The greasy pole goes up and down: but is it the only choice?
Most MPs aspire to a ministerial career, but other options are available, from the serious to the absurd
The idea that ministerial office should not be the only measure of career progression in Parliament has been bandied around for a long time. The landmark report of the House of Commons Reform Committee, Rebuilding the House, was noting an existing school of thought in 2009 when it said that “it is crucial to create a parliamentary career path focussed on select committee work”, and that has to an extent come to pass. The introduction of House-wide election and extra salary for most committee chairs made the positions more attractive, and has gone hand-in-hand with a greater public profile for the work of those committees.
This week has seen the highs and lows of “alternative career paths”. After the ministerial changes made by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there are currently four departmental select committees without chairs: Treasury (Mel Stride becoming work and pensions secretary); Health and Social Care (Jeremy Hunt becoming chancellor); Education (Robert Halfon becoming minister of state in the same department); and Transport (Huw Merriman likewise becoming minister of state in the department he scrutinised). All of these are, of course, vacancies reserved for Conservative MPs under the arrangements based on the composition of the House. There are already several candidates who have announced their intention to stand.
At the other end of the spectrum, the former health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced yesterday that he would be taking part in ITV’s ratings-friendly reality television show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! He had been considering putting himself forward for the chair of the Treasury committee, but, in surely one of the starkest choices a politician has made in recent times, opted for the rigours of the Australian outback rather than the longeurs of the committee corridor. He will be in diverse company, joining, among other “celebrities”, Boy George, Chris Moyles and Mike Tindall.
Hancock’s decision—an unexpected gift from a clear blue sky for satirists and sketch writers everywhere—has not attracted much praise. He was swiftly suspended from the parliamentary Conservative party, the chief whip, Simon Hart, deeming his potential absence from the Commons for many weeks as “serious enough” to deserve sanction. The deputy chairman of Hancock’s own constituency party remarked grimly that he looked forward to seeing his Member of Parliament “eating a kangaroo’s penis”, while the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group called the decision “sickening” and noted that Hancock “oversaw the UK having one of the highest death tolls in the world from Covid-19 whilst breaking his own lockdown rules”. A spokesman for the prime minister commented primly that it was “unlikely” that Rishi Sunak would be watching the programme.
Of course Hancock’s decision, while prima facie demonstrating a staggering lack of judgement, is not unprecedented. He is not even the first sitting Member of Parliament to appear on I’m A Celebrity…, as Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary, took part in the 12th series in 2012. She did not inform the chief whip, Sir George Young, and, a few days after her participation was revealed in November 2012, the whip was withdrawn. Although Dorries was the first contestant to be voted off the programme, she was not readmitted to the parliamentary Conservative party until May 2013, having argued, impenetrably and implausibly, that the whip had not in fact been withdrawn, merely “temporarily suspended”.
Dorries’s reputation was not enhanced by the furore, but, in truth, her stock was not especially high. She had previously sailed close to the wind with parliamentary allowances, and had been forced to admit that her popular blog was “70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact”. It would hardly have mattered, another scandal for a marginal backbench figure, until Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 and appointed her as a junior minister responsible for mental health. (It was not quite as preposterous as it seemed, as Dorries had spent a few years working as a nurse in her younger days.)
She was promoted to minister of state for health in 2020 then, to widespread astonishment, became secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport in September 2021. It was an appointment which seemed to owe everything to her fierce loyalty to the prime minister, and her lack of grip on her brief was cruelly and publicly exposed: in front of the Commons culture committee she demonstrated her ignorance of how Channel 4 and Channel 5 were funded, and clashed furiously with the SNP’s John Nicolson over a Twitter spat she had had with LBC’s James O’Brien. Yet she remained in the cabinet until Johnson stepped down, and considered her own bid for the leadership earlier this year.
Dorries’s rise from publicity-hungry outback exile to cabinet minister should not, perhaps, be regarded as a model for Hancock. Scottish Labour’s Kezia Dugdale appeared on I’m A Celebrity… in 2017 while the Scottish Parliament was sitting and even escaped punishment from her whips, but she had already been party leader and was clearly on an exit trajectory from front-line politics. George Galloway was a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother in early 2006 while sitting as Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and encountered stiff criticism from political opponents, but he had always been a controversial figure and, despite having unseated Labour’s rising star Oona King in 2005 he was marginalised and scrabbling to drum up support from a ragbag of opponents of the Iraq War and the more conservative elements of the Muslim population.
It was suggested that Hancock was disappointed not to receive a ministerial post when Sunak became prime minister. On the day of Sunak’s appointment, he was captured on camera being awkwardly ignored by the new premier. But he had already seen his reputation battered after resigning as health secretary for breaking lockdown regulations and having an extra-marital affair with an old university friend who had become a non-executive director of his department (leaked CCTV footage of them embracing and kissing did nothing for his dignity). A WhatsApp message from Boris Johnson revealed that the then-prime minister had described Hancock during the pandemic as “totally fucking hopeless”, and a comeback appearance, clad in tech-bro black turtleneck, at the Capital Jingle Bell Ball was widely mocked.
Yet ambition has seemed to continue to flicker, however haplessly, in Hancock. Last October, it was announced that he had been offered a role as special representative on financial innovation and climate change for the UN Economic Commission on Africa. This seemed to touch a number of current issues and offer a degree of dignity in rehabilitation. However, as a sitting legislator, he was ineligible for the post, and four days later the offer was withdrawn (though many suggested that the NGO community had lobbied hard against his candidacy, one describing him cuttingly as “a disgraced politician whose competence has been questioned in his own country and who knows little about Africa”).
Is this another—admittedly bizarre—attempt at regaining a public profile? In his defence, Hancock has stated that he is motivated by the opportunity to talk about dyslexia, with which he was diagnosed while at Oxford. He has campaigned for greater awareness of the condition and in March introduced a bill into the Commons to prescribe screening for dyslexia in primary schools. But he would have to be staggeringly naïf to think that he will have profound conversations about reading around the I’m A Celebrity… campfire rather than enduring ever-more-humiliating Bush Tucker Trials. Moreover, his constituents are entitled to feel aggrieved that their representative in Parliament will be voluntarily absent from all Commons business for an unspecified number of weeks. I am deeply relaxed about MPs having outside interests, but the red line must surely be that they do not interfere with or limit their fundamental capacity to carry out their parliamentary duties, and Hancock clearly fails that test by absenting himself to the Antipodes. If he is to revive his career, he must now be looking beyond the legislature for his next role.
So we turn to the rash of elections for committee chairs. In the pre-2010 days, these vacancies would have been filled by the whips (the “Usual Channels”) with candidates carefully selected to balance ability, plausibility and loyalty. Now, however, would-be chairs have to set out their stall before all their fellow MPs. And each committee has attracted a number of aspirants of various backgrounds.
The most heavyweight post is that of chair of the Treasury committee. The opportunity to cross-examine the chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England, and be a go-to commentator on economic policy, is hard to resist and gives the incumbent a high profile in Parliament and outside. So far four candidates have declared. Kit Malthouse and Andrea Leadsom are both former cabinet ministers. Malthouse was in the top team only for three and half months, but has served in junior posts at the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Housing and the Home Office. He is a qualified chartered accountant and was Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing. Leadsom, by contrast, began as a debt trade for Barclays Bank’s investment division, moving on to governance and marketing roles in fund management. She was a member of the Treasury committee from 2010 to 2014 before joining the government as economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister. Both have experienced the highest echelons of Whitehall and know politics at its toughest level.
The other candidates are Harriett Baldwin and John Baron. Baldwin was a managing director at JP Morgan Chase, spending more than 20 years at the firm, and, like Leadsom, was economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister from 2015 to 2016. She then held ministerial positions at the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, and has been a member of the Treasury committee since 2020. Baron, a perennial backbencher with a rebellious streak, was an infantry officer before becoming a merchant banker, and served on the front bench in opposition. He would be the natural choice for mischievous Labour MPs but would make the government whips uneasy.
Transport has six challengers: Jack Brereton, Jackie Doyle-Price, Katherine Fletcher, Karl McCartney, Chris Loder and Iain Stewart. All but Brereton and Loder have held ministerial office, an indication of the importance of select committee chairmanships. The policy area includes High Speed Rail 2 and a key element of the government’s levelling-up strategy, connectivity having been identified as a critical factor in increasing prosperity in the White Paper crafted by Michael Gove and Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England.
Education sees five hopefuls in the lists. Jonathan Gullis is an outspoken former minister; Caroline Ansell was a French teacher for many years and qualified as a headteacher; Brendan Clarke-Smith taught at the International School in Romania and served as an education minister; David Simmonds has a background in local government and is a serving member of the committee; and Robin Walker, who sits for his father’s old seat of Worcester, was minister for school standards. On paper, any would make a respectable chair.
The health and social care committee has enjoyed a high profile under both Jeremy Hunt and Stephen Dorrell (each a former secretary of state) and attracted attention for its scrutiny of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Five more MPs seek the chair. Dr Caroline Johnson is a consultant paediatrician and was briefly a health minister; Stephen Hammond is a Commons veteran, first elected in 2005, who was also a minister of the Department of Health as well as holding senior party roles; Steve Brine was Jeremy Hunt’s PPS before serving as minister for primary care; Anne Marie Morris, a corporate lawyer, was, interestingly, a lockdown sceptic; while James Morris, a small businessman, has served as a senior whip and a health minister. It is striking, therefore, that four of the five candidates have been ministers at the department they now want to scrutinise.
It must surely be a sign of a healthy culture of scrutiny and accountability that the leadership of select committees is so fiercely contested. The additional salary of nearly £16,000 is no doubt one attraction, but probably a minor one. What is more noticeable is that former ministers seem to regard these positions as, at worst, acceptable consolation prizes. We may not yet be at a stage where MPs choose select committee work over ministerial careers, but the needle has certainly moved since the publication of the Wright Report in 2009.
Most Members of Parliament still come to Westminster with the idea of ministerial preferment at least on their minds. Most will still favour roles in government over everything else. But with only around 100 positions available at any one time, it is both sensible and healthy that other responsibilities attract the ambitious and able. Matt Hancock must be wondering, after this week’s excoriating media coverage, whether setting his sights on reality television rather than the select committee system was, in fact, the right call.