Prime Ministers should never take the House of Commons for granted

Keir Starmer's advisers complain that Labour MPs have "main character syndrome", expecting a busy PM to flatter their egos; he should, because he needs them

The problem

Sir Keir Starmer has had a fairly dreadful week or so, I think most of us would agree. As the Second Reading of the controversial Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill on Wednesday drew closer, it became clear that not only was there significant opposition to the measure within the Parliamentary Labour Party, but that it was not impossible, despite a nominal majority in the House of Commons of 165, that the government might actually be defeated.

Dame Meg Hillier, the diligent and respected Chair of the Treasury Committee who is hardly a fire-breathing socialist warrior, had tabled a reasoned amendment, a procedural device which states that “this House declines to give the bill a second reading” and can then explain why the proposer believes the bill should not be passed. If the House agrees to the reasoned amendment, the bill is rejected without any further proceedings, and cannot be brought back in the same form during that session of Parliament. Her amendment had been signed by 12 other select committee chairs and attracted the support of more than 120 Labour MPs, suggesting that, depending on the stance of the opposition parties, it could be carried.

As I explained in an article for The i Paper, government bills have only been lost at Second Reading twice since the Second World War, and only once by a ministry with a working majority: on 14 April 1986, the Shops Bill [Lords], a Home Office bill which would have abolished the laws restricting Sunday trading in England and Wales, was defeated by 14 votes; 72 Conservative MPs voted against the bill. It was the only time Margaret Thatcher was defeated in the House of Commons. After the division, the Leader of the House, John Biffen, announced, graciously if succinctly, that the matter was at an end.

In the light of the decision of the House tonight, it is clear that further progress on the Bill is not possible. The Government accept that position and have no plans to reintroduce this legislation.

In comparison with the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, the Shops Bill was a relatively minor measure. Defeat was embarrassing and politically awkward but hardly seismic; this week’s bill, however, was at the heart of Labour’s attempt to make radical changes to the welfare system and save substantial amounts of money. A defeat might not have been terminal for the Prime Minister—though it is hard to see how the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, could have continued in her job with much authority or credibility—but it would have damaged the government badly.

An attempted solution

Starmer realised that a large proportion of the rebels had to be won over. Last weekend, therefore, he, Kendall and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, sought out unhappy Labour MPs and attempted to cajole them, as well as beginning to offer various concessions and mitigations. At some point, avoiding a defeat in the House of Commons surpassed saving any meaningful version of the bill as the government’s priority; the first compromise was that any changes to Universal Credit or Personal Independence Payment would not apply to those already in receipt of the benefits, and this had been enough to persuade Hillier to withdraw her reasoned amendment and support the bill.

By Tuesday the anxiety was so great that reason was being abandoned. Ministers still clearly thought defeat was a possibility, especially when the Conservatives announced that they would oppose the bill rather than abstaining, and by the time the debate began at 1.44 pm, the mood in the Chamber was tense and sour. Another reasoned amendment tabled by Corbyn-era Shadow Cabinet member Rachael Maskell and signed by nearly 40 Labour MPs had been selected for debate by the Speaker, and there were rumours of up to 50 of the government’s MPs being prepared to defy the whip and oppose the bill.

The extent of the government’s panic was revealed at around 5.25 pm, when the debate had little more than 90 minutes left to run. Sir Stephen Timms, Minister for Social Security and Disability, announced from the despatch box that the government would delete clause five of the bill, dealing with changes in eligibility for Personal Independence Payment, at Committee Stage and that it could therefore be disregarded. It left the bill all but devoid of any significant measures, and it is hard to calculate how many, if any, opponents were decisively won round, but the reasoned amendment was defeated by 179 votes and the bill was given a Second Reading 335-260, a comfortable majority of 75. It will now go to a Committee of the whole House and all its remaining Commons stages next Wednesday, 9 July (a very compressed schedule, as I wrote in The Daily Telegraph last week).

The sheer chaos of the bill’s consideration cannot be overstated. To have ministers stripping clauses out of a bill as they are on their feet towards the end of a Second Reading debate is extraordinary and shows a level of desperation and apprehension at least the equal of anything that happened in Liz Truss’s 49-day roller-coaster premiership or the bedlam of the Brexit process under Theresa May. It also highlighted two other related issues: an administration which cannot, even if only on a handful of specific issues, guarantee the support of its own backbenchers, and, just as vitally, a lack of parliamentary intelligence; by this I mean that the government, and the Whips’ Office in particular, clearly did not know with any great certainty which way Members intended to vote. It is these issues of what you might call parliamentary relations that I want to consider.

The peasants are revolting

Sir Keir Starmer had only been a Member of Parliament for nine years by the time he became Prime Minister, and less than five when he became Leader of the Opposition. Of post-war premiers, only Rishi Sunak (who was elected at the same time as Starmer) had less experience in the House of Commons, having been an MP for seven years when he became Prime Minister in 2022. In addition, Starmer was already 52 when he was elected MP for Holborn and St Pancras at the 2015 general election; and, significantly, almost all of his time in the Commons has been on the front bench.

He was a backbencher from May to September 2015, when he was appointed Shadow Minister for Immigration, and again from June to October 2016, having resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench in protest at his leadership then accepting promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Brexit Secretary. Given that these two periods included two summer adjournments (21 July to 7 September 2015 and 21 July to 5 September 2016), Starmer has, in effect, never been an active backbencher; he was formally a member of the Home Affairs Committee from July to October 2015, but only managed to attend four meetings in that time. Rishi Sunak may have had less time in the House overall before reaching Downing Street, but he spent two and a half years as a backbencher before his meteoric rise to the top.

The Prime Minister has also spent a lot of his first year in office out of the country. His attendance at last month’s NATO Summit in the Hague was his 26th foreign trip in a year, therefore averaging one visit a fortnight. These have been a mixture of regular, set-piece appointments like NATO summits, the United Nations General Assembly, Commonwealth Heads of Government, the European Political Community, the G20 and G7, unpredictable engagements like the funeral of Pope Francis and bilateral visits. Together they add up to around 50 days, perhaps a little more if travel of factored in, or around a seventh of his time as Prime Minister. Whatever your view of the value of such travel, it has an effect on time management. Before Tuesday’s debate, Starmer had only voted seven times in 246 divisions since entering Downing Street: with such a large majority, he can afford not to make his way to Westminster every time the division bell rings, but it does tell its own story.

All this matters because one complaint made by Labour MPs during and after the controversy over the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill was that the Prime Minister was virtually never to be seen at Westminster and was a distant, isolated figure: some new backbenchers had not spoken to him since they had been elected, and some doubted he would remember their names or recognise their faces. Starmer was simply absent from their lives.

Very few Prime Ministers love the House of Commons as an institution or arena. Sir Winston Churchill was an obvious exception, as it gave him a superb platform for some of his best oratory (though it is striking to remember that the Chamber was out of use from 10 May 1941 to 26 October 1950 after a German air raid hit the Palace of Westminster). Before him, only Stanley Baldwin in the 20th century seemed genuinely to love the House. When he died in 1947, Clement Attlee, then Prime Minister, paid tribute to him as “pre-eminently the House of Commons man”.

He was a great lover of this House and a great believer in Parliamentary Government. Of all the Prime Ministers whom I have known, he was the most assiduous in his attendance. He spent long hours in the Chamber listening to our Debates; he was a familiar figure in the precincts of the House, in the Library, in the Dining Room and on the Terrace; he delighted to talk with Members of all parties; he steeped himself in the atmosphere of the House. It followed from this that he had a remarkable knowledge of the Members, not only of the party which he led for so many years, but of other parties as well.

It is not a description which would sit easily on the shoulders of any premier, Churchill aside, since Baldwin. They have varied in their performance: Macmillan and Wilson at their best were masters of the arena, Thatcher made for with force and determination anything she lacked in delicacy or sharp wit, Blair never particularly enjoyed performing in the House and its organic nature, a kind of rough-hewn. collegiality, made it a poor fit for Boris Johnson, fundamentally a loner. It is striking that, of the 13 post-war Prime Ministers, only two—Churchill and Eden—had served as Leader of the House and another two—Heath and Major—had ever been government whips, closely involved in the management of business in the House and required to understand its rhythms and moods.

Starmer, despite his legal eminence, is not a particularly gifted performer at the despatch box. His public persona is stiff and wooden, and he lacks the fluidity that allowed other Prime Ministers to shine. That is hardly a fatal flaw, or even an especially rare one, but, again, it combines with his rare attendance and contributes to a sense that he doesn’t like Parliament as an institution or regard its Members, even on his own side, as a discrete and significant constituency of opinion.

It is hardly surprising that absence from the House of Commons and an apparent indifference to it has became a bête noire of Labour backbenchers, for whom the Parliamentary Estate is the focus of their weekday lives. Last month The Huffington Post reported:

Labour MPs bemoan the fact that Starmer is never seen around parliament, meaning opportunities for impromptu chats with him are few and far between… Neil Duncan-Jordan told Radio 5Live this week that since being elected the MP for Poole last year, he has not spoken to Starmer once.

An experienced Labour Member saw this as a serious failure on the Prime Minister’s part.

That is unbelievable. After 1997, Tony Blair had every new MP in to No.10 for a cup of tea and to say thank you. It cost nothing and built up a lot of goodwill that came in handy down the line.

Another Labour figure agreed, calling the Number 10 Downing Street team of advisers around Starmer “completely dysfunctional”.

It’s a mixture of ignorance and arrogance. They think all they need to do is send out instructions and all those MPs they put into seats will do as they’re told, but it doesn’t work like that.

Some of this must be taken with caution, as it is clearly for some part of a charge sheet being drawn up against Morgan McSweeney, the Downing Street Chief of Staff, a determined but sometimes abrasive figure. But it does all fit together coherently as a picture of a leader who feels no great attachment to the House of Commons, is focusing on a fraught and challenging policy agenda at home and abroad and may, somewhat understandably, feel that, having led his party to a victory of historic proportions at least in parliamentary terms after an equally historic drubbing less than five years previously, he is entitled to expect a degree of loyalty, supoort and gratitude.

This has provoked a stinging backlash from some of Starmer’s supporters. One loyalist MP told The Sunday Times:

One of my colleagues described it as ‘main character syndrome’. These complaints about the prime minister not talking to new MPs—well he’s a bit fucking busy talking to President Trump.

A Downing Street adviser disdainfully reiterated this tendency of self-aggrandisment:

I think there are a lot of [new MPs] who worked in the charity sector who think they are really important. There’s no respect for a leader who has worked incredibly hard to fix the party and who got them elected just 12 months ago.

For those in Starmer’s inner circle, feeling the pressure and frustrated by the speed with which the government’s position has deteriorated from the day of the general election, it is understandable to be frustrated by the demands of people easily dismissed as lobby fodder, especially when there are so many of them. But it is unwise and unrealistic: Members of Parliament, whether they are, in the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn’s phrase, “the Duke of Plaza Toro or the Member for Nowhere”, have demanding egos and a high regard for themselves, otherwise they would never have sought election in the first place. To criticise them for it is to criticise the sea for being wet.

What power have you got? Where did you get it from?

For the Prime Minister or his advisers to regard backbenchers with such thinly concealed disdain, and to use phrases like “main character syndrome” and people “who think they are really important”, is not just unwise in terms of managing parliamentary relations. It is fundamentally wrong, an affront not only to the democratic mandate of each and every MP, but also to their relationship with the Prime Minister and, by extension, the executive.

Whatever your opinion of Sir Keir Starmer, he is the King’s chief minister not directly because of any legal experience, intellectual aptitude or political nous. He was invited to form a government on 5 July 2024 for one reason which trumps all others and which all others require: he is able to command a majority in the House of Commons. On that majority relies everything else, including, significantly, the ability to pass bills of supply and appropriation: these authorise the government to draw money from the Consolidated Fund, effectively its account at the Bank of England, and spend it according to the Estimates it has submitted to the House and which the House has approved. It must also gain the approval of the House of Commons for the Budget resolutions and the Finance Bill and Ways and Means resolutions for other bills which impose taxes or other charges on the public to provide revenue into the Consolidated Fund.

What all of this means is that the consent of Parliament, and specifically of the House of Commons, is necessary for the government to raise and spend money. If it does not have a majority in the Commons, or an ability to pass legislation in agreement with other parties, it cannot do this and it therefore cannot govern. That is why Finance Bills are generally regarded as confidence measures: if the government is defeated on the Finance Bill, it has lost of the confidence of the House and the ability to govern.

Confidence and supply, therefore, are the preconditions for government, and the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons is invited to become Prime Minister, first and foremost, because he or she can provide them. We often take these things for granted because the parties’ whipping systems have generally delivered consistent majorities when they have been available, obvious exceptions being the 2017-19 Parliament, when the Conservative Party fell three seats short of a working majority and had to conclude a confidence and supply agreement with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party; and the 1974-79 Parliament after 31 March 1977, when the Labour government, elected with a majority of only three, became a minority administration with the Conservatives’ Andrew MacKay victory in the Birmingham Stechford by-election.

However, as the government’s woes over the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Scheme Bill demonstrated, confidence is not an abstract set of numbers on a screen or a piece of paper, but individual decisions made by each Member of Parliament under ever-changing circumstances. It is of course the case that overwhelmingly MPs vote according to their party whip, and mostly do so without complaint: you join a political party, after all, because you agree with or can tolerate most of their policies and opinions. What has happened within the Parliamentary Labour Party over welfare reform, and on other issues too, is that enough MPs to be significant have found their inclinations in conflict with the party hierarchy’s direction, and have chosen to rebel rather than acquiesce.

The outcome has been a reminder that the Prime Minister and the government rely on their MPs, and rely on them all the time. Parties face the electorate every four or five years at general elections, but negative feedback from the parliamentary party is much more direct.

In episode five of the first series of Yes, Prime Minister, “A Real Partnership”, writers Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn perfectly demonstrated the potential dangers of losing touch with parliamentarians as Jim Hacker vented his frustrations to his wife over MPs demanding an increase in their pay.

Jim Hacker: The public will never stand for an MPs’ pay rise when we cut back on nurses and teachers.

Mrs Hacker: Oh, that’s a much more serious problem.

Jim Hacker: No, darling, much LESS serious. They can’t vote against me till the next election. Backbenchers can do it at 10 o’clock tonight.

This is why the dismissive reaction of Starmer’s advisers is so foolish and wrong-headed. Some of the rebellious MPs may be self-important, some may be demanding the attention of an embattled Prime Minister at a time when he is hard-pressed on a number of fronts, and they may overestimate both their importance and abilities. Labour officials may think that the parliamentary party should remember that Starmer is the reason they are there. But they are also the reason he is in Downing Street, because he leads 402 other Labour MPs and they will in the usual course of events vote the way he asks them to.

Like any Prime Minister, he should remember that he relies on them and that their support cannot be taken for granted. Once a leader loses hold of that, loses touch with the parliamentary party and becomes insulated within a bubble in Downing Street, there tends only to be one outcome, as Lady Thatcher among other predecessors could warn him.