The 650 Members of Parliament trundle back to This Place today. Among them is Simon Alexander, one of the dozen independent MPs who will be writing a weekly diary throughout the 2026/27 term
Hello there. Welcome back to This Place, a diary of an independent MP. I’m Simon Alexander, though please call me Al. That’s A for Apple, L for Lexus, because it looks like AI (A for Apple, I for Indigo) on the page. “Do you love AI? I love AI.” So says Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, who used to be famous. Expect some AI chatter during the next few months; I’ve plotted out a series of posts, and I promise I won’t get Claude or anyone else to write them!
When I wrote my first piece in advance of the 2023/24 term, Rishi Sunak was the Prime Minister, the Lame Duck Billionaire whom I was sure was going to fly off to California. To his credit, he stayed in Richmond, West Yorkshire, with his massive majority of 12,000; unlike his two predecessors, he is still a sitting MP and intervenes in debates in the chamber, an ordinary mortal without a ministerial car or an impossible in-tray to manage. In fact, his predecessor but seven, Gordon Brown, has just put out another one of his Here’s What I Would Do books, which he will be plugging on BBC Radio 4 next week; this one’s about ‘how global instability and civic decline are connected’. On an unrelated note, Mr Sunak is more interested in AI, what with his sinecure at Anthropic.
Back in September 2023, I began the diary with the following statement, which I repeat three years to the day later: ‘Without fear or favour…I aim to cut through the thickets of noise and fury, introduce you to some friends and foes, guide you through the mazy corridors of power and slaughter the most sacred of cows.’
I also mentioned the council leader Alex Berrygrove, who is still in post, budgeting away, trying to fill in the potholes and keep the library open; he’s got a podcast now too! In terms of priorities, for me at least constituents come first and parliament comes second. Older readers may know that I never attend Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on Wednesday, because pantomime should be enjoyed once a year at Christmas and not in a packed chamber when everything is for show anyway. I prefer to hang out with Vish and Em in the office, wearing party hats and joining in with the booing.
Yes, my policy and media adviser are back, and this time it’s a different Em. Vish thought it was shrewd of me to hire a media spad with the same name as my old one, for continuity’s sake, but really Em-Dash, as I call her, was the best candidate and she had also flattered me by quoting from the blog. Yes, I can conclude that flattery will get you everywhere, and by ‘everywhere’ I mean This Place.
In my spare time I enjoy attending the APPGs, the all-party parliamentary groups that act as societies for MPs to relax, socialise and talk to interesting people. If you need an alternative to a sleeping pill, I suggest the 900-page document on the Parliament website that lists all members of all APPGs. Your humble diarist is still involved in several: Antisemitism, Classical Music, Jazz, and Political and Media Literacy. My pet subject of Oracy no longer has its own APPG, and nor does American Football, although I still hope to attend a Superbowl Party on February 14, with all the other bachelors.
In lieu of this I’ve joined the Women’s Football group, and hope to get along to a few England games when I can in advance of the 2027 Women’s World Cup, which the USA will win because they have an English coach in Emma Hayes. I have also joined Chris Evans, author of a couple of books on football, on the Writers APPG, which also boasts as a member Pete Wishart, the man from Big Country and Runrig.
Pete survived the cull of SNPers in the 2024 General Election to become the longest serving party member in Westminster: there were 56 just after the 2014 Independence Referendum; now there are only eight, thanks in part to the activity of the husband of the woman Private Eye magazine have imprinted on my mind as the ‘wee lookalike Krankie’. In fact, poor Pete is the last man standing from the group MP4, although Kevin Brennan has gone to the Other Place and is still kicking around on the estate fighting for songwriters like him (indeed, he’s up on Thursday at a committee meeting to talk about his fan-led review of British music).
Lord Berkeley is also there, whenever he isn’t recording episodes of Private Passions, appointment listening at noon on Sundays on Radio 3. He is still part of the Classical Music crew, as befits Benjamin Britten’s godson, although we miss the boy William Wragg, whom I periodically check in on after he left public life in 2024. We’re all Promming next week, heading to see and hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony played by the Mahler Academy Orchestra. If you’ve missed any Proms from the 2026 season, I recommend the Marvin Gaye one which I attended last month. Wowee.
I have on my desk an application for the Compassion in Politics APPG, which aims to ‘promote compassion, empathy and integrity’ in This Place and is spearheaded, naturally, by the sister of the late Jo Cox, whom we lost ten years ago this June. Kim Leadbeater has been busy during this administration trying to move the needle on the assisted dying debate, which is a noble thing to do. Lauren Edwards is having another go this year, with Second Reading this month for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is all getting very Jarndyce v Jarndyce, in that it seems to be going on forever with no sense of an ending, which my writer colleagues would point out is ironic in the extreme.
Other debates to look forward to include bills from two Tory doctors: Neil Shastri-Hurst is keen for schoolkids to learn Emergency and Lifesaving Skills, while Dr Luke Evans, aka Dr Hunk, will bring forward a bill early next year to prevent relationships between first cousins, which cause all kinds of illnesses. My Writers APPG colleague Sir John Whittingdale will be coming in hot with the SLAPP Bill in November, while his fellow Tory survivor Victoria Atkins aka Vicky the A, the former Health Secretary, is going to be counting on my vote to allow legislation to build solar panels on farmland. She is a keen supporter, either politically or actually, of British farmers.
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Right, so now that the newbies are up to speed, let’s look at some potential storylines for the 2026/27 Parliamentary term, starting with Burnley; not the old mill town, but the Andy Burnham-John Healey axis which is the latest twist on the PM-Chancellor dynamic. It’s hardly Blair and Brown, or Thatcher and Nigella Lawson’s dad, but it seems notable that after two years of Rachel Reeves, who worked at the Bank of England, Burnham has picked his fellow Northerner Healey, who got his start interviewing journalists for the house magazine (called The House).
The MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough in South Yorkshire (majority: 7000) was very vocal in his dismay for the Starmer administration, resigning his role as Defence Secretary and kicking off the beginning of the end. I hope he rises to the role of being in charge of the economy, or at least as ‘in charge of the economy’ as you can be when world leaders are chucking tariffs out of the pram. B-Day aka Budget Day is at the end of October, so there’s only two months of build-up to the biggest day for what the comedian Al Murray calls ‘Reckonomics’.
Prisons and the police never sleep, which means that between them the Justice Secretary Alex Norris (Nottingham North and Kimberley, majority 9400) and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will have plenty of sleepless nights and brickbats in the coming months. Ms Mahmood has a surprisingly low majority of 3500 in the Birmingham Ladywood seat that was handed to her upon the retirement of the great Clare Short in 2010. Now there’s a big beast, although you never hear from her these days despite her accumulated knowledge from her time as International Development Secretary.
Ms Short infamously resigned her cabinet post over the Iraq War and left the Labour Party, which means I sit in the exact seat that, as an independent MP, she sat in during the Gordon Brown years. I do wonder what she makes of it all, when the party has squandered the goodwill from the 2024 vote, and has been trying to (I will choose my words carefully because they are litigious folk) mollify the Reform UK members who sit in front of me, carping from inside the tent rather than on SovereignTV and the Telegraph comment pages. I’ll deal with the Not So Hateful Eight next time, as I have much to say about the band of merrie men and, to their credit, two women.
Who’s next? Ah, Dr Cooper will see you now, the career politician and wife of a podcaster. She is now in charge of health and social care, and good ruddy luck to her. And watch out for the next social media superstar Ed Miliband, who as Foreign Secretary will get lots of digital stamps in his passport and represent Britain on the world stage whenever the PM is too busy up North. Miliband vs The World should take him to Syria, Ukraine and New York City, where his brother and former Foreign Sec David lives and works, in his role as head of the International Rescue Committee.
The woman who has taken Ted’s seat in the cabinet round table is Lady Miatta Fahnbulleh, a think-tank veteran whom I tipped for a parliamentary seat in one of my Wednesday round-ups of potential MPs back in 2023/24. Dame Harriet Harman gifted her the Peckham seat, where the winning MP’s majority was 15,000. Ms Fahnbulleh, who was born in Liberia and has a degree in PPE from Oxford and a PhD from the LSE (come on now, that’s just showing off!), is the only black woman in cabinet. She follows in the enormous footsteps of Auntie Diane Abbott, the first black woman to sit in This Place who is (for now) back in the Labour fold.
Auntie D is also the Mother of the House, having been MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (majority also 15,000) since 1987, when Rick Astley was having his first hits. A subplot of this administration is how, when and how much the M of the H will criticise the government, because people still listen when she speaks. Very. Very. Slowly. You could operate on people’s hearts in the time it takes her to finish an intervention.
Lady Miatta is in charge of Energy and the Planet, so she has quite a broad brief. Lucy Powell is now in charge of schools, and a few weeks ago she straight-batted questions about the Jason Arday tragedy (which some have called a lynching) on the Today programme. Ms Powell is the MP for Manchester Central (majority: 14,000), one of the starriest constituencies in the UK and, of course, home to Number 10 North, where the PM will be working three days a week because he is loved anywhere that has a North-West postcode. This is Burnham country, and he is master of his domain.
In the Irony Department, Angela Rayner is in charge of housing and local government, with her loyal deputy Matthew Pennycook still looking after the housing brief as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the Grenfell Tower inferno. I give Ms Rayner a year before something happens to end her political career, which is already in extra time; nice lady, though, and she will certainly inspire the next generation of self-proclaimed ‘gobby’ women.
As for Lisa Nandy, the PM’s less gobby mate from Wigan, she is of course still in Culture, given that in 2027 the BBC Charter is up for renewal. As well as the NHS and HRH (the Royal Family), the BBC is the third great three-letter acronym in Britain. God help us if David Attenborough, who must have received a gold-embossed 100th birthday card from his friend the King, goes the way of Dolly Parton this session. We will not see his like again; he invented televised snooker, you know.
Over at DEFRA, listening to celebrity farmers like Kaleb Cooper and his boss whose name escapes me, the PM has installed another Northern woman, Dame Angela Eagle (MP for Wallasey since 1992, PPE at Oxford, majority 18,000). We shall see if she has better luck than poor Steve Reed (MP for Croydon North, majority 15,000), who is out on his ear along with your friend and mine, Darren Jones, the boy DJ (MP for Bristol North West, majority also 15,000). Steve and DJ will be mooching around the backbenches with their pals Sir Keir and Sir Galammy, intervening when necessary on behalf of their constituents.
For the sake of completeness, David Lammy kept his Tottenham seat by 15,000 votes, while S’Keir Starmer beat all the novelty candidates to keep representing the voters of Holborn and St Pancras by 11,500. It’s the former PM’s birthday tomorrow, his first normal one since he took over the Labour Party in 2020. I’ve told Vish to send his team a picture of a weeping Ian Wright hugging his old teacher Mr Pigden; he’ll always have Arsenal, after all.
As for the regions, which are terribly important in this new era, three top blokes are going to be telling Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland what’s what. Doug Alexander (MP for Lothian East, majority 13,000), whom you might remember from such roles as Gordon Brown’s International Development Secretary, is the Scot with the Scotland brief. Steve Kinnock (MP for Aberafan Maesteg, majority 10,000) is the Welsh non-windbag deputed to liaise with Plaid Cymru’s leader Rhun ap Iorweth. Kinnock can always turn up to a meeting with his wife, the former PM of Denmark, or his dad, who led the Labour Party but lost the 1992 election.
A complete masterstroke has seen the PM appoint the great Chris Bryant for the Northern Ireland brief. Bryant, the voluble MP for the Rhondda valley (majority: 7800), deserves a cabinet position purely because he literally wrote the book on This Place. He was elected as part of the 2001 intake along with the PM, so maybe the MP for Makerfield (majority: only 9000) just wants to feel less old around the cabinet table, where the oldest members with big briefs are John Healey and Dame Angela Eagle, who were both born in the early sixties and are thus in their early sixties.
Here’s a fact for you, for free; Andy Burnham and Steve Kinnock were both born in the first week of the 1970s. Kinnock was a New Year’s Day baby, and Burnham arrived on January 7. Incredibly, Ed Miliband is a Christmas Eve 1969 baby, which means he’s a fortnight older than the PM. All three men, at 56 years old, are children of Thatcher who came of age in the 1980s, around the same time that Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne and Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson were mucking around at Oxford. Of that quartet, three have gone into newspapers since they left This Place, and the other was briefly the Foreign Secretary and now gets a seat for life in the House of Lords. What a weird place This Place, rewarding failure.
The PM spent the 1990s watching his beloved Everton FC and listening to Oasis, who brought rock’n’roll from Manchester to the world and will likely be back at Knebworth next summer; think of the freebies! The man he replaced as PM is only a few schools years older than Miliband, Kinnock and Burnham, but he seems from a different generation, and not just because he spent most of his life at the bar (the courts, not the saloon). I hope S’Keir goes back to doing case work, and I reckon he will find human rights law a jolly sight easier than explaining why his chief of staff was so keen to give Peter Mandelson a plum job. Remember the Mandy Law, which states that everyone you put in post has the potential to end your own political career, or at least send you to the backbenches.
I’ve run out of words, so in future weeks I promise to deal with today’s media environment, the rise of Count Binface and the Leader of the Opposition, to whom I don’t think I gave a name in my old columns. KemiLOTO, as in Camelot? Suggestions welcome, but keep them clean. In the meantime, I’ve got some emails to answer. There are always some emails to answer. Onwards to Inbox Zero!!
You can read Simon Alexander MP’s This Place column every Tuesday at jonnybrick.com