Reflections on the week in politics
Trump and Hegseth ease another general out, the House of Commons gets its first female Clerk and Sir Keir Starmer's responsibility and reputation
A few items of news which should have a pin put through them before they disappear.
Another one bites the dust: Secretary Hegseth strikes again
I’ve written before here and here about the unparalleled removal, early retirement or dismissal which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has carried out across the United States’ armed forces. We must assume he has the imprimatur of President Trump, or at least the President is insufficiently interested to do anything about these purges, which have included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. Mark that: in less than two years, the heads of the three main armed services and the President’s senior uniformed military adviser have all left their posts unexpectedly. In total, 24 general officers, flag officers and senior commanders have been removed without adequate explanation. Sixty per cent are female or black.
A more striking statistic is this: from the end of the Civil War until 2015, 11 four- and five-star officers (full generals and admirals, Generals of the Army and Fleet Admirals) were sacked by Presidents. Since the beginning of his second term in January 2025, the Trump administration has already matched that number.
The most recent casualty is General Chris Donahue, Commanding General, United States Army Europe and Africa and Commander, Allied Land Command. In the latter post—it has been dual-hatted since August 2022—he is the primary land warfare adviser to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), currently General Alexus Grynkewich. Donahue has been in post only since December 2024, but on 24 June 2026, following reports in The Atlantic, a spokesman for the US Army confirmed that Donahue would relinquish his position on 2 July; no reason was given. The statement merely concluded, “The Army thanks Gen. Donahue for his leadership of US Army Europe and Africa”.
It is still possible that Donahue could be moved to another post commensurate with his four-star rank. There is a vacancy as Army Chief of Staff since the dismissal of General Randy George in April; or Donahue could be appointed General Commanding US Army Transformation and Training Command, from which General David Hodne was removed in April. There are also plans to create an unmanned systems command which Donahue could be asked to run. However, the fact that there has been no hint of any of these from the Department of Defense suggests that Donahue is heading for early retirement.
It should be noted, in fairness to the Department of Defense, that Donahue’s current position is due to be downgraded from a four-star to three-star appointment as part of a scheme to reduce the number of general officers and streamline America’s military footprint in Europe. That means that Donahue will be ineligible for his own post. It is not clear whether that requires him to stand down immediately; but the common consensus seems to be that there is more to his departure than that.
Chris Donahue is an extremely highly respected soldier and commander. Commissioned into the infantry in 1992, he has served with the 75th Ranger Regiment and Delta Force (1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta), as well as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He commanded Delta Force from 2013 to 2015 then was Director of Operations at the Joint Special Operations Command from 2015 to 2017, and has since been Deputy Director for Special Operations and Counterterrorism, J-37 at the Joint Staff and Commanding General, NATO Special Operations Component Command/Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan. He undertook his fourth deployment to Afghanistan as Commanding General of the 82nd Airborne Division, then, on promotion to lieutenant general, of XVIII Airborne Corps, where he oversaw the delivery of a great deal of military assistance to Ukraine.
The truth behind his departure now may lie in the period during which he commanded the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. Soldiers from his division held Hamid Karzai International Airport for the last 48 hours of the evacuation of NATO troops, and Donahue himself was the very last foreign soldier to leave Afghanistan when, at 11.59 pm on 30 August 2021, he boarded a C-17 Globemaster III which was one of a final group of five aircraft to complete the evacuation. Alongside Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, Commander of US Forces Afghanistan Forces, he enabled the evacuation of more than 122,000 people, an extraordinary logistical and military achievement. But in Trump’s cosmology, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was an indelible stain on America’s military record: although his first administration had agreed an earlier withdrawal date of 1 May in its deal with the Taliban, Trump called the evacuation “the dumbest move ever made in US history”.
The evacuation and the events leading up to it certainly leave few people emerging with credit. The United States and its allies hugely and catastrophically underestimated the speed with which the Taliban would seize territory and especially capture Kabul, meaning that they were on the back foot at all times. Certainly the evacuation was an impressive and brave logistical feat, as was Dunkirk, but both represented strategic defeats.
There was confusion in Washington as a declining President Joe Biden and his senior military advisers had differing recollections of events: the President had claimed in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that the evacuation had been undertaken on the advice of the military, but this was rejected the following month when the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Commander of US Central Commander, General Frank McKenzie. The following day, Milley, McKenzie and General Austin Miller, Commander of US Forces—Afghanistan, made further criticism of Biden’s leadership in front of the House Armed Services Committee.
(If anyone thinks that President Biden’s cognitive impairment was merely a scurrilous Republican Party talking point, I strongly advise reading Original Sin: President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It is a terrifying, sobering and infuriating condemnation of the circle of family and aides around the President who ignored or lied about his mental decline and chose to flatter an ill man rather than face reality.)
Donahue’s role in the evacuation may have made him a target for the ire of President Trump, who is capable of being astonishingly and pointlessly vindictive. When he was nominated to be Commanding General, US Army Europe and Africa in November 2024, a hold was placed on his attendant promotion to full general by Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma because of “questions” over his involvement in the evacuation. It has also been reported by CNN that there is tension between Secretary Hegseth’s office and Donahue’s command, though, the broadcaster noted carefully, “not necessarily directly between the two men”. It went on to say that “any high-profile publicity the Army received in Europe—even when generally positive or seemingly on-message with Hegseth’s priorities” caused unhappiness, resentment and suspicion in the Pentagon.
If Donahue’s unexpected departure from a senior military position half-way through what would usually be a three-year term was an isolated occurrence, it would be possible to give the Department of Defense the benefit of the doubt and regard with scepticism rumours of tensions or political disputes in the highest ranks of the armed forces. But it could hardly be less isolated: the numbers alone demonstrate that Trump and Hegseth are purging the senior ranks of the military and are offering no clear reasons for doing so. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that their motivation is partly ideological intolerance, including a profound opposition to all kinds of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, a suspicion of women serving in senior command positions and straightforward partisan antagonism towards the Biden administration as a whole and anything which can characterised as a failure and attributed to the administration.
This mixes with Hegseth’s deeply unpleasant, limited, machismo-oozing mantra of “warfighting” and “warrior ethos”, expertly skewered and dissected on the History Does You Substack last year in an essay entitled “The Rise of American Bushido”. The Secretary of Defense’s conception of warfare is becoming darker, nastier, more aggressive and more overtly Christian nationalist; witness the prayer meeting he led at the Pentagon in March, when, in reference to Operation Epic Fury, the absurdly posturing name given to the conflict with Iran, he prayed:
Behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous. Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish… Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield, protect the innocent and blameless in their midst, make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.
This is not normal, and I see no reason not to say that it is not normal. Despite supposed notions of the separation of church and state—the First Amendment begins “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—religion has often played a substantial role in American public and political life. But it is much harder to find parallels with Cabinet secretaries talking about “breaking the teeth of the ungodly” or almost casually referring to the enemy as “wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them”.
My own view is that Trump and Hegseth want to eradicate from the highest levels of the armed forces anyone who might not agree with their conception of the United States, its foreign policy, its military and the tasks required of it. We know that President Trump places no value on professional advice because he has absolute confidence in his own judgement and instincts, and he also requires absolute, unquestioning personal, rather than institutional, loyalty from all subordinates. This undermines one of the fundamental purposes of an independent, professional military, which is to advise the President on freely, frankly and without bias. Trump doesn’t want that. He wants courtiers.
Given the purging spree that has taken place over the past eighteen months, I see no reason why General Donahue will be the last senior officer to leave his command early or against his will. There has been minimal pushback from a shamefully supine Congress, dominated as it currently is by the Republican Party, and Trump has yet to experience any adverse effects of unpopularity. Why would he stop now?
The first female Clerk of the House of Commons
When my old friend Tom Goldsmith announced in March that he would step down as Clerk of the House of Commons after three years in post—which seems a reasonable stint to me in what is a furiously pressured job in which you can feel very exposed and reliant on your own judgement and have to apply it often in a split second—there was much speculation, as there always is, in my old place of work about who would succeed him.
There used to be a strong degree of predictability about the clerkship, perhaps because talent management, as it would absolutely not have been known in the old Clerk’s Department, occurred at a lower level. Since 1900, there have been 21 Clerks of the House up to an including Goldsmith, and only two of them—Sir Malcolm Jack (2006-11) and Goldsmith—were not previously serving as Clerk Assistant, the second most senior role in the clerkly hierarchy and currently double-hatted (double-wigged?) as Managing Director of the Chamber and Participation Team. Jack was Clerk of Legislation when he became Clerk of the House, while Goldsmith was Principal Clerk of the Table Office, the part of the House Service which deals with parliamentary questions.
The current Clerk Assistant, Sarah Davies, has been in post for seven years now, and is the first woman to hold the position on a permanent basis. I worked for Sarah when she was Clerk of the European Scrutiny Committee in the mid-2010s, Sir Bill Cash seeming to have found his true calling in life as its Chairman; he had been a member of the committee from November 1998 until its demise and his departure from the House of Commons in May 2024, and chaired it from May 2010. From July 1985 to November 1998, he was a member of the ESC’s predecessor, the Select Committee on European Legislation, joining on 14 months after he was elected MP for Stafford at a by-election in May 1984—so he spent 39 years on the committee in its two iterations, nearly 14 of them as Chairman.
That was dedication. Sir Bill was always courteous and measured in tone, a thoughtful and considerate man as far as officials were concerned. But he lacked perspective: the fight against a federal Europe, against the ever-encroaching EEC and then the EU, against the Treaty of Maastricht and the Single Currency, was the spark that animated his public career and life, and it seemed never to occur to him that there were people for whom it was less important, less urgent, less grave and less threatening. But I digress.
It emerged this week that the 53rd Clerk of the House of Commons, taking up the post in October, will be for the first time a woman. Eve Samson is currently Clerk of the Journals, responsible for the Journal Office which keeps the formal records of the what the House of Commons does in the form of the Votes and Proceedings, which are then consolidated into the Journal of the House of Commons. It also acts as a collective procedural memory for the House, seeking out precedents and cautionary tales, and the Clerk of the Journals is the House’s primary expert authority on parliamentary privilege.
Eve will mark 40 years in the House of Commons Service later this year and has done almost everything. She clerked the Treasury Committee, the Business and Enterprise and Business, Innovation and Skills Committees, the Public Administration Committee, the European Scrutiny Committee and the Transport Committee, and was seconded to the Cabinet Office (1999-2002) as adviser on parliamentary procedure. She has also been Clerk of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Secretary of the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission and the Speaker’s Committee on IPSA and Clerk of the Committee on Standards and the Committee of Privileges, including when the latter investigated the conduct of Boris Johnson and accusations that he had intentionally misled the House over so-called “Partygate”.
The role of Clerk of the House of Commons is, to borrow from the late Jimmy Greaves, a game of two halves. The clerkly side of the job, the traditional part of it, is acting as the chief procedural and constitutional (but not legal, in the ordinary sense) adviser to the Speaker. If there is a difficult issue arising over privilege, or the sub judice resolution, or the authority of the House and its committees, or dealings with the House of Lords, the Speaker will ask the advice of the Clerk, who will provide his (or, now, her) best judgement based on extensive knowledge of procedure and practice, experience working in different parts of the House, and no small amount of political (but not party political) judgement.
The Clerk of the House, like the most recently recruited assistant clerk, has to be able to make Members feel confident that the advice they get will not be affected by their party membership or political affiliation, that a Labour Member would get the same advice as a Conservative Member, and a government backbencher the same as an opposition backbencher. That is fundamental to the job. A corollary of that is the Clerk, like every clerk working under him or her, must be able to tell Members no sometimes. The clerks do not make the rules (however much MPs might think they do), but they have a duty to enforce them, and that can lead to uncomfortable conversations. One of my most experienced, procedurally able and politically sensitive colleagues worked on the mantra to Members, implicit or explicit: I am here to help you do what you want to do, within the rules of the House.
But many issues are areas of judgement, when the Clerk can give the Speaker advice, saying, in effect, “This is what I would do in your position, given the facts and context and based on my experience and judgement”, and the Speaker is perfectly at liberty to do something else. Advice is just advice, and by definition it cannot be binding. Traditionally, very little of this was written down, as the Speaker and the Clerk will discuss significant or challenging issues extensively, refining positions over the course of their conversations, the Clerk sometimes inviting contributions from senior colleagues. At most, the written outcome might be a one- or two-page briefing note for the Speaker, but it may be as much an aide-mémoire as anything else, and would certainly not normally be an exhaustive recitation of the arguments on all sides from first principles.
Not long after he was elected, the current Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, informed Members that, in part as a reaction to some of the worst controversies of John Bercow’s time in the Chair (2009-19), he was establishing a procedure whereby the Clerk of the House could raise a flag over a decision he felt was particularly novel or departing from precedent in an especially serious way.
As Speaker of the House I am committed to transparency, but I am mindful that frank advice must be protected confidentially. To balance those principles, I have written to the Clerk of the House to establish a new procedure, modelled on the power of accounting officers to seek ministerial direction. The procedure will apply if I take a decision as Speaker that the Clerk of the House considers to comprise a substantial breach of the Standing Orders, or a departure from long-established conventions, without appropriate authorisation by the House itself. In such a case, the Clerk of the House will be empowered to place a statement of his views in the Library, and I will always make the House aware that that has been done.
This seemed to me a useful safety valve, the existence of which would in fact diminish its necessity.
(Anyone who wants to be reminded of why I thought Bercow was such a bad Speaker can read this article in The Critic.)
The second part of the Clerk’s role can be explained more succinctly but is as demanding in terms of time an attention. The Clerk of the House is also the Chief Executive of the House of Commons Service, with overall responsibility for a department of around 3,300 people and a budget of about half a billion pounds. With the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009, the ever-growing security threats to Parliament and ongoing scandals over bullying and harassment, the more generic “back office” functions are becoming more prominent and subject to greater scrutiny, and it is more important than ever to get these things right. An additional item perennially on the agenda is the Restoration and Renewal Progamme for the Palace of Westminster, a project so large and so important that it has paralysed many politicians and officials into inaction; it is difficult to know where to start.
This is the multifaceted role which Samson will assume in October. By coincidence, in November last year, it was announced that the next Clerk of the Parliaments, the equivalent office for the House of Lords, would be Chloe Mawson, then Clerk Assistant of the House of Lords. She formally succeeded Sir Simon Burton on 2 April 2026 as the first woman to be Clerk of the Parliaments, but it means that within the space of six months or so, both Houses will have appointed their first female Clerks. The upper House may claim bragging rights for having been in the lead, but it will give my former colleagues in both Houses something to needle each other about amiably.
It would be an exaggeration to say I know Eve well, but when I was still in the Commons I knew her about as well as I knew most of the 90-odd fellow clerks: well enough to talk to easily over coffee or at professional events. And I was certainly part of the Westminster team which she led to at least one international assembly, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly which met in Vilnius in June/July 2009. Equally, although I observed three Clerks of the House—Malcolm Jack, Robert Rogers and David Natzler—at reasonably close quarters, I did so at one remove. So it would feel presumptuous to make any sensible observations about how Eve will fare as Clerk of the House.
I can fairly say that Eve, like most of the best clerks when I was in the Commons, is fiercely bright: she read English at King’s College, Cambridge, has written frequently about Parliament and been part of the editorial team for Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice. She is one of the most eminent authorities on parliamentary privilege, which can be a fiendishly complex subject despite deriving from a seemingly straightforward provision, Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689, which states “That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament”. Certainly former colleagues still in the Commons have often attested to her formidable mastery of the subject, and even if it may seem recondite, it shares with a number of issues of procedure considerable complexity and requires learning, experience and fine judgement.
Being very clever is not in itself enough to guarantee success as Clerk of the House—though I’ve never known one who wasn’t—but Eve also has a lot of experience in what you might call the more ‘inward-facing’ jobs in the House: Standards and Privileges, the Speaker’s Committees on the Electoral Commission and IPSA, and Clerk of the Journals. These are the places not generally in the public eye where some of the most sensitive problems can arise, and require the Clerk of the House to be able to keep half a dozen plates spinning at once, often without much or any notice.
The Clerk’s relationship with the Speaker is critical, naturally. The Speaker will have been involved in the selection, of course, usually chairing the final selection panel, and it would be perverse and pointless for the other members of the process to try to appoint someone to whom the Speaker objected. As it happens—I think this is right—the current Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has known Eve since he was first elected to the House in 1997 and appointed to the Trade and Industry Committee, of which she was then Clerk. Sir Lindsay is also not, in my experience, a difficult man to get on with if you play a straight bat, and I was his Private Secretary for a couple of years when he was Chairman of Ways and Means and Deputy Speaker.
Perhaps I could wind up with a few issues which I think may loom large on the Clerk’s to-do list over the next two or three years.
Multi-party politics: we are probably less than three years from a general election (or, to put it less dramatically, approaching the half-way marker of the current Parliament), and the outcome of that election could, if current opinion polls are broadly reflected, change the order of British politics more profoundly than anything since the Labour Party outperformed the fractured Liberals in 1922 to become the second-largest party in the House of Commons. I am aware of the risk of seeming like someone who cannot face or absorb the consequences of change, but I am still not entirely certain that the current flux will be tomorrow’s reality or that Reform UK has the legs or the weight to cause seismic change, but the House of Commons authorities need to think through the consequences of a hung Parliament which almost becomes the norm. They will also have to factor in Andy Burnham’s positive if so far vague noises about electoral reform. Our Parliament is predicated on a very binary, two-party, government v opposition political model, which has when necessary adapted to accommodate a relatively strong third party, but if we were regularly seeing four or five parties with similar strengths and inevitable coalitions, many of the foundations of how Parliament works would have to be reconsidered, from the allocation of seats on select committees to the utility of the a group designated as HM Loyal Opposition. I don’t doubt it could be done, but the parliamentary authorities should have wargamed some different scenarios rather than adapting on the hoof, and it will require that particularly clerkly frame of mind—orderly, methodical, slightly pedantic, experienced, pragmatic and occasionally imaginative—to make sure no obvious problems are overlooked.
“Modernising” the House of Commons: when Labour came to office, the then-Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, whom I found pretty reliably useless and bargain-basement, established the Modernisation Committee, chaired by the Leader of the House, to “consider[s] reforms to House of Commons procedures, standards, and working practices”. It was very much inspired by the previous Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons which was set up under Blair in June 1997, also chaired by the Leader of the House and which was the origin of many reforms both good and bad. I’m instinctively distrustful of the loaded word “modernisation”: you wouldn’t get it in to the title of a bill, or at least you wouldn’t in my day. I think most of what Powell wanted to do was wrong and misguided, and her successor, long-time whip Sir Alan Campbell, is at least more measured. But I also have concerns about “modernisation” in a House of Commons of which more than half the Members are newly elected; with the best will in the world, with a nod to Chesterton’s Fence, how can Members who have only been in the Commons for 18 months or two years reliably or sensibly judge what works and what doesn’t? I also, simply, don’t trust the government, any government, to determine changes to the legislature, as ministers have no stake in more effective parliamentary scrutiny. Moreover, many of the ideas being batted around, while portrayed being for the convenience of Members would likely have the effect of diminishing the role of the Chamber, which few enough Members seem to value: remote working, proxy voting, call lists for speaking in debates. As the Speaker’s chief procedural and constitutional adviser, I do think the Clerk has some duty to the House as a whole and its purpose as a scrutiny body as well as a legislative one.
Harassment and bullying: the way the House deals with this kind of conduct has come a long way in the past 10 years or so—when I was still a clerk there were examples of utterly unacceptable behaviour by Members towards House staff being brushed under the carpet and allowances made, about some of which I am still and will always be angry beyond words—and the establishment of the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme and the Independent Expert Panel represent a substantial step forwards. But it is not an area in which the House authorities can ever declare victory and rest on their laurels. Public perception remains a huge problem, and there will always be a struggle over proportionality and perspective. Trying to formulate some notion of “reasonable” and “unreasonable” behaviour is very difficult, but it clearly cannot be the case that the gravity of an offence is determined entirely by the victim. Does bullying exist? Unquestionably so. Should those responsible be subject to a procedure which can end in sanctions? Yes, absolutely. Does every sharp word or raised voice constitute bullying and/or harassment?I would say no, it is qualified by context and intent. Have I been told to fuck off my Members of Parliament? Yes, once. Did it represent bullying and/or harassment? No, in no way. Was I offended, hurt or traumatised? No, a busy MP having a bad day overreacted to a stressful situation. Should members of staff be expected just to endure it? No, not at all. Finding the balance between these different things is hard, but it needs to be done and should always be a work in progress.
Restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster: however you choose to undertake this project, it is going to be eye-wateringly expensive, because the Palace is a Grade 1 listed building, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Design and a high Victorian construction which, while sophisticated for its time, has not always proved brilliantly adaptable. One exacerbating factor is that no-one wants to have his or her name on any paperwork—so there is a terrible temptation towards hesitancy, exasperation and ultimately the risk of the Place. I acted as secretary of a small project board examining the mechanical and electrical services, which was warned of potential, almost certain failures in the heating systems; and that was nearly 20 years ago. Collectively, the leadership of both Houses need to grip this, make some decisions and stand by them.
In any event, I wish Eve well as the 53rd Clerk of the House since Robert de Melton in 1363, and I hope she enjoys the role too.
How are the mighty fallen
I mentioned this in a note on Substack, but it bears reiteration. Assuming you accept the appointment of Sir Robert Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons on 3 April 1721 as the beginning of what we call the office of Prime Minister, then the longest-serving PM is Walpole himself, lasting 20 years 314 days until his resignation in 1742. The shortest-serving premier, whose administration could have been avoided in is entirety with a decent-length holiday, is Liz Truss, who managed 49 days before being forced to resign in October 2022.
There have been 58 Prime Ministers in total, and we know we will soon have a 59th, probably Andy Burnham. If there are no other contenders for the Labour leadership, and Burnham inherits the crown shortly after 16 July, then Sir Keir Starmer will stay where he is in the overall ranking, at 43rd just behind the Earl of Aberdeen (1852-55) and just ahead of Sir Anthony Eden (1955-57). Longevity in office does not on its own guarantee great achievements; nevertheless, when he took on the role in July 2024 with a huge majority in the House of Commons. What happened will be debated over the years, but it is peculiar that above Starmer in the length of service stakes are luminaries of British politics like George Grenville (40th), Henry Addington (31st), the Duke of Portland (30th) and Henry Pelham (8th). As the very deaf 82-year-old Duke of Wellington exclaimed when the members of the new government headed by the Earl of Derby were read out in the House of Lords in February 1852, “Who? Who?”