Valedictory Debate

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Friday 24th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) , who had been my good friend for many years before he became my hon. Friend. We had a long-standing shared interest in his wife—[Laughter.] That is perhaps not the appropriate thing to say, given that his daughter and my goddaughter are in the Gallery, but we have been chums for a long time.

I have to admit that, unlike many other hon. colleagues, I have had no hugs in the last few days. [Hon. Members: “Ah.”] That may be because I have been in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, far away from this place, watching the incredible events of the last few days unfurl. I was able to come back here early in time to join this last hurrah, to vote on something—goodness knows what it was—just now and to speak in this valedictory debate.

Many hon. Friends may not have been to Lesotho. The former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), spoke earlier about the importance of defending democracy. It is interesting that there is a small, close Commonwealth country friend that absolutely shows love and respect for this House. The Speaker of the Lesotho Parliament said to me that, whenever he is vexed by something about procedure or what he should do, he always turns to the House of Commons. It is at a different end of the planet and in another hemisphere, but so many people around the world look to this place. What we do here matters beyond our walls here, beyond our shores and beyond our constituencies. It is really important that we all remember that. I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I look slightly dishevelled and below par today, but I spent the last 20 hours on a series of planes to get back here today.

Earlier, people promised anecdotes about various trips. I am not going to give any anecdotes. I am not going to talk about going to Syria with the now hon. Member for Rochdale (George Galloway)—good grief—going to Yemen with Keith Vaz, or going to Greenland with Mr Deputy Speaker, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans), who was in the Chair just now; it is probably just as well.

Madam Deputy Speaker, in the 27 years you and I have served in this House—two life sentences, as my wife constantly reminds me—we have seen great events; some better than others. We have seen the Iraq war, the financial crash, Brexit, covid and the transition of monarchs.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I were elected on 1 May 1997, with 33 first-time Conservatives, I think—those of us who scraped through the battle of the 1997 election —as well as 176 first-time Labour MPs and one new Ulster Unionist party Member. Out of those numbers, today some 13 Conservatives remain, including you, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, and various others. Only 18 of those 176 Labour MPs have survived to this day, as well as the one Ulster Unionist who is now a DUP MP, so on our side the 1997 intake was resilient, as you and I know only too well. I became an MP on 1 May, and I will cease to be an MP on 30 May next week, which happens to be my birthday. What a birthday treat that is going to be.

First, I probably owe Mr Speaker an apology. I am one of the longest-serving members of the naughty corner—or the rough trade corner, as it has been known—the source of much heckling, noise and verbal exercise, the source of that one famous quote at Prime Minister’s Question Time when the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) made the rookie mistake of leaving a question open-ended. He said that he had just been with his comrades in the European socialist group at the European Parliament, and guess what they said to him? The heckle from this corner was, “Who are you?” and various other heckles besides.

I apologise for the heckling and the noise over the years, but of course, during the tenure of the previous Speaker, we wore a badge of honour as members of the BBB club. It was a literal badge; I have tried to find it. That was—I hope this is in “Erskine May”—the “bollocked by Bercow” club, of which there was a league table in The Sunday Times, alongside a story about those of us who had been upbraided by the Speaker on the most occasions. It certainly was a badge of honour; thank goodness that things have moved on and the quality of the Chair has improved hugely over the past few years. Fuelled by jelly babies in this corner, as well as good banter and good camaraderie, I hope—I should leave a little note—that whoever occupies the naughty corner after the election, be it on the Opposition Benches or the Government Benches, upholds the best traditions that we have tried to uphold.

As you and I know, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is a privilege to be in public service. It is a privilege to be a Member of Parliament, to serve this House, to serve as a Minister—for those of us who have been given that opportunity, for however fleeting a time—and to serve on Select Committees. I have been the deputy Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee for 10 years now, and those Committees are one of the great strengths of this House. The Home Affairs Committee was described by Quentin Letts as probably the best Committee in Westminster. In response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith) and her reference to dealing with Quentin Letts, I had the great advantage, because when I first arrived and he was—I think—the sketch writer on The Daily Telegraph, he and I were often mistaken for each other. In those days, certainly, we looked quite similar, so when he wrote up any references to me, they were usually prefaced by “The Adonis-like Tim Loughton, the epitome of charm and handsomeness”, or whatever. Try looking like the people who write the columns, rather than those who are written about in the columns.

But the greatest privilege, of course, is to serve one’s constituents. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead has also said, and as others have echoed, the first and last reference point of being an MP should be our constituents: their problems are our nation’s problems, and we need to understand those problems if we are to provide the solutions for all of our country. As many of us know—goodness knows it is going to be the case this time around—the seat for which one is selected is something of a lottery. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead was going to be the candidate in East Worthing and Shoreham, because the people compiling the shortlist rather preferred her to me, but then she was selected for Maidenhead and so the way was clear.

Sussex is where I was born, grew up and went to school. The constituency was where my relatives lived and where my father had gone to school. To have that sort of connection to one’s constituency is particularly special, as many hon. Members have pointed out. It has been a joy to represent the best county in the United Kingdom as its Member of Parliament for 27 years. I am grateful to my constituents, in a constituency whose boundaries have been completely unchanged, who have had the foresight to elect and re-elect me in seven elections. In 1992 I pitched my tent in the soviet republic of Sheffield, Brightside—alas, I narrowly lost on the day by 22,500 votes due to the inclement weather—but we have all been through that. So I thank my constituents first.

Like everyone who has spoken, I want to thank my staff, starting with Fiona Chadwick, who I inherited in 1997. She had worked for Terence Higgins in Worthing and other MPs in the House of Commons since the 1980s. She was part of the coven, as it was called, in the basement. She has great expertise and still works for me part time. I also thank Kari Sargeant, who has worked with me and run my office since 2015, as well as Justine, India, Ellie, Liza and others in my office. I only employ women; I know my place. They run a very efficient office.

I have employed a number of researchers over the years, many of whom have gone on to greater things. Some have become millionaires; some have become Ministers for the Cabinet Office with disgracefully larger majorities than I have in my constituency, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) will testify. I thank all my staff and the many researchers and others who have worked for me over the years. I have never actually had to sack anybody, which is quite a surprise to my hon. Friend.

As other hon. Members have done, I thank all the staff of the House who make this place tick. I will not read them all out, and I will certainly not mention the bar staff, who seem to get the biggest cheer from my colleagues when they are mentioned. The staff are the unsung heroes who make democracy work so that we can do our job.

I thank my civil servants from my time at the Department for Education. The secret of having good civil servants is to have happy hour. At 6 o’clock, the drinks cabinet in my office was always open for those members of my private office who were still around. I do not think anyone would be allowed to do that these days, but it worked really well. If I had a particularly difficult subject that I wanted a civil servant to have a meeting with me on, I invited them during happy hour and gave them a very large gin and tonic, and I always got my way. That is what good Government is actually about.

As my colleagues have done, I thank all the Conservative party officers and volunteers who do all the work behind the scenes, in all weathers, which makes it possible for us to get elected and do our job.

Most of all—I am glad that many other hon. Members have mentioned this—I thank our families. This is the most family-unfriendly job. It was a particular irony for me, having been the shadow Children’s Minister for eight years and then the Children’s Minister, that my job did not enable me to be as good a father as I would like to have been. When I was first elected in 1997, my son Hector was under three; Freya, the gobby one, to whom my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon is godfather, was just one; and Tilly was minus six months. We give up so much, and our families give up so much more, to enable us to do our job.

Many other hon. Members, including the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who opened the debate, have said that this place has changed a lot and that it has changed for the better, and I agree. In 1997, the security briefing that we were given was five minutes with a police officer, who gave us our locker key and said, “Right, Mr Loughton, you’d better put your name on everything, ’cos crime happens in this place as well, you know.” That was the entirety of the security briefing. The only other briefing was a nice 20-minute video from Betty Boothroyd, with wonderful vistas of the river and the Palace. That was all the preparation we had. Things have moved on greatly, I am glad to say.

In those days, we had all-night sittings—the best place to sleep was under the tables in the Strangers’ dining room. Fortunately, those days have gone. When I served on my first Finance Bill Committee with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), we had to keep the business going until 5 o’clock in the morning. He and I spent several hours reading out the Southern train timetables between Worthing and Bognor Regis, and talking about related matters, to keep the Committee going. That sort of thing was a bit silly and does not happen anymore, so things have got better.

I echo the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, who said, “Don’t want to go back into opposition.” We were both elected in 1997. Only by 1 May last year had we been in government for longer than we had been in opposition for those 13 long years beforehand, and government is better.

I end by urging future Governments on a couple of issues on which I feel strongly. I have championed, I hope, the cause of children and young people, particularly disadvantaged children in the care system. As Children’s Minister, I worked on reforming children in care regulations and on adoption—although, I was surprised to read in the biography of the former Prime Minister, now the Foreign Secretary, that that whole piece of work on adoption was actually his idea and only started after I left office. But hey, that’s politics.

We should never forget that children and young people are 20% of the population, but 100% of our future. We lose sight of that at our peril. We have not done enough on children’s social care. It is a false economy not to do that as early as possible and not to work on prevention rather than having to fire-fight the symptoms of neglect. That is why the Best Start for Life programme, championed by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), and the first 1,001 days, which is something I have been involved in, is so important, because it is life changing if we deal with children and their parents at the beginning of their lives, not later in life. Future Governments need to remember that. The work we did on child sexual exploitation and early years is also really important.

Let me turn to one piece of unfinished business. I have here a copy of my private Member’s Bill—I always carry one around—which is now the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act 2019, of which I am very proud. It has enabled more than 25,000 couples to have an opposite-sex civil partnership since 2019, and has enabled people getting married to put the name of their mother on their marriage certificate—something that had not happened since 1837.

That may seem like a little thing, but it was brought home to me when I received a wonderful letter from somebody I had never met before whose daughter had just been married in Bath in the same church where he and his late wife had been married. He said that being able to put his late wife’s name on the marriage certificate made such a difference, and that it was as though she was actually there, even though she was not there physically.

The bit of unfinished business is section 4, which gives powers to coroners to investigate stillbirths. It is as vital now as it was when that became law back in 2019 for the Government to get on with it and issue the regulations. I urge the next Government to treat that as a priority.

The job has changed. The job, I think, has got harder. Three people have been murdered in my time here: Jo Cox, David Amess and the police officer Keith Palmer. Social media has made our job harder. It has divided society, and promoted hate and the cancel culture. But those of us who work here—those of us who work together across the Chamber, across Committees and across all-party groups—all share that devotion to public service and making the lives of our constituents and our nation better, regardless of party difference.

I will continue to work with friends across the political divide on other platforms outside of Parliament. After 47 years as a party activist—I joined at the age of 15 —eight elections and 12 years on the Front Bench, I hope that I have made a bit of a difference through legislation in this place and a bit of a difference for my constituents, and that I have gained a bit of respect for what I have tried to do.

Finally, there is an old adage that poses the conundrum: what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. This place is full of knowledge, but I think we have seen today that we are losing a lot of wisdom from this Chamber. That is a great sadness, with various colleagues moving on for whatever reason, but this place is a source of wisdom. When we use that wisdom wisely and with consensus across the House, we can achieve great things, and we have. I am proud to have played a small part in that.