There was quite a row in the Commons to-day. It was occasioned by an unexpected business statement by the Leader of The House, Alan Campbell.
The background to this is that the Government had granted to-morrow as an Opposition Day.
One of a number of such days allocated to the official Opposition in which it gets to determine the motions for debate.
The convention is that, once allocated, the Government will not change the business that day unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason for doing so. Equally, that it will not put on any Government statements that would take up the Opposition’s debating time.
Ordinarily, The Opposition would have until the rising of the House to-night to table its motions for debate to-morrow. It did however, notify earlier to-day that, without giving the exact wording of the motion, the principal subject would be whether the House, which is due to go into Summer Recess on Thursday evening, should instead, come back to sit on Monday, in order to enable the new Prime Minister to come and make a statement setting out his government’s plans and priorities.
This would be a most welcome opportunity for MPs to find out what the new PM really plans to do. Thus far, all we have is press speculation and rumours. There has been no scrutiny by elected representatives, not even a leadership contest within the Labour Party. He has simply been crowned without having to put a manifesto before us.
If we are not to hear from him on Monday, the day when he becomes Prime Minister, we will have to wait until September.
MPs, on behalf of their constituents in the South want to know what are the implications of all the hype about ‘Number 10 in the North’ for the South East and South West.
Our businesses want to know what the new regime will mean for their taxes.
We need to know how he plans to fund defence. We want to know if he is going to persevere with the mad plan to give away Chagos to a regime friendly to China and Iran.
This desire for information is not confined to Opposition MPs. I asked a Labour MP, elected in 2025, if she had been one of the 80% of her colleagues who had rushed to nominate Andy Burnham. She replied that she had not, – a potentially career limiting omission. I asked why not. She replied that she had never met him and didn’t know what he stands for. Well, there it is.
As soon as the subject for debate to-morrow reached the Government Whips Office, all hell let loose. The Leader of the House came with his emergency business statement, withdrawing to-morrow’s Opposition day and substituting a general debate (without a motion to on which to divide) on the conflict in the middle East.
The Leader was uncharacteristically rattled, I suspect that he was very unhappy with what he had been sent out to announce. He maintained that the debate on the middle east was of vital importance and that, in any event, the Government did not even know what the Opposition motion was going to be. This is disingenuous: it is true that the exact wording had not been tabled, but the subject was well known.
You can always tell when something goes horribly wrong for the Government: the Labour benches cleared and those that remained sat in stony silence looking at their feet, while the Opposition expressed its outrage.
Why are they so coy, so determined to keep the new PM in hiding?