Coffee House Shots
Why has Starmer taken down a portrait of Thatcher?
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just 12 pounds and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Alongside that, you get a 20-pound John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shops, the Spectator's daily politics book cast. I'm Megan Macquarie and I'm joined today by Katie Bowles and Isabelle Hardman. Isabelle, to start us off, can you share some of the fallout from the health news that we had yesterday? Yeah, so there's been another development in this story, which is all about the government's preventive health agenda and trying to save the NHS money and save lives by getting to people early before they get sick, preferably, or before they develop certain habits, like smoking, that will make them sick. And yesterday on the podcast, you were discussing the plan to ban smoking in outdoor settings, such as beer gardens and small parks. And today, we're getting more details on these more proactive health MOTs, which have been offered for a while, particularly those in their 50s and over through GPs, but this is a much more proactive scheme where the NHS will be going into offices, pubs, building sites to weigh people and measure them in an attempt to prevent cardiovascular disease, strokes, architects and so on. And this is quite interesting. I mean, I think probably for people of a certain generation, those of us who are kids in the 90s, it probably reminds us of being weighed at school and all the sort of trauma that went with that. But it is something that the government is hoping and is spending £7 million on, which isn't loads, will save a lot of money down the line because people can then be referred to NHS weight loss clinics and other services that will help them improve their health. And I think one of the things that the government is going to have to tackle in the next few months, is that if you make as strong an argument as kids started yesterday when I asked about the smoking proposals, saying, you know, my starting point on this is that 80,000 deaths are caused by smoking every year, that's a huge burden to the NHS, you know, that's a very compelling argument, even if you have plenty of reposts, as for instance, Kate Andrews does, to that argument, if you have that starting point, you cannot just focus on smoking because obesity has a far greater cost in terms of lives and money to the NHS. And it's obviously much more complex, you know, smoking does cause deadly illnesses. Eating per se does not, but eating too much and being inactive do. So the government has to have a less blunt approach than, you know, you can't ban food and neither can you ban foods over certain calories because that doesn't work either. But there has to be some very concerted action that personally I think we'll have to go beyond just health MOTs to try to tackle the fact that we have a very unhealthy, overweight and inactive population and that's going to take ministers down a lot of roads that they're going to feel even more uncomfortable about than banning smoking in beer gardens. Yeah, I think Isabelle's entirely correct, which is it really does beg the question of where else does the Labour government go, particularly in the coming years, because it all obviously links back to Rich Reuse saying there's no money, you've got these departmental spending cuts and you have an NHS, which is very much under pressure, you have a huge welfare bill, including out of work and I think, you know, ministers look at that out of work welfare bill and see health as one of the main factors for the number of people currently out of work. So it is, I think, seen as not just a desirable thing to do, but something they have to do in terms of trying to get the population fit in more healthy. And I think, given Wes Street, he's going for this preventative approach. And also, Kias Dhamma has openly said he's happy to have a fight in favour of the nanny state. You know, people want to argue for that. It does mean, I think, possibilities are opened that would not be perhaps there under a Tory government. And Katie Parliament's back next week, in Saturday's episode, we're going to be talking about the Tory leadership contest, but before we get there, can you tell us a bit more about what's going on with select committees at the moment? You could say, partly because we still have many, many months to go on the Tory leadership contest, that the more pressing election is the select committee chairs. And actually, given the size of the Labour Party and how small the Tory Party is, perhaps some of the more effective opposition will come from the select committee chairs just in terms of the scrutiny, some Labour to their own party, depending who is picked, some Tory, some Lib Dem, not reform, they're not going to any places, and they're not very happy about it, you know, will apply to Secretary of State in terms of their departments. And Isabelle has written about this a lot, but normally, I think in recent years at least, being a select committee chair, as seen as a role you do when you are not quite states, but you have a lot of experience to bring to the job. So you had, you know, Rachel Reeves in the Corbyn years was a select committee chair. It's often what you do when you want to contribute to the Commons, but for whatever reason, maybe you've been missed out in promotion, maybe you've been in government, and you're now looking for, you know, a place to add that while not serving, because your party's in or out or doesn't work for you. You go. And what's quite interesting at the moment is there are a few 2024 intake MPs who are considering and planning to run for select committee chairs, which, and Isabel knows more than me on this, but it's pretty unusual. And having spoken to some of these new BMPs, I think that there is a sense that if you are a 2024 Labour MP, you are actually in their view, and probably factually the biggest block there is in this parliament in terms of the, you know, your intake, the number of you there are. So they think they can start acting as a group to probably get their own in, looking to the fact some of their colleagues have been given ministerial job straight away. I'm thinking, well, why not do we do that? And is it a good idea? Well, I suppose I'll let Isabel answer that. Thank you, Katie. Well, I guess, look, on one level, I think it's great that ambitious people want to go into the select committee career route. My view of select committees is that they should be as powerful and prestigious and as exciting a career route as going into a government department. Now, at the moment, they're not resourced to that level. You do get a pay rise if you are a select committee chair. I personally think that select committee members should be paid by attendance, so, and I think there should be greater pressure for them to take that role really seriously, because at the moment, you can basically ask questions that the clerk has written for you. And some MPs do that. Some MPs ask absolutely mad questions. My favorite, I think, was Claudia Warebasking about a country called Barus, which turned out to be Belarus. But, you know, select committees can, particularly when they're the prestigious ones, be really important engines of scrutiny, and even though they, you know, obviously MPs on them are still members of a party, they do do really good cross-party, non-parties and scrutiny of policies. However, and so I'll just list the various people who've been recently elected, but fancying themselves as select committee chairs. So, Mike Tap, Dover and DLMP, Francis Justice, Marie Tiddball is looking at education. Then you've got David Pinto Duchinsky, who wants to go to the work and pensions committee, Alice McDonald, International Development. And as Katie says, it makes a lot of sense given a number of new intake MPs have become junior ministers, but I think the important thing here is that they've become junior ministers, and they're not secretaries of state, and they would rightly be much more of a fuss had, for instance, Kirsty McNeal become a cabinet minister, straight after being elected. He is a junior minister, and I think if we're going to have select committees with a high status, being an alternative career route to climbing a greasy pole and joining an executive, then there needs to be some sense of seniority, and no matter how impressive somebody is out of Parliament, you know, we've both covered Parliament for long enough, Katie, to know that you can have an incredible career outside of Parliament, and then be an absolutely dreadful backbencher, or even a very poor minister when you come in, because you simply either don't bother to learn how Parliament works, or you don't have the skillset. And I think the complaints from their more established colleagues that these guys need to actually understand how Westminster works, in this instance, are entirely valid, because you need to understand how the Commons works, you need to understand how the legislative process works, actually participating in it, not just in an academic sense, because the two things are very different. These people won't even know their way around the committee corridors. And I think that does count for something, and it does also, if you've got someone who's just been elected, chair of a select committee, I think it does somewhat diminish that office in the eyes of their colleagues as well. So good on them for being ambitious, and it's great that they think, well, this is a good thing for me to go for, because the more prestigious a select committee becomes, the better for Parliament, the better for legislation. But it would be a bit like, and I suppose we have all met those sorts of people, a 22-year-old thinking that they could probably be editor of the Times within a year. I think there's a little bit of Darren Jones syndrome going on, whereby quite a few MPs look at the Darren Jones route. Now, Chief Secretary of the Treasury seems to be utilizing Star in the Labour Government, and he really built up a name for himself and made an impact through chairing a select committee. Remember when I interviewed him at the beginning of the year? He was talking about how he'd initially been a select committee chair, and he wasn't going any cut through, and then he spoke to various figures and then revamped how he did it to really play for the clips, so he started seeing it. So I do think somebody's quite ambitious Labour MPs who've just arrived, who haven't been promoted like some of their colleagues. Some of this new intake became Minister of State, immediately, but have not got that as suddenly thinking, this is the way I could cut through very quickly. And finally, should we bring ourselves up to speed on what's happened between that chair? Big scandal between Thatcher and Starmer. Here, Starmer has decided to remove the portrait of Margaret Thatcher from the Downing Street study, and this has caused a big round, not least because it was actually a Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who invited Margaret Thatcher for tea in Downing Street and told her that he was going to commission, said, portrait, and the assumption at the time was that it would be there forever. And I think it's worth describing how this was revealed, which is that Starmer's biographer Tom Baldwin revealed this at a book festival in Glasgow called I Write, and he and Starmer were sitting in the study under that portrait, and Baldwin had remarked, "It's a bit unsettling with her staring down at you like that, isn't it?" And apparently, Starmer said, "Yeah." And then Baldwin said, "Are you going to get rid of it?" And the Prime Minister nodded, and then Baldwin told the book festival, and he has. So perhaps this is the, I don't know, the insidious influence of biographers on politics. Look, I mean, I don't know whether I should say this on a podcast, but I struggled to get worked up about this, but it is one of those things that people do get very energised about in politics, not just the presence of a famous portrait in Downing Street, but it's one of those details that the interview is like, "We always like to put in speaking to us from her ministerial office with a portrait of Thatcher or a portrait of whoever over their desk, which underlines what sort of Prime Minister they're going to be." Yeah, I think it obviously looks tribal, and I think it risks looking a bit petty, but also, where is Kirsten on Thatcher? Because, yes, he does seem at times, as it says, to come from that labour tradition, but he also wasn't so long ago praising Thatcher. He gave a speech talking about how Margaret Thatcher had sought to drag Britain out of its stupor, you know, it has felt an opposition when labour just wanted to flirt with certain papers on the right that give some Thatcher reference to show, "Oh, you know, parking tanks on Tory's lawn." And therefore, you know, I think it may be just as to the sense that it's quite hard to know. Sometimes, he doesn't always seem to have consistency on various views. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Isabelle, and thank you for listening. [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING]