Your host tonight: the honourable Member

There are now six sitting MPs who host regular shows on broadcast media; it is not against the rules, but it is unwise and damaging to MPs and the Commons in general

Politicians have always enjoyed a close relationship with the media, whether it is fawning obsession or virulent hatred. Some Members of Parliament are exceptionally gifted performers—though it is less common than you might expect for so public-facing a role—and the opposite path, from the press to the House of Commons, is alos very well-trodden. The central importance of communications in government and opposition, blamed by reflex on Sir Tony Blair and New Labour but with much deeper roots, means that media skills of all kinds are now absolutely essential and have just increased the opportunities for journalists and presenters to work in Whitehall and Westminster, and for MPs, civil servants and political staff to go the other way. It has only repointed the wall around the Westminster bubble.

For all that, it is unprecedented that six MPs have their own dedicated shows on TV or radio. It may not be many—one per cent of the membership of the House—but these are all (for the moment) sitting Members of Parliament supposedly carrying out at least the functions of a constituency MP, and sometimes with additional responsibilities. It is also worth noting the dominance of new broadcasters in employing these eminent parliamentarians.

The dubious half-dozen are as follows. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con, North Somerset), surely the world’s least likely television presenter, anchors an hour-long show, State of the Nation, nightly on GB News. The same channel carries Friday Morning and Saturday Morning with Esther and Phil, hosted by married couple Esther McVey (Con, Tatton) and Philip Davies (Con, Shipley). Liverpool-born McVey, of course, was a GMTV presenter before she chose a political career (Davies, the ultimate Yorkshireman, wanted to be a journalist but was, by his own admission, “too shy”, so he found a living in management for Asda).

GB News’s most recent acquisition from the green benches, in what must, I suppose, be described as a coup for the broadcaster, is the Conservative Party’s deputy chairman, Lee Anderson (Con, Ashfield), who has recently started presenting a beyond-parody Friday evening show called Lee Anderson’s Real World. Anderson is the most local of local Members: born into a coal mining family in Ashfield, he spent a decade working underground at collieries across Nottinghamshire and was a Labour member of Ashfield District Council from 2015 to 2018 as well as office manager for local Labour MP Gloria De Piero (see below). He joined the Conservative Party because of what he perceived as increasing hard-left influence in the Labour Party.

It is notable that GB News seems a popular destination for retired politicians too, whether their departure was voluntary or enforced. It finds space for Michael Portillo, Nigel Farage, Gloria de Piero and former first minister of Northern Ireland, Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee. Three are perfectly good.

Perhaps the most eye-catching debut has been that of former culture secretary Nadine Dorries (Con, Mid-Bedfordshire). After a toe-in-the-water as a guest presenter, in February this year she began hosting her own show, Friday Night with Nadine, on Talk TV. In some ways it was an obvious move: Dorries had been in front of the camera in 2010 as the replacement for Iain Duncan Smith on Tower Block of Commons, in which four MPs had to live for a time on a housing estate, taking part after Duncan Smith’s wife had been diagnosed with cancer. She then appeared as a contestant in 2012’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, although she was the first to be voted off. She was no stranger to news studios, reliable for giving frank opinions uncomplicated by nuance, and her projected self-confidence must have ticked another box on Talk TV’s list. Her first guest was the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, to whose cause she remains devoted, and the episode is a startling artefact which is worth watching: it is a study in fan-girling and righteous, vicarious anger at the nobodies who had brought Johnson low the previous summer. No doubt it appeals to a specific demographic GB News wants to capture.

The last MP to host his own show is David Lammy (Lab, Tottenham), who has presented a radio show on LBC on Sunday mornings since last year; before that, from 2020 to 2022, he appeared on Saturday afternoons. Because it is on radio for a formerly London-centric station, Lammy’s media efforts have been more low-key than his TV colleagues, but Lammy is also shadow foreign secretary, a senior member of Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet.

These unusual sidelines have been in the spotlight over the last few weeks because two of the Members, Rees-Mogg and Dorries, are still very passionate supporters of Boris Johnson, whose conduct was severely criticised by the House of Commons Committee of Privileges, prompting Johnson to resign as an MP. They both spoke out in uncompromising terms about the committee’s inquiry, accusing it of being partial and unfair. “Kangaroo court” was a commonly deployed phrase, and the criticism was so pointed that the committee issued a special report in June, approved by the House in July, which ‘named and shamed’ those whom it felt had articulated sentiments so negative and likely to undermine due process that they should in the future be considered a contempt of Parliament. In its special report, it noted that:

This matter is made more difficult because two of the Members mounting the most vociferous attacks on the Committee did so from the platform of their own hosted TV shows.

Indeed, neither had held back. Rees-Mogg, inevitably and characteristically, had veiled some of his barbs in the dark, heavy serge of his courtly Victoriana, but as early as March, Dorries had launched an attack from her Talk TV bully pulpit.

I don’t think there was ever a world in which this committee was going to find Boris innocent. The committee have demonstrated very clearly that they have decided early on to find him guilty. The committee knew that they had not a shred of evidence to prove that he misled with intent. They changed the rules, lowered the bar and inserted the vague term reckless into the terms of reference. Boris Johnson will be found guilty by this kangaroo court. There is no doubt about that and that in itself will be a disgraceful and possibly unlawful conclusion with serious reputational consequences.

These are very grave accusations for a former cabinet minister to make against a committee of the House responsible for the supervision and safeguarding of parliamentary privilege.

Some of the more fastidious among you may be wondering if all of this media preening is quite proper. There are a number of issues. Perhaps the most obvious is impartiality. The rules of Ofcom, the media regulator, allow presenters to express their own political views, so long as other perspectives are given time as well, but do not permit politically active figures to act as newsreaders except in “exceptional” circumstances which can be “editorially justified”. Having received a number of complaints, Ofcom has recently opened inquiries into an episode of State of the Nation in which Rees-Mogg covered breaking news about the trial of former US president Donald Trump and an edition of Talk TV’s Richard Tice, hosted by guest presenter Alex Salmond, which is accused of breaching the regulations on “due impartiality”. There is a third inquiry ongoing into an episode of Saturday Morning with Esther and Phil on GB News.

Ofcom knows that the new reality may require a new formulation of its rules. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, a former Whitehall permanent secretary, said:

One area which has sparked vigorous debate recently—and which some argue stretches the principle of due impartiality to its limits—is the rise of the politician as the presenter. We also have a duty to ensure our rules remain effective and we conduct reviews of our code when needed. Given the rise in the number of current affairs programmes presented by politicians, and recent public interest in this issue, we’ve launched new research to build a comprehensive picture of audience attitudes towards these programmes.

On this point, I am relatively relaxed. Despite their sloganeering, GB News and Talk TV are, I think, recognised by most viewers as what they are, comment networks with a distinctive political stance (indeed, looking at their roster of presenters, it is hard to see how anyone could think anything else), but Ofcom is wise to review its regulations to reflect an unprecedented situation. I am, however, aware that I am “very online” and part of the “Westminster bubble”, and that most voters devote a fractional amount of their daily attention to politics, so clearly networks must not be allowed to present themselves as impartial deliverers of straight fact.

In any event, the problem is a wider one. Trust in the media in general is dreadfully low, especially when compared to other countries; one recent poll by King’s College London put it at a miserable 13 per cent, less than half that even of the United States, the Mount Doom of polarised democratic politics, and that has fallen fast, having been measured at a still-not-very-encouraging 33 per cent in 2017. But these new channels are reaching meaningful chunks of the electorate. After a rocky start, GB News is the third-most watched news channel (after the BBC and Sky, albeit a long way behind), being seen by 3.44 million viewers in June 2023, while its younger rival Talk TV was seen by 2.13 million. These are not tiny figures, and the channels are no longer niche. But the overall picture seems to be that people watch with distrust or at least cynicism.

Is this a problem? After all, politicians have always appealed over the heads of their parliamentary colleagues to a wider audience with guest appearances on television and radio, and by writing opinion columns for newspapers. GB News and Talk TV are arguably just a different format of that same thing. And editorial control over a newspaper column is not really much stricter than that over a television programme, with the proviso that trust is so low that neither is believed by all that many people.

The other criticism which voters will inevitably and understandably have is that these media careers are keeping MPs away from their primary duties as elected representatives (whatever you think those duties are). Dorries is hardly flying the flag here: last week, LBC revealed that the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire—who, enraged that she was not awarded the peerage which she believed she had been promised, declared she would resign from the Commons “with immediate effect”, but has not yet done so, more than a month later—had not spoken in the House for a year, nor had she tabled any questions or taken part in any other proceedings except to vote. (I provided some commentary for LBC, seen at the link above.)

Nevertheless, she has been paid her full salary of £84,754 as an MP and received a partial advance for a new book from Harper Collins of £20,500 for work between April and May. She is eligible for a ministerial severance package of £16,876.25, though it is not known if she has claimed it, and she has yet to declare her earnings from Talk TV to the registrar of members’ financial interests, James Davies. She also failed to inform the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) before she took the role at Talk TV to seek their guidance, and ACOBA has therefore referred the matter to the Cabinet Office. For comparison, Rees-Mogg, who has registered his income properly, receives just over £29,000 a month from GB News. Perhaps Dorries is not being paid—the channel’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, is said to be concerned at how much it is costing—but it would be good if the public knew for certain.

Let’s be realistic. These television and radio commitments are very far from full-time. Dorries is an egregious case, almost defiantly so, but there is no evidence that Rees-Mogg, for example, is not pulling his weight in terms of parliamentary contributions since taking on his additional media role. Lammy, equally, hosts only one radio show a week, and recorded the time commitment as 27 hours per month, which seems a modest amount of his waking hours which shouldn’t impede his ability to represent the 76,000 electors of Tottenham. There is nothing inherent in presenting a television or radio show which renders an MP unable to carry out his or her constituency work satisfactorily.

More broadly—and I’m aware some people take radically different views—I’m very comfortable with the principle of MPs being allowed outside interests, whether it is working as a general practitioner or writing semi-learned books of biography or political history. I don’t see being a Member of Parliament as being a job, with set or even maximum or minimum working hours, so much as a public service and perhaps a vocation. Since the economic crisis of the late 2000s, we are all supposedly part of the “gig economy”, all of us at least thinking about a “side hustle”, and there is no reason why MPs should be exempted. There are, for me, only two main restrictions: firstly, payment must be absolutely transparent and must conform to certain rules, such as the 1995 resolution banning paid advocacy; and, secondly, the outside interests must not impinge on a Member’s ability to carry out the basic functions of the role. This is broadly the status quo set out in Erskine May, and, I would add, one of the glories of Parliament is that there is the mechanism for a performance review every four or five years in the form of a general election, at which voters may reject an MP who is not to their liking or satisfaction.

(“Ah yes,” people will say, “but people really vote for party labels, so there’s no genuine performance management.” Well, that might be true in practice, but the opportunity is there, and if the electorate stubbornly endorses individual Members of whatever quality and diligence on the basis of party label alone, that is their, or our, fault. We cannot complain about MPs not being up to the standard we want and then deny ourselves the one mechanism to change them.)

I think I would object to an MP having an effectively full-time “second job” (an inaccurate and misleading term which I don’t like), and the days have long passed in which, for example, Iain Macleod (Con, Enfield West), having left the cabinet, could be editor of The Spectator (1963-65) and a director of Lombards Bank; or his colleague Quintin Hogg (Con, St Marylebone), former Viscount Hailsham, could maintain a more or less full-time legal practice while on the opposition front bench between 1964 and 1970.

But something which demands only part of a Member’s time is in my view wholly defensible. It allows MPs to keep more in touch with the world beyond Westminster, even if that is only the law courts or the board rooms of the Square Mile, it maintains any specialist knowledge they may have (almost all disciplines date horribly quickly now) and contributes to them being simply more complete human beings. We complain about identikit professional politicians, yet we want to close off the one most obvious avenue to mitigate that problem. There comes a point at which we, the public, have to be grown-up and accept we cannot have everything on the menu. I would also add that, having spent many years haunting the corridors of Westminster, I am as aware as anyone of the faults of the House of Commons as an institution and of MPs as individuals, and I think you would get a long way down the list before you reached “not spending enough time working” as a cause of any deficiencies.

That, however, is a wider debate for a different day. Because it seems to me, though I find the logic of my position difficult to pin down, that presenting a television or radio show is of a different quality from being a doctor or a barrister or a lecturer. It’s not the time commitment, which is modest. It’s not the outside income, which, if properly registered (Ms Dorries), is not an issue. It’s not the overtly political and partisan nature of the work, because I have no problem with MPs, for example, writing newspaper columns. It must be something to do with the quiddity of the medium, the more visible and potent nature of television’s bully pulpit.

Even if GB News and Talk TV still have comparatively small audiences—it’s not as if Rees-Mogg has taken over Graham Norton’s Friday night BBC slot—television has an immediacy and a superficial clarity which print media cannot match. I am sufficiently supportive of the bare brutality of market forces not to believe that having a place on these networks is “unjust”; any MP can offer himself or herself to a network for such a role. I dare say there are Left-ish Labour Members who might pass muster for Novara Live or a similar outlet. The idea of MPs being television presenters just seems somehow unseemly. Brian Walden had the sense of propriety to resign his Birmingham Ladywood seat before becoming anchor of Weekend World in 1977, and even he went on to be arguably too close to Lady Thatcher; when he left Weekend World, eventually fronting The Walden Interview on ITV, he was replaced by Matthew Parris (Con, West Derbyshire), who similarly relinquished his parliamentary career; and John Freeman (Lab, Watford) had left the House at the 1955 general election before he began presenting the iconic Face to Face in 1959 and Panorama in 1961.

There is a difference that none of these sitting MPs is seeking a full-time career in journalism. In any event, only McVey, and conceivably Lammy, in a different way, is at all suited to it. Their media roles are simply another form of amplification. Although television audiences are set to contract as habits and technologies change, the immediacy of television and broadcast media more generally, the power of its imagery and its ability to compress and distil news make it much more popular than print. Traditional television itself is losing out to more flexible and agile forms of digital communication, but the MPs we have been discussing enjoy a significant advantage over their colleagues when it comes to relating information and opinion quickly to a large audience. There, I think, lies the kernel of the issue.

So what needs to be done? It would be impractical and unfair for the Commons to say that MPs can not present TV programmes. I would suffer no distress at, say, Jesse Norman (Con, Hereford and South Herefordshire) fronting a documentary series about Edmund Burke, or Dan Jarvis (Lab, Barnsley Central) on the recent deployments of the Parachute Regiment. And to devise a form of words which addressed the specific problem we’re looking at in general terms would be difficult and probably futile. Nevertheless, if the permissibility of outside interests is to be reviewed—Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to all-but-abolish “second jobs” if Labour wins the election—then this is a matter which should probably be included. Equally, Ofcom’s proposed revision of its stance as the regulator will no doubt encompass this kind of media work.

Ultimately, I think the sort of work which Dorries, Rees-Mogg et al. are doing simply doesn’t pass the smell test. Yes, that’s subjective and personal and vague, but it still matters, and it will colour the opinion of the electorate too. It comes down to public trust, as most things do at the moment: the apparent advantage these MPs gain will not be well-regarded and may further damage the reputation of Members of Parliament and the House of Commons as an institution. There might have been a time when the matter could have safely been left to the good judgement of Members, but I think we are no longer in that time, or have left it for the moment, at any rate. That said, given the low regard in which the media is held, it is hard to say which discipline taints the other. As Orson Welles said of his feud with critic Pauline Kael, “Never touch shit, even with the gloves on. The gloves only get shittier, but the shit doesn't get any glovier.”