a party, institutionally, they think he should resign. Is this the beginning of the end? Will he last the week? What are your thoughts?

Stephen Bush
Thus far from the perspective of can he command a majority in the House of Commons, it hasn’t really yet crossed the factional barrier within the Conservative party, right? Then broadly speaking, it is a list of the SNP and one faction of the Conservative right. So from a gritting-it-out perspective, he can. Whether or not he will want to is quite different, not least because the important thing to understand is that his supporters club, when he ran, was very much drawn from people who wanted a more traditional Speakership and from the Conservative party. He’s the anti-John Bercow in lots of ways. And John Bercow was a Conservative MP who became Speaker largely with the votes of Labour MPs. And Lindsay Hoyle is a ex-Labour MP who became Speaker largely with the support of Conservative MPs. So it’s very possible that he may decide, you know what, I don’t want any more of this and he’ll just go. However, if I were the government, I would think, broadly speaking, the average person who doesn’t follow any of this stuff closely, who, you know, zones out when they hear the word Commons motion. I don’t want the oh, the government’s in chaos vibe that people will get if there’s a change of Speaker. There’s been so much upheaval in the last four years and I just think if you’re the government, you don’t want more. It’s bad for the brand.

Lucy Fisher
And just to take us back one step, Miranda, for listeners who are not exactly sure like what the Speaker does. They are selected by Parliament, not the government. Often, if you’re in one party, you get selected if you win over the support of the opposite party. Just tell us a bit about what the Speaker does.

Miranda Green
Well, the Speaker is supposed to be neutral and to be presiding over the debates of the Commons and is also supposed to be there to actually represent the Commons within parliament, ie to the House of Lords as well, and also to the Crown. Nowadays it’s mainly chairing the debates, a sort of administrative role within the House of Commons as well, which often becomes quite controversial as well, you know. And so this aspect of neutrality . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Because you didn’t just explain the controversy there because it’s things like deciding whether things like deciding whether to keep the bars open or to have a less alcoholic culture.

Miranda Green
Yeah. And also how to deal with crimes and misdemeanours by members of parliament, which has been a really hot topic unfortunately in recent years. And also how the Commons sort of runs its own business and adapts its culture to modern times, which is quite controversial. So this topic of sort of whether the MP is truly neutral and even-handed is very, very important. And so if there, as with this story this week, the suggestion that maybe senior Labour figures or shadowy Labour figures were kind of putting the frighteners on Lindsay Hoyle to try and get him to change the rules about this opposition day debate and let a Labour motion be voted on when it wouldn’t ordinarily be, is kind of key to the whole debacle. It makes him very vulnerable, I think. I mean, I strongly agree with Stephen, and I must say, you know, this parliament is dying. It would be mad for any party to push this to a resignation by the Speaker. It just looks like more political chaos. It’s not actually in anyone’s interest particularly to do that.

Lucy Fisher
OK. To sum it up, I’m gonna back you all into a corner. Is Lindsay Hoyle toast? Michael?

Michael Crick
I think so. I don’t think you can survive with one of the major parties in parliament totally against you.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda.

Miranda Green
I think he seems to be very unhappy and might excuse himself from the role, actually, rather than being defeated.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think he probably could carry on, but I just don’t think he’s gonna want to.

Lucy Fisher
Right. Well, we’ll have to see whether this row gains a head of steam or ebbs away.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michael. Now let’s talk about your specialist subject or something that you’ve been working on for many months now, which is Tomorrow’s MPs, a transparency initiative you’ve been running on social media site X. Explain what it is and why you started it.

Michael Crick
Well, I’ve always been fascinated by the selection of parliamentary candidates, partly because at one point I wanted to be one myself, but that was in the very distant past.

Lucy Fisher
For which party?

Michael Crick
For Labour. And indeed I was even approached about being a Labour candidate, or at least putting my name in, for a by-election in Bootle in 1990. And that was a sort of crucial turning point in my life because I decided I wasn’t gonna go for it and that I preferred being a journalist. And if you talk to MPs, they’ve all got their selection stories and they tell you about the fixes and the fiddles and the cock-ups.

Margaret Thatcher, you know, wasn’t actually selected as candidate for Finchley in 1958; the voting went the other way. Her opponent actually won I think by one or two votes. But the chairman of the association was so taken by her that he switched them because he thought she was beautiful and intelligent and going places. And I suspect he also thought that her opponent, who won the VC in the war, would get another selection pretty soon anyway.

Lucy Fisher
What a sliding doors moment.

Michael Crick
And so . . . and cock-ups. And, you know, fixes galore, trade union involvement? Not so much these days — in fact, hardly at all. It just goes on and on and on. So it’s full of great anecdote. It’s politics in the raw, local politics, personality politics. And it often takes MPs. Yeah. I mean, Betty Boothroyd, the former Speaker, spent nearly 20 years trying to get a seat. Michael Howard at 31 goes before the former Conservative leader. But also the trends are fascinating.

Lucy Fisher
But also to explain that at present these processes are shrouded in secrecy. The parties don’t want people talking publicly about them. They happen behind closed doors. So you’ve been . . . 

Michael Crick
Well, exactly. (Overlapping speech)

Lucy Fisher
You’ve been building up a web of informants, leakers, sources who’ve been tweeting you.

Michael Crick
The great thing about it is it’s an aspect of the social media age that, you know, it would have been so much harder to have done it before because — and I still call it Twitter because I don’t think people really know what X means — initially I would do traditional journalism, you know, looking up who’s standing and who stood last time and all of those kind of thing, and then I realised, you know, you can appeal for information.

And then now it just flows in and candidates talking about other candidates and candidates who have already been selected telling me about all the other races they hear about because they’ve got all these WhatsApp groups. And the contenders, as it were, before they become candidates, they all know each other and a lot of them know each other, particularly in the Conservatives.

But there is a load of, lots of secrecy. Labour are the most open about it and a lot of their contenders, most of them will have Twitter sites and Facebook sites and videos and often paid for at huge expense, by the way. The Lib Dems are astonishingly secret. Their contenders for parliamentary selections are banned from telling anybody who their opponents are or what the vote is. Most illiberal. This is the party that, you know, championed freedom of information before anyone else. And the Conservatives, they’re pretty secretive as well. And every now and then they have a leak inquiry into something, into how I managed to put something on the Twitter feed. And of course it’s confined to a very small group of people.

I mean, some of the recent Conservative ones, even for seats that are currently Conservative, have been decided by just a few dozen people. And of course, the American equivalent is the primary process, which involves hundreds of thousands, millions of people, not just for the presidency but for, you know, the senators and congressmen and everything. And that is a very public process. And I think that there should be a wider public involvement, and we should know more about who the contenders are so that somebody can say, hang on a moment, that’s the guy that defrauded me 20 years ago. You know, maybe some of the, dodgy characters who end up in parliament wouldn’t be there if there was a bit more openness and transparency.

Lucy Fisher
That’s a very good point, about the vetting. So, Michael, you’ve explained your process, which has been putting online into the open sphere details of who’s applying, who’s making the longlist, who’s making the shortlist. And then you’ve also documented who’s won the nomination for the main parties for each seat — or at least for the most winnable seats.

Michael Crick
Yeah.

Lucy Fisher
And that takes me on to now some of the trends that you’ve identified in those selected. So do you wanna talk us through, with the Conservatives and Labour, what we’ve seen from both parties in terms of the kinds of people they’re most commonly selecting?

Michael Crick
Well, the biggest trend — and this has been going on for 20 or 30 years now, and it’s now, well, in my view, worse than ever — is a trend towards local candidates. I’d say a at least 80 per cent of candidates have got a convincing local link. They were either born there or brought up there, went to school there, live there. This reflects the feeling amongst party activists and voters that their MP should be local. I think the terrible thing about it though is it greatly reduces choice. Because it means that if you are trying to become a candidate, you’ve only got two or three places maybe that you can say are local to you. And equally, it reduces the shortlist.

Lucy Fisher
That’s quite an interesting point. Can I just bring in Stephen and Miranda briefly? Do you agree with that, that it’s a shame that if local parties are restricting the candidates they choose to pools of local people?

Stephen Bush
Well, there is inevitably a problem there under first past the post. Essentially, you know, there are 8,000 Conservative voters in my home constituency of Hackney and indeed 8,000 in my hometown Bow where I was born. And broadly speaking, at least some of them are people who are talented enough that they would make good Conservative MPs. And if you have a situation in which every actually winnable Conservative seat goes we’re not electing someone from Bow, that does narrow the pool of ideological, age diversity, career diversity. So that is definitely a problem.

The thing which I think is interesting, as someone who also, you know, very keenly follows the inner life of political parties, is that parties do seem to go through weird fashions. In 2015, if you were a council leader in the Labour party, you basically could not buy a selection, right? I mean, I remember covering Keir Starmer’s selection in one of my many bad calls, completely failing to see his leadership bid coming, but it was very obvious he was going to win by loads because the local members really loved the idea of, you know, there’s this grandee who’s done a big job and they were very excited by it.

And now you see almost the reverse and you see, you know, Conservative selections where someone who’s like, oh, you know, I’ve founded a business and they’re like, oh yeah, but you know, you’re from east London. And you want to represent outer east London? So I think some of this will reverse itself. But yeah, it is a problem. And my solution would be to have a better electoral system, which meant that you did get a Conservative MP elected out of inner east London. But something needs to give.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, can I ask you about another of the patterns that Michael’s found, which is really extraordinary to my mind. We should stress that we haven’t finished the selection process, but so far, of the 134 candidates that Michael has tracked that the Conservatives have selected, 70 per cent are men. And at present, around 75 per cent of existing Tory MPs are men. What’s your reaction to that?

Miranda Green
Yeah. So actually, this has been a visible pattern for a while, hasn’t it, Michael, I think, that actually local parties, all of them, have been quite slow to select women this time.

Lucy Fisher
And I should add, according to Michael’s data, 56 per cent of Labour candidates picked so far are men, compared with 44 per cent women.

Miranda Green
So as a sort of veteran of these rows, I have to say what matters is where you’ve got women selected in seats you’re gonna win, not the raw figures of how the proportion of candidates are female. And that goes for other sorts of representation as well, because actually you can end up with your party on the green benches looking really horribly homogeneous, because none of your excellent diverse candidates actually were selected for places where they were gonna win.

Michael Crick
Or it wasn’t . . . It’s not that long ago that the Lib Dems were all men.

Miranda Green
. . . so embarrassing!

Michael Crick
. . . And all white.

Miranda Green
Absolutely. Because they didn’t win the seats, they thought they were gonna win at that election. So what’s really important is to look at the target seats list and what the proportion is there.

Lucy Fisher
I think it’s pretty similar to . . . 

Michael Crick
Well, the Conservatives, actually, if you take the seats that are now Conservative, the new boundaries but on 2019 figures would be Conservative. They’re doing even worse, only fewer than 27 per cent, just over a quarter are women. So it looks like . . . and if the Conservatives lose seats, then they’re not gonna make great advances in the terms of the numbers of women they have. Now, Labour, of course, have had to move from the all-women shortlist system, whereby they were able to say, right in these seats here, here and here, we’re only having women on the shortlist. And of course that got scores of women into Parliament for Labour to the extent that actually 50 per cent of MPs, Labour MPs were women and are women. And of course they’ve now had legal advice that they’ve got to stop this because it’s against the equality legislation.

I mean Labour on 45, 44, 45 per cent I think is pretty good. And you’re never gonna get absolute perfect parity. And of course, there are all sorts of reasons why women don’t go into politics. I mean it’s linked to what we were talking about before, of course. The threats, I think, against women have been particular. And so it’s gonna be incredibly difficult to have a parliament that totally reflects when it comes to race and gender. And even more so when it comes to other things like class and age.

Miranda Green
Absolutely true. But I would just point out, speaking as a woman, as Gordon Brown would say, (laughter) you know, women are not a minority. We’re actually the majority of the population. So there’s something very particular going on if that’s not being reflected in elected representation.

Lucy Fisher
Well said, Miranda. And Michael, just on another diversity point, which I don’t think you’ve mentioned and which really struck me as interesting, is the LGBT+ representation among the new candidates. Abdi Duale, one of the members of Labour’s national executive committee — its ruling body — commented last month that nearly a quarter of Labour’s candidates are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-plus. And you’ve got an interesting prediction about what level, what threshold we could get to in parliament at the next election based on the candidates we’ve seen selected so far.

Michael Crick
Yeah, I mean, I haven’t been able to assemble the information on whether people are gay or not. People, you know, often they don’t mention it, they don’t talk about it, and you can’t make assumptions and so on. And that’s why him saying that is interesting and indeed, a senior Labour official said to me that he thinks it’s no exaggeration to say that half of the Labour male candidates are gay. Now, these are figures that are way above what are perceived to be the proportions in the population. And I think that if Labour does get a, you know, I mean, say 50, 100, 150 majority, it’s quite possible that the number of gay and lesbian people in parliament could be above 100. It’s about 65 now.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen?

Stephen Bush
What is really interesting about parties’ selections via various demographic filters is they do often reflect broader problems the political parties have elsewhere, right? So, for example, why did the Labour party want to select more women in the ’80s? Because they kept losing the votes of women. Now the right has that problem and that is one reason why some people in the Conservatives are, I think, rightly alarmed by their selection. I mean, one interesting dynamic in this round of selections is the Labour party cannot seem to select Black men for love nor money, right? They can select Black women very easily. They can select men very easily. But there’s like something about the two together, which for some reason seems to collide in the Labour mind and they’re like, but are you diverse or aren’t you?

And that does, I think, reflect a broader trend where the Conservative party, having been behind on that metric for a very, very long time, is now, you know, given the UK, its first British-Indian prime minister is almost certainly gonna give it its first Black-British leader of the opposition, etc, etc. And if you look at how British-Hindus vote, votes are changing. And if you look at what’s happening in some Black British-African communities, that is also being reflected by a wider change in how people vote. So this stuff about who gets elected does really matter, I think, to the health of political parties and also I mean, in general, I kind of think that demographic diversity is a good stress test about whether or not your procedure was fair. You know, just like you’d expect about 51 per cent women if you’ve done a fair selection.

Michael Crick
Another aspect is that Labour chooses Asian or Black candidates in seats where the population is above-average ethnic minorities. They do not in their predominantly white seats like most of the North East or South Wales, they barely choose them at all. Whereas the Conservatives, of course, it’s the other way round because they don’t have many seats where the population is above national average. So they choose Black and Asian candidates in incredibly white seats like Nus Ghani in Wealden, 98 per cent white — you know, Priti Patel. And it’s a real contrast. So Labour selections are very ghettoised really. They need to start selecting Black and Asian people in very white areas if they are really being as diverse as they would like to be.

Miranda Green
I’m quite interested in the idea that you seem to advocate, Michael. I don’t wanna misrepresent you, but of doing some experiments with primary style selections, ’cause I wonder how much doing things differently would actually change some of these dynamics. And there are some people, I think, trying to do it aren’t there? I think down in Devon there’s a campaign to have some primaries down there. And, you know, because once you’re talking to the whole electorate, I mean, obviously only some of them would bother to become involved in selecting the candidates, but you’d be opening it up a lot more.

Michael Crick
And of course, the Conservatives tried a primary system in David Cameron’s day before the 2010 election and indeed subsequently. And there were several MPs like Sarah Wollaston who was a GP who suddenly thought she wanted to go into politics. She was chosen in Totnes in Devon. I remember covering that. And she was a very apolitical person but, you know, very good on health and so on and kept rebelling. Cameron was heard to say, whatever happens, we’re never gonna have a primary ever again. (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Michael, we’ve got just a minute or so left to talk about your final observations. I mean, there’s so much else we could talk about, but what are the other areas that have struck you about this electoral cycle?

Michael Crick
Well, on class, it’s, you know, there are fewer working-class candidates probably than ever. I mean, on the Labour side, there’s probably about nine, and they’re meant to be the Labour party, one or two Conservatives. But the really other interesting thing is how in both parties, certainly the Labour party will be much more to the centre, more right-wing. Hardly anybody on the left has been chosen as a candidate. It’s about six of them, half a dozen of them. And on the Conservative side, it’s also quite interesting. I assumed that, you know, it would be the right would be triumphing all over the place and lots of Brexiters and so on. It’s not like that, actually. A lot of them are candidates are very rather quiet about their politics. A few Remainers have been chosen like Rupert Harrison in Bicester and Woodstock; James Cracknell, the Olympic oarsman. So you could actually see with the red wall people losing their seats. You can see the parliamentary Conservative party moving slightly at the centre as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
We’ve just got time for Political Fix stock picks. Stephen, who are you buying or selling this week?

Stephen Bush
I’m gonna buy more Kemi Badenoch. Now, as regular listeners will know, I think I maybe have the worst-performing portfolio of our regulars. And my desperate . . . 

Miranda Green
I don’t know, I think I’m down there with you.

Lucy Fisher
We’re playing the long game.

Stephen Bush
My desperate search for the Conservative candidate who is on the right but doesn’t make every Conservative MP on the left want to shoot themselves. And she’s had a, to put it mildly, difficult week in which accusations about the Post Office in which it has caused lots of people to ask questions about whether or not she’s too combative to do the role well. Now, I think all of those questions are about right. But essentially, I don’t think there is anyone else left standing in her bit of the ecosystem, as it were. So there’s no other available candidate who can unite those two bits of the party. So her stock is cheap this week so I’m doing a canny acquisition.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda?

Miranda Green
I’m with Stephen on this issue. I’m gonna hang on to my Badenoch stock because although I even got advice from our Twitter followers saying surely this is the week to sell Kemi, I also think, you know, buy on the dip and she can only go up from this week. I’m actually going to I suppose buy Eleanor Laing, Deputy Speaker — quite competent, a former Tory. So that would satisfy Michael’s, you know, point about needing to follow for Labour speakers with a perhaps a Tory originating speaker, and she’s much more emollient. So I’m buying Eleanor Laing as a sort of understudy Speaker.

Lucy Fisher
Could be a canny choice. Michael?

Michael Crick
Well on Kemi Badenoch, of course, you know, being combative is exactly the quality you need to be a leader of the opposition, much more suitable to opposition than government.

Lucy Fisher
So you’re buying her stock?

Michael Crick
I’d buy one or two, and then I’d certainly buy loads of George Galloway’s, ‘cause he will now . . . It looks like making his fourth appearance as an MP for a fourth different seat.

Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ll be talking more about the Rochdale by-election next week.

Miranda Green
Lucy, what about you?

Lucy Fisher
I’m buying Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, who I think had a really good week. He’s a master rhetorician, in my view. He’s a really, really effective public speaker and him getting very angry at the Speaker and about the chaotic handling of the Gaza debate I thought has probably introduced him to a lot of new voters south of the border. Well, Michael Crick, thank you so much for joining us this week. Stephen Bush, Miranda Green, thanks for joining.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michael Crick
Thank you.

Stephen Bush
Thank you.

Miranda Green
Thank you, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
That’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in the episode in the show notes. Do check them out. There are articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline with help from Leah Quinn. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley Is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next week.

[MUSIC PLAYING]