Prime Minister (Nomination) and Cabinet (Appointment)

Peter Bone Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), with his usual skill, introduces a Scottish National party policy that sounds attractive but is completely and utterly useless. It is tradition to find something on which we agree with the previous speaker, and I agreed with him totally when he was gracious enough to say how much the House welcomed the recovery of the Prime Minister after his serious illness.

Before dealing with the issue itself—[Interruption.] I do not see a clock running, so am I allowed an unlimited amount of time?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. For the avoidance of doubt, no, the hon. Gentleman is allowed 10 minutes. There is a mistake in the clock not running; he now has approximately eight and a half minutes.

[Mr Bone]

Why is this ten-minute rule Bill being introduced now, and what are we being asked to do today? We are not being asked to approve the content of the Bill; we are being asked to give leave for it to be introduced as a private Member’s Bill. The hon. Gentleman could have done that in February. There are 130 Bills that Members introduced properly, prior to this Bill being introduced. So I thought, “Well, let’s ask the Library,” and the Library says:

“Ten Minute Rule bills are often an opportunity for Members to voice an opinion on a subject or aspect of existing legislation, rather than a serious attempt to get a bill passed.”

As usual, the House of Commons Library is correct.

Later tonight we will consider motion 7 on the Order Paper, which will move our private Members’ Bills back again. I agree entirely with the Government that that is the proper thing to do, given the covid crisis, but it means that we will have September, October, November, January, February and March to get through 130 private Members’ Bills. This is an opportunity to throw out a Bill now that would only clog up the system later on.

Let me turn to the gist of the Bill. It is an interesting way of pretending that sovereignty does not exist, but sovereignty rests with the Queen. The Queen is sovereign and the sovereign appoints the Prime Minister. The hon. Gentleman has not produced an actual Bill today—what he has in his hand is a dummy Bill—but I looked back to see what his previous Bill said. He was very careful not to go into the detail, and I am not surprised. In normal times, if this Bill became an Act of Parliament, the House of Commons, with a Government majority of 80, would of course nominate the leader of the largest party to be Prime Minister, in the normal way. I had to go back to April 1940 for when we had a Prime Minister who was not the leader of the governing party, and that was only for six months, during the second world war. So why is this clever politician introducing this Bill? Let us think about the detail. He says that the House of Commons would nominate the Prime Minister. I thought, “Well, that’s strange—the House of Commons?” And then I looked a bit further, and it is the Speaker of the House of Commons who would nominate the Prime Minister after the House voted.

Then I thought, hang on a minute—what would have happened when my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) resigned and we had Speaker Bercow in the Chair, if this proposition had been in place? It would not have been impossible to see a situation whereby the Opposition combined to vote for the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), and maybe one or two disenchanted Conservatives joined that vote—and then Mr Speaker would have been proposing to the Queen that the right hon. Member for Islington North be Prime Minister of a Conservative Government that nobody on the Government Benches would support and everyone on the Opposition Benches would. That is a nice try, but it honestly does not work. For that reason, the Bill should not be given leave to proceed.

My Government are a very fair Government, and I doubt that they will interfere with the voting today because they like the House to make decisions on principle, not because the Whips are telling us what to do. But I hope that Back-Bench Members will oppose this ten-minute rule Bill, because it has been brought here to make a point. It needs to be thrown out now and not to be part of the ongoing private Members’ Bill process.

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire did move on to two other issues in his Bill that do need more consideration. The first is the question of what happens and who takes over if the Prime Minister is incapacitated. That is a very fair point; we must always have a Prime Minister. When the current Prime Minister fell ill, the Government—thankfully, just before he was admitted to hospital—came up with a schedule of Members who would be Prime Minister if something happened to the current Prime Minister. In fact, the First Secretary of State effectively did become Prime Minister. And if the First Secretary of State had fallen ill, there was a whole list of people after him.

Now, I already have a Bill before the House—the Prime Minister (Temporary Replacement) Bill—to deal with this situation. It proposes a fixed system, so we would know in advance what would happen if the Prime Minister were incapacitated. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will support that Bill on 30 October. The second part of his own Bill is not necessary and is flawed, because there would be a delay between the Prime Minister being incapacitated and a new one being appointed.

Where I find more interest is subject of the appointment of Cabinet Ministers. As I understand it, under the hon. Gentleman’s Bill, the approval of the House would be required before a Member could become a Cabinet Minister. I suppose if one goes back a few years to, say, 1707 when this House introduced—[Interruption.] What happened then was that a Member had to resign their seat if they became a Cabinet Minister. That is not a bad idea. Of course, most of those Cabinet Ministers stood for election and were not opposed; one or two of them took the opportunity to sneak off to safer seats at that moment. That situation was brought to an end in 1926, by a private Member’s Bill.

I do not suggest that we go back to that time, but the hon. Gentleman does have a point when it comes to Select Committees holding confirmation hearings for newly appointed Government Ministers. Departmental Select Committees could hold such hearings and say whether they thought the person was fit and proper. Now, I am sure that that would always be the case as long as there were a Conservative Government, but it might not be if we had a Labour Government in power. I would not necessarily say that that such a process should be mandatory, but it would be a good idea for Select Committees to look at it. If the Select Committees played that role, it would force the Government to form them much earlier in a Parliament than they sometimes do.

There is some merit in the proposals that I have just discussed, but the fundamental issue of allowing Speaker Bercow to nominate to the Queen the right hon. Gentleman for Islington North—what an absurd idea! For that alone, leave to bring in this Bill should not be granted.

Question put (Standing Order No. 23).

The House proceeded to a Division.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

For the sake of clarification, we will close the doors 12 minutes after the commencement of the vote, which was two minutes and 30 seconds ago.