Ballots & Bullets

On Friday, the Government Chief Whip, Patrick McLoughlin, spoke to students on our second year British Political Parties module.  The next visiting speaker on that module is a former Chief Whip, Jacqui Smith.  That’s two Chief Whips in a couple of weeks.  So what’s the collective noun for Chief Whips?

Believing in the wisdom of crowds, I asked twitter.  …

I recently spoke at the book launch for Paul Flynn’s latest book How to be an MP. It was, people think, the first book launch held in the Speaker’s House, and was introduced by the Speaker, John Bercow.  I think I was invited to speak because, a few months ago, when Paul Flynn was getting lots of stick for …

As our last post indicated, the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009 inflicted damage to popular perceptions of politicians. But what impact has the phone hacking scandal had?

Despite the furore it created within the political class and the turmoil it generated within the media, the public reaction to ‘hackgate’ has been largely left to speculation – until now.

In …

In the last couple of years there have been three major events in British politics: the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009, the 2010 General Election and the phone hacking scandal of 2011. In this post we look at the impact of the first two; and in our next we assess the effect of the third.

A survey commissioned by Committee …

Yesterday evening, Radio 4’s Four Thought – which you can listen to here – featured a lecture about a teenager from Hull who back in 2003 had taken to writing to politicians to ask them if they had ever been on a pogo stick or space hopper.

As I explained in the lecture, ‘Jason Whiley’ never really existed – him …

This Tuesday’s Independent contained what was for the most part a by-the-numbers article about parliamentary whipping; it managed to squeeze in references to ‘fear’, ‘submission’, ‘the little black book’, and ‘Francis Urquhart’ all in the first two paragraphs. But it was saved by the inclusion of Whip’s Top Trumps profiles.  They only covered four of the current whips, graded …

There are, as many Labour MPs will tell you, few advantages to being in Opposition.  But as I argued (along with Mark Stuart) in a chapter in Nigel Fletcher’s recently-published How To Be In Opposition, one of the few benefits is that the media don’t focus on any internal divisions in the same way as in government.  The …