Select committees begin to take shape (2)

The Conservative Party has now submitted its first batch of names for select committee membership, with some potential interest

On Wednesday I wrote briefly about the names so far selected by the Labour Party to fill out the membership of the select committees of the House of Commons. Now the Conservatives have proposed some of their nominations to the Committee of Selection, and the first crop will be agreed formally by the House on Monday. Like the government, the opposition was not yet found willing volunteers for every committee place (presumably the whips are dusting off the thumbscrews in advance of a second round of “encouragement”) but I have listed the Conservatives so far named below.

There is one important proviso to this set of nominations: the new leader of the Conservative Party will be announced on Saturday 2 November and he or she will then reshuffle the interim opposition front bench. Obviously, some of those who wish to serve on select committees may be offered shadow ministerial roles and will therefore have to leave their committee position, so there could be a fresh wave of Conservative candidates some time next month.

Nevertheless, here are the names as matters stand now:

Backbench Business
Wendy Morton

Business and Trade
John Cooper, Alison Griffiths

Culture, Media and Sport
(Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair), Mims Davies

Defence
Lincoln Jopp, Jesse Norman

Education
Dr Caroline Johnson, Patrick Spencer

Energy Security and Net Zero
Sir Christopher Chope, Bradley Thomas

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Sarah Bool, Charlie Dewhirst

Foreign Affairs
Aphra Brandreth, Sir John Whittingdale

Health and Social Care
Joe Robertson, Gregory Stafford

Home Affairs
(Dame Karen Bradley, chair), Robbie Moore

Housing, Communities and Local Government
Lewis Cocking, Gagan Mohindra

International Development
David Mundell, David Reed

Justice
Sir Ashley Fox, Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst

Northern Ireland Affairs
Alicia Kearns, Jerome Mayhew

Public Accounts
(Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair), Peter Fortune, Rebecca Paul

Science, Innovation and Technology
George Freeman, Kit Malthouse

Scottish Affairs
Harriet Cross, Jack Rankin

Transport
Katie Lam, Rebecca Smith

Treasury
Dame Harriett Baldwin, John Glen

I will offer some brief comments on a few of these nominations. Many are, as you might expect, new MPs, but there are also some real veterans and a handful who have held high office, which always brings an interesting dynamic to select committee scrutiny.

Dame Harriett Baldwin (Treasury): the MP for West Worcestershire deserves some credit for returning as an ordinary member to a committee she had chaired from November 2022 until the election. Originally an investment banker at J.P. Morgan Chase, she served as a whip in 2014-15, then in quick succession was economic secretary to the Treasury (2015-16), under-secretary of state for defence procurement (2016-18) and minister of state for Africa and international development (2018-19). Having backed Jeremy Hunt in the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, she was not included in Boris Johnson’s government, and joined the Treasury Committee withinm a year. She then succeeded Mel Stride as chair when he was recalled to cabinet by Rishi Sunak. With an MBA in international finance and more than 20 years in banking on her CV, she knows the committee’s remit intimately, but will have to adjust to life back in the chorus line after a stint as the leading lady.

Sir Christopher Chope (Energy Security and Net Zero): a very long-standing Member, Chope was first elected for Southampton Itchen in 1983, losing to Labour’s John Denham in 1992 (by 551 votes), then returned as MP for Christchurch in 1997. He had a modest ministerial career as under-secretary of state for the environment (1986-90) and transport (1990-92), and served on the opposition front bench in 1997 and from 2001 to 2005, but since then has been an active backbencher. In particular he distrusts many Private Members’ Bills as poorly considered and inadequately scrutinised, and has frequently courted controversy for derailing well-intentioned and widely supported measures. Now 77 and a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, Chope is making his first foray into a departmental select committee since Trade and Industry (1999-2002), and it is significant that he is lukewarm at best about net zero carbon emissions targets. His committee colleagues may come to regard him as playing the role of Devil’s advocate, but he has enormous experience, knowledge of procedure and diligence, so he will not easily be brushed aside.

George Freeman (Science, Innovation and Technology): one of that relatively rare breed of politicians passionately interested in one subject, Freeman, a biomedical venture capitalist, was elected MP for Mid-Norfolk in 2010 and has held a science-based ministerial portfolio on three separate occasions: he was under-secretary of state shared between the Department of Health and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with responsibility for life sciences, from 2014 to 2016; under-secretary of state for science, research and innovation at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 2021-22; and minister of state for science, research and innovation 2022-23, first as BEIS then at the newly established Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. In the first role, he was known as “High Tech Hezza” as he occupied Michael Heseltine’s former office. Freeman is an imaginative and enthusiastic advocate of science and technology and, unless he is recalled to the front bench, should add value to his new committee.

Alicia Kearns (Northern Ireland Affairs): having chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee from 2022 to 2024, the MP for Rutland and Stamford moves down and across to scrutinise a different department. Only 36 and in just her second parliament, Kearns worked in government communications at the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office, then in the private sector countering violent extremism, disinformation and hybrid warfare. Politically, she is difficult to characterise, socially liberal but hawkish on relations with China. Her experience in foreign affairs will be useful in terms of Northern Ireland’s relations with the Republic of Ireland and with the EU, and as a former committee chair she has considerable experience of scrutiny. Nevertheless, it would hardly be surprising if the next Conservative leader found room for her on the front bench.

Jesse Norman (Defence): one of the Conservative Party’s genuine intellectuals, Norman was an Eton contemporary of Boris Johnson, read classics at Merton College, Oxford, and went on to graduate with an MPhil and then a PhD from University College London, his doctoral thesis entitled “Visual reasoning in Euclid’s geometry: an epistemology of diagrams”. He has also lectured in philosophy at UCL and Birkbeck, and has twice been a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He has a particular interest in Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. A varied ministerial career saw him at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2016-17), the Department for Transport (2017-19), financial secretary to the Treasury (2019-21), minister of state for the Americas and the Overseas Territories at the FCDO (2021-22) and back to Transport as minister of state for decarbonisation and technology (2022-23). After leaving the government, he joined the Defence Committee and has been nominated again. He is a deep thinker, sometimes cautious, and sees himself as a Burkeian conservative. Although a relative newcomer to defence policy, he is an impressive and accomplished figure and will take the role very seriously.

Sir John Whittingdale (Foreign Affairs): part of the Tory “deep state”, Whittingdale was special adviser to Norman Tebbit, Leon Brittan and Paul Channon successively (1984-87) as trade and industry secretaries then political secretary to Margaret Thatcher as prime minister (1988-90) and for a time after she left office. He was elected MP for Colchester South and Maldon in 1992, then Maldon and East Chelmsford 1997-2010 and Maldon 2010-. Part of the generation of Conservatives coming to political maturity just as the party went into a long period of opposition (see also Sir Liam Fox, Sir Bernard Jenkin, Lord Willetts), he was William Hague’s parliamentary private secretary then spent most of the 2001 Parliament in the shadow cabinet speaking on trade and industry (2001-02) and culture, media and sport (2002-03, 2004-05). He then chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee for 10 years before moving into the cabinet as culture secretary for a year, before an unexpected swansong as minister of state for media and data at DCMS from 2020-21. Foreign affairs do not represent Whittingdale’s principal field of expertise but he has been in the Commons for more than 30 years and served as a cabinet minister, a junior minister, a shadow minister and a select committee chair so knows the form intimately.

As I said above, all of the Conservative nominations must be regarded as contingent, since there will be a reshuffle of the opposition front bench in the next few weeks and in a diminished parliamentary party almost anything can happen (William Hague’s first shadow team in 1997 included Cecil Parkinson, Norman Fowler and Patrick Cormack). Perhaps I will end up issuing a revised version of this anon…