Business of the House

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

As I rise, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, has arrived to sit next to me. She is a very distinguished predecessor of mine, whom I congratulate on her promotion and return from the Back Benches.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) is absolutely right about modern-day slavery. It would be opportune to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), the former Prime Minister, for all the work that she did on modern-day slavery—the terrible and hidden curse that it is. I share his view that everything should be done to stop it. The Home Office should move in that direction and people should not fear criminal prosecution if they have been held as modern-day slaves. That would clearly be desperately unfair.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I join you in your warm tributes to Paul Evans, Mr Speaker. I wish him all the best in his retirement.

I thank our curious new Leader of the House for announcing the, well, meaningless stuff that we are coming back to in September. I warmly welcome him to his place. He is the fifth Leader of the House that I have had in this post, but it has to be said that he is by far the most exotic.

[The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Andrea Leadsom)]

indicated dissent.

[Pete Wishart]

I did not mean to upset the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy with that remark.

It might be as well to point out that the hon. Gentleman is Leader of the House of Commons, not the House of Plantagenet or the House of Tudor. He will have, of course, a number of key responsibilities, prime among them being restoration and renewal—perhaps not a concept for which he is particularly renowned, unless it involves one of his own houses.

I join everybody in paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride). We will now never get that holiday bus from hell, and I will forever miss his terrible jokes about music at my expense. Although he knew that his post would probably only be temporary, he did take his job in his “Stride”.

I do not know about you, Mr Speaker, but I went to bed last night and had this horrible nightmare that the UK Government had been taken over by rabid, right-wing Brexiteers. I am not particularly sure whether I am awake yet. May we have a debate about dystopian visions of hell, and have a look at where this Cabinet of dysfunctional Bash Street Kids fits in?

I presume that at some point when we get back after recess the Leader of the House will want to have some sort of debate about Brexit, given that it has been his life’s mission. He and his European Research Group colleagues are now the political mainstream in this House, so when will we get the chance to debate their big plans to crash out of the EU without a deal, and all the disastrous consequences that await us?

The Leader of the House is familiar with Scotland—he famously fought the Glenrothes by-election with his nanny and his Roller—so he knows there is no way on earth that Scotland is going down with his colleagues in their buffoon’s Brexit.

Lastly, Mr Speaker, I wish you and all the staff of the House a very happy recess. I wish the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), and the new Leader of the House a very warm time and hope that they enjoy themselves and have some time for relaxation. It is hot outside, but as the Government continue to open the doors of hell in their buffoon’s Brexit, it is going to get a lot hotter yet.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I may be the fifth Leader of the House since the hon. Gentleman took up his post, but from what I hear it seems that his question is the same regardless, so it does not make any difference who the Leader of the House should be. I therefore fear that the answer is going to be much the same. I would point out that the House of Commons predates the House of Tudor: it started in 1265, and the House of Tudor obviously began with Henry VII—