Dinenage to chair Culture, Media and Sport
The MP for Gosport won the race to be chair of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the 11th "replacement" election since 2020: how is it going?
Introduction
Today was an event in the House of Commons which is almost an exemplar of something which was of interest to MPs but will cause barely a ripple in the pond of public consciousness beyond Westminster. Following the resignation of Julian Knight, former Conservative MP for Solihull, as chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, due to a number of allegations of sexual misconduct, the House elected Dame Caroline Dinenage (Con, Gosport) as his replacement, defeating former chair Damian Collins (Con, Folkestone and Hythe) and acting chair Damian Green (Con, Ashford) by a comfortable margin in the first round.
It was the 11th “by-election” for a select committee chair since the positions were initially elected (and appointed) in January 2020, in the wake of the previous month’s general election. That’s a relatively high turnover, prompted in part by the election of a new leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, in April 2020, and two changes of prime minister, in September and October 2022, with consequent reshuffles, promotions and sackings. I’ve written in the past about the evolving influence of select committees since the implementation of the Wright reforms after the 2010 election and the increasing attractiveness of chairmanships of committees which now carry a modest additional salary as well as influence and profile. In this essay I want to do two things: firstly, give a brief sketch of Dame Caroline as she takes up her new position; and second, look at the sort of MPs who are standing for and winning select committee positions in the 2019 Parliament.
New select committee chair
Caroline Dinenage was elected to the House of Commons in 2010 for Gosport in Hampshire, succeeding Sir Peter Viggers, now (somewhat unfairly) remembered for his duck house. She was 38, personable and enthusiastic, had started her own manufacturing business before university and was an experienced company director and local councillor, but, in truth, at first she was principally known as daughter of children’s TV and regional news legend Fred Dinenage. Her father had been a presenter of the long-running children’s educational programme How since 1966 and was a very well kent face to viewers of ITV Meridian and its predecessors.
Dinenage was very much part of the Cameron project to modernise the Conservative Party. She had been selected as candidate for Gosport by an all-postal open primary (in which all registered electors, not just Conservative members, could participate) and generally voted with the coalition government. She took a particular interest in manufacturing and small businesses, reflecting her own career, but did not find swift promotion; the necessity of including Liberal Democrat ministers in the coalition meant that there were many Conservative backbenchers who felt they deserved promotion but were being frustrated. From 2012 to 2015 she served on the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee and was a member of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly from 2010; it was in this latter capacity that I first met her, as I was secretary to the delegation from 2013 to 2015.
When the Conservatives formed a government on their own in 2015, Dinenage was given her opportunity as a minister. From 2015 she was a justice minister and double-hatted at the Government Equalities Office, dealing with family justice, women and equalities, then became a junior education minister in 2016. In June 2017, she briefly took over family support and child maintenance at the Department for Work and Pensions, but in January 2018 she was promoted to Minister of State for Social Care at the Department of Health and Social Care. In a reflection of the incessant churn of junior ministers in recent years, her 25 months as social care minister represented a lengthy stint; in February 2020, she was moved again to Minister of State for Digital and Culture.
Ministers who have the kind of trajectory that Dinenage enjoyed are very difficult to assess from the outside. If you hold a ministerial position for a year or two, especially at a sub-cabinet level, it takes some months to master the brief to a reasonable degree, and you are hemmed in by the lack of freedom of action which afflicts most junior ministers. Many of your decisions will also derive from the policies of previous ministers, and there is always the financial pressure from the Treasury encroaching on most things you do. Dinenage herself has commented on the haphazard nature of junior ministerial appointments. Talking to Dr Cath Haddon of the Institute for Government, she said that the Ministry of Justice part of her first position was an odd fit.
The MoJ bit, I think, was a weird combination, and a weird choice, on the basis that I was, I think, probably one of the only people to go into the Ministry of Justice that had literally no legal background whatsoever… I literally don’t think I’d even asked a justice question before I became a justice minister.
Dinenage had a certain energy about her which can go a long way to providing momentum for a junior minister. She seemed a safe pair of hands at the despatch box, which seems an overrated quality to the public beyond Westminster—understandably, given how few people watch any parliamentary proceedings, let alone departmental questions; and the fighting-in-the-trenches of ministerial life, public bill committees and delegated legislation committees, are sometimes barely seen by those who are present. But avoiding awkwardness and embarrassment on the floor of the House is vital to a minister’s reputation within Westminster. An image of competence and grip can disappear in an afternoon, while an air of upward mobility can be created by deftness and wit.
The other part of ministerial routine which Dinenage undertook successfully and without apparent complaint was the treadmill of stakeholder events: speeches, public meetings, awards ceremonies, official openings and so on. Sometimes these are recalled only by the essential photo opportunity, but they matter for making those who are involved in the policy area feel engaged and they create the impression of an active and open government. Dinenage probably identified her chief strength as a junior minister when she said “I guess my reputation became one of emotional intelligence, but also being able to fulfil a brief and get stuff done”.
A cabinet reshuffle was widely expected by September 2021. The previous month had seen the humiliation of the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul, and it was acknowledged that the process had been an embarrassing mess. The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, had performed poorly, not least by deciding not to return immediately from a holiday, and his tenure in that post was clearly near its end. Dinenage had spoken to the whips earlier in the summer and indicated she was ready to leave ministerial office: there was no immediate prospect of promotion, she had been on the front bench for more than six years and she lacked the energy to learn a new brief and a new department under a new secretary of state. Consequently she left the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which, to many people’s surprise, welcomed Nadine Dorries as its new boss: her role as minister of state was taken by the young Hornchurch and Upminister MP Julia Lopez, while parts of her brief went to Chris Philp and Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay.
Since leaving government, Dinenage has founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Carers, served on the Women and Equalities Committee and returned to the delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Her new role as chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, however, will now take precedence. The committee has a broad spectrum of inquiries underway and is also undertaking pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Media Bill (this kind of task is often performed by a specially appointed joint committee of Lords and Commons rather than given to the relevant departmental select committee). She will also be expected to be an authoritative voice on the remaining stages of the Online Safety Bill which is currently in committee in the House of Lords. There is a certain irony in this, as Dinenage was responsible for the drafting of the bill when she was a DCMS minister.
Dinenage’s statement when she put herself forward for the chair of the select committee paid the usual obeisances to the importance and profitability of the creative industries, the media and sport, and emphasised their important role in the UK’s soft power. She listed her priorities as being support for the creative industries, scrutiny of the Gambling White Paper, club football governance and visas for those in the arts and sport. On being elected, she added:
I’m looking forward to getting down to scrutinising the Government to ensure it delivers on everything from gambling regulation and football governance reform through to bolstering support for our world-renowned creative industries.
It is a challenging time to assume the chairmanship of a select committee (if one was not previously a member of that committee). The general election is expected to be in the summer or autumn of 2024, so this parliament has perhaps 16 or so months left to run, including two summer adjournments. The last year of a parliament is generally one of decreasing focus on legislative and scrutiny matters, as attention drifts towards the prospect of an election campaign and perhaps a change of government. Dame Caroline will need to make sure no time is lost and begin addressing her own and the committee’s agenda right away if she is to fit in everything she hopes.
The churn of chairs in the 2019 Parliament
Every so often, understandably, a chair leaves his or her position on a select committee. For those who are elected by the whole House, therefore, there must be a “by-election”. There have been 11 such changes since the tranche of chairs were elected after the last general election, and I wanted to look briefly at who the candidates, successful and unsuccessful, have been, to see if we can draw any conclusions about the role and influence of select committees over the course of this parliament.
Of these vacancies, seven were open to Conservatives only, three to Labour MPs and one to the SNP. That last tells us little: the International Trade Committee effectively “became” the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee after the machinery of government changes in February 2023, insofar as it was reserved for the SNP and therefore it was hardly a surprise when the jovial but erratic Angus MacNeil, who had chaired International Trade since 2016, won the election to lead the new committee. That said, he was run close by Kirsty Blackman, an earnest and rather artless Aberdonian who had been deputy leader of the SNP’s Westminster group before resigning to deal with depression. One might have expected the Nationalists, who can exhibit a degree of discipline when required, to have decided among themselves to unite behind a single candidate; but MacNeil has long been something of an outsider among his parliamentary colleagues, too accident-prone and too flamboyant for their comfort.
As far as the Labour Party is concerned, they have been eligible for the elections to chair the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee (now Business and Trade), the Committee on Standards and the Home Affairs Committee. All three vacancies occurred when the incumbent was promoted to the opposition front bench: Rachel Reeves (BEIS) as shadow Brexit minister, Kate Green (Standards) as shadow minister for child poverty strategy and Yvette Cooper (Home Affairs) as shadow home secretary.
The first election, for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, attracted three substantial candidates. Hardly surprising: Rachel Reeves had sought the chair in 2017 after two years on the backbenches, having been a middle-ranking member of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, but as a financially literate, vaguely centrist, pro-Israel figure, she neither wanted nor found a place in the Labour Party’s senior counsels after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. She had used the committee to maintain, rather than create, her political profile, but it had acted as a serviceable alternative from 2017 to 2020 until Sir Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader and she had been recalled to the front bench.
The three candidates were Dr Stella Creasy (Lab/Co-op, Walthamstow), Angela Eagle (Lab, Wallasey) and Darren Jones (Lab, Bristol North West). Creasy, a high-born bluestocking with a doctorate in social exclusion, had served on the front bench under Miliband and was obviously gifted, though some found her excessively earnest and slightly censorious. In 2015, she stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party and was placed second, though Tom Watson beat her by a margin of two-to-one. She retreated to the backbenches and campaigned actively on issues including the regulation of payday loans, abortion rights and provision for working mothers, including in the House of Commons itself.
Angela Eagle was a veteran. She had beaten the Conservative overseas development minister Lynda Chalker to win the Merseyside seat of Wallasey in 1992, a trades union official from the Oxford PPE stable, becoming the Baby of the House at 31. She was made a minister by Tony Blair in 1997 and served as an under-secretary of state over three departments before being sacked literally by accident in May 2002: Downing Street had forgotten she existed and given her Home Office post to local government spod Lord Filkin. Eagle found out she had lost her job as she was due to give a speech to more than 100 people. After blameless work in the select committee trenches, she returned to government as a Treasury minister when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, then saw out the last year of the Labour administration as pensions minister. She spent the Miliband era in the shadow cabinet, stood (like Creasy) for the deputy leadership in 2015, and, probably through gritted teeth, spent a year under Jeremy Corbyn as shadow business secretary but left the shadow cabinet in the mass resignation of June 2016. She declared her candidacy for the party leadership the following month, hoping to unseat Corbyn, but withdrew and supported the supposedly-more-plausible Owen Smith, who was then comfortably beaten by the incumbent. She then returned to the backbenches.
Darren Jones was the least likely of the candidates on paper. A Bristolian solicitor specialising in technology law, he worked for a transatlantic legal firm before moving in-house with BT, and was elected to the Commons in 2017 aged 30, beating Conservative Charlotte Leslie. It was his second attempt to take Bristol North West, the constituency in which he had been born. The first ‘Darren’ ever to be elected to Parliament—a fact he noted in his maiden speech—in March 2019 he was appointed by deputy leader Tom Watson convener of an organisation called the Future Britain Group, intended as a big-tent gathering of social democratic MPs within the Parliamentary Labour Party. It attracted around 80 MPs and 70 peers, including big names like Lord Kinnock, Lord Mandelson, Lord Blunkett, Lord Adonis, John Prescott, Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn, but sank quietly once Corbyn left the leadership. He also became chair of Labour Digital, a position he still holds.
If experience was the most valued criterion, Eagle should have won the election at a canter. Creasy certainly had a high profile, though she had been absent from the House of Commons for the second half of 2019 on maternity leave. Her respectable tally of votes in the deputy leadership election of 2015 might have suggested she had a sizeable following; equally, she has always been easier to respect than like. But it was the new boy, Darren Jones, with less than three years in the House behind him, who won, and won comfortably. In the first round of voting, he garner 256 votes, with Eagle second on 174 and Creasy trailing on 114. That translated to a 296-222 victory in the second round, an emphatic and impressive victory for Jones.
It was proof of two things: first, that select committee chairmanships were attracted to former ministers or shadow ministers, and could—as Reeves had demonstrated—keep an active political career alive; second, conversely, it proved that the House was happy to give the benefit of the doubt to new and inexperienced Members if they seemed capable. Jones, young and articulate, had a good technical grasp of AI, a major issue of policy interest; his easy manner was not unconnected to the fact that his hero was Tony Blair. But there may also have been an element of freedom from the sectarian bitterness of the Corbyn years: he had campaigned for Andy Burnham in 2015 as a young activist, serving as South-West Co-ordinator, but had not entered the Commons until 2017, and had been too junior to feature heavily in factionalism. Exhausted Labour MPs, at least, might have regarded him as a welcome relief, while it is possible, if cynical, to imagine that some Conservative MPs had chosen the youngest and least experienced candidate to draw the fangs of the select committee.
Readers will be delighted to know that I don’t intend to analyse each of the elections so exhaustively. Let us, however, look at some broad themes. Of the 11 chairs elected since 2020, nine had been ministers or opposition frontbenchers (one of them, Greg Clark, chair of Science and Technology, had been in the cabinet). It is, I think, now generally accepted that chairing a select committee—unless it is a hopelessly obscure example like Arms Export Controls (one of my old wards) or the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art—is at very worst a good compensation for a ministerial post, and probably equal to being a junior shadow minister. In some ways the committee post will provide more publicity and speaking opportunities in the House, but on balance usually less influence on public policy.
It is also worth observing that all 11 elections were contested by at least two candidates (and often many more: six Members vied to be chair of the Transport Committee in November 2022). This is encouraging. I know from bitter experience that serving on select committees is not always a top priority for Members, although chairmanships are, of course, sui generis. A dozen years after the Wright reforms, however, with directly elected chairs and smaller, more streamlined committees, the world of select committee scrutiny is relatively vibrant, effective and attractive to Members (though we should not pat the House on the back for the 2010 reforms and leave it at that). Committees continue to exercise a different kind of scrutiny of ministers from questions and statements on the floor of the House; and it is now taken as read, in the wake of any controversy involving government action (or failure to act), that a select committee will examine the issue with relative dispatch and at least uncover the broad facts. After the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Foreign Affairs Committee questioned the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, on 1 September and put him under considerable pressure for the performance of the Foreign Office; a report was then published in May 2022, and the government response to that report was issued in July 2022.
The House does remain willing to elect younger Members if they present an active and knowledgeable image. Not only was Darren Jones elected to chair the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, but Alicia Kearns (Con, Rutland and Melton) won the race to lead the Foreign Affairs Committee in October 2022, despite having been elected to the House only in 2019 and running against two former cabinet ministers, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, and a former member of the Diplomatic Service, Richard Graham. However, Kearns was already on the committee, had worked in communications at both the FCO and the Ministry of Defence, was a leading member of the China Research Group and had an almost-frenetic social media presence.
Conclusion
I have written in the past about the influence of select committees, their need and appetite for resources and the vital but uncelebrated role of the ordinary members of committees who don’t get the pay or visibility of chairs. I have no doubt that the select committee system is stronger and more powerful than it was before 2010, and it is probably more innovative too. But we still need to absorb the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic: committees did continue to meet, and taking evidence remotely has in fact broadened the range of witnesses committees now approach; but having members at the other end of a video link does make questioning more difficult and stilted, and anecdotally I hear from former colleagues in the House Service that MPs, especially those who joined in 2019, having spent their first 18 months or two years semi-remotely, are disengaged from their work in Parliament and lack a collegiality which Members who see each other every day quickly develop.
Chairing a prominent select committee is an attractive goal for MPs. However, the original hope, back in the heyday of Tony Wright, was that the select committee system would become an alternative career path to ministerial or shadow ministerial office. That has not happened, and perhaps was never realistic. What has happened, however, as the Hansard Society recently identified, is that ministerial and shadow ministerial jobs and chairing select committees have now blended and intertwined to produce more diverse routes up the greasy pole of politics. Tom Tugendhat used the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee to become a leadership contender when Boris Johnson resigned last summer and is now an “attending cabinet” minister as Minister for Security at the Home Office. Sir Chris Bryant, a minister under Gordon Brown and a shadow minister from 2010 to 2016, probably has a higher profile and more influence in the House, at any rate, as chair of the Committee on Standards since 2020 (he was also chair of the Committee of Privileges until June 2022; the two posts are intended to be held together but Bryant stood aside from Privileges as he felt unable to act impartially in its investigation of Boris Johnson, but is expected to resume the position when that inquiry is complete).
Some progress, more to make? It is a judgement one can almost always make of the House of Commons. But it seems to hold water for the current system of select committee scrutiny. To return to the point from which we started, congratulations again to Dame Caroline Dinenage for her election as chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, where she has her own contribution to make in this landscape.