Having ticked off Reform UK plc last week, Simon Alexander MP surveys the rest of the supporting cast who now oppose the 400 Labour MPs on the government benches
The two most important people in my political life are the ones nobody sees. It’s time to reintroduce the band, my bassist and drummer if you will (and you might not).
Vish spent 18 months working for one of the 2024 intake of Labour MPs before deciding he had joined a sinking ship. He was sick of ‘bloody Gaza’ and ‘bloody Starmer’, and when a vacancy arose in his old post of policy advisor to Muggins, he applied and dazzled me in his interview.
‘So what qualifies you to work for me?’
‘I worked for you for three years.’
‘You’re hired.’
That was pretty much it, although he does make a very good cup of tea and, above all, can talk in English to constituents who bring their problems to me. He’s like a nurse to my doctor, triaging problems and streaming them to the correct person, be they the police, Citizens Advice or even dear old Alex Berrygrove, the leader of the council and my nemesis.
Here at Al Towers, we aim to please, but we also have several irons in several fires. As policy adviser, Vish is also abreast of the latest doorstep issues, so you can see why he might have been fed up of Bloody Gaza and Bloody Starmer when he went knocking with his boss. He has an easier life with me, and he is thankful for it.
As I mentioned a fortnight ago, there is a new Em in town. Em-Dash is what she answers to, a highly proficient Media Advisor who stunned me with her presentation on how to get my message out to constituents.
‘I know you have your coffee shop surgeries,’ she correctly said, ‘but people are used to swiping and thumbing and doomscrolling, so we need you to up your follower count.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
‘Well, for a start you need to be quirky and show your personality to the people.’
‘Did I not do that in print?’
‘Nobody my age reads your diary, apart from me. You need to go visual.’
‘Like Jacob Rees-Mogg? Or Zarah Sultana?’
‘Yes, but also nothing like that. Look at Dawn Butler and her Things To Do For Free series.’
‘I am not as photogenic as her. I can’t wear yellow. Are you going to give me a glow-up?’
‘I’m just thinking of the kind of person who gets their politics news from Cody Dahler.’
‘Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb guy?’
‘Yes. Presentation matters these days.’
I gave her the job even though I knew it was only a matter of time before she ended up working for a cabinet minister, Ed Miliband perhaps, travelling the world as his videographer and keeping him away from sandwiches. Indeed, Em-1, who was my Media Advisor during the 2023/24 term, is now part of the PM’s team, having initially worked for him when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. I sent her a congratulatory message when her man was elected PM unopposed. She’ll be down here infrequently given that she’s based at Number 10 North but I hope for a brush-by with her boss; sadly there are 400 other people wanting one too.
Far easier to speak to other MPs, with less demanding in-trays. I need to reintroduce my fellow Independent MPs, not least the man in Islington North who seems to have ruined another party by being impossible to work with, like he’s Nigel Farage in a different coloured jacket. Your Party (Whose?) is another one of the left’s grand wheezes which didn’t work; since it launched last year it has been torpedoed by in-fighting and petty politics which prove that that sort of MP is better out of power than in it. Technically Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are both members of Your Party (My Party?), but I still see them as independent warriors competing in a Judean People’s Front vs People’s Front of Judea style. I fear Reform UK plc, aka the Bendelo Party, are heading that way too.
There are several MPs who got into power talking about Bloody Gaza, some of them with microscopically small majorities: Shockat Adam won Leicester South by 979 votes, Ayoub Khan Birmingham Perry Barr by 507, Adnan Hussain Blackburn by 132. Iqbal Mohamed took Dewsbury and Batley, some of whose voters the late Jo Cox and her surviving sister Kim Leadbeater represented, by the more comfortable margin of almost 7000, because Leadbetter became MP for Spen Valley due to boundary changes.
Now to the ex-Labourites sitting as independents for a plethora of reasons. With a 4000 majority Bayo Alaba became the first ever Labour MP for Southend East and Rochford, earning a seat on the DCMS select committee based on his past as a music venue runner. Lately, though, he became the latest Labour MP to have the whip removed, in his case over allegations over improper financial conduct concerning bounceback loans during the pandemic. He maintains a robust defence but we must let due process occur.
He joins two other Labour MPs sitting beside the mob of Members Without Parties: Rosie Duffield (Canterbury, majority 8600), who lasted about ten weeks as a government minister before resigning on principle over Keir Starmer’s freebies; and Karl Turner (Kingston Upon Hull East, majority of just under 4000), who has been an MP since 2010 and was turfed out on March 31 this year because he disagreed with what his party were saying about stopping trial by jury in certain cases. He also called Morgan McSweeney ‘McSwindle’ and was reprimanded for talking to an activist journalist; I expect Turner will have the whip restored, but I don’t know what the party thinks anymore because it changes its spokespeople every ten minutes.
Alex Easton won the North Down seat in Northern Ireland as an independent, after three tries as a DUP candidate. I will never climb Mount Kilimanjaro, as he did last summer, but I respect him enormously. He and the lovely Jim Shannon are often chinwagging; Shannon sits in front of me as part of the Northern Irish contingent (less, of course, Sinn Fein MPs, who still do not sit in Westminster).
Dan Norris unseated Jacob Rees-Mogg in North East Somerset and Hanham (majority: 5300). He still sits as an independent after he was suspended 18 months ago for all kinds of crimes, which he still denies, including bullying and much worse. A few thousand people, but not 10% of the registered voters, have signed a recall petition but he has not resigned his seat. Josh Simons had to give up Makerfield in a tactful resignation which suited all parties. As for NESH, could we see the return of the Mogg? I sincerely hope not.
Cameron Thomas of Tewkesbury (majority: 6000) is that rare thing: an MP suspended from the Liberal Democrats. A former RAF officer, he was arrested in June on suspicion of assault and coercive behaviour, which is (to put it lightly) a big no-no. The Lib Dems have 72 MPs, so I will deal with them separately; their party conference takes place in Brighton this weekend, so someone tell Sir Ed Davey that he has to go to the Arcade on the Pier. His big speech is next Tuesday at 2.30pm, too late for next week’s diary entry. I am keen to hear what he thinks about Mr Trump(!).
Reform UK plc aka the Bendelo Party have already had their conference, but (I shall as ever be careful) the morally questionable banker James McMurdock was not there. Last year they kicked him out of the party after The Times revealed that he had claimed loans during the Covid-19 pandemic that seemed fishy. He also neglected to mention that he had been to a young offenders’ institution for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, but the Bendelo Party plc preached Christian values and kept him in the party for that. Morals vs Money: the story of Nige al-Faraj’s life. McMurdock was elected MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock by 98 votes, a result declared after three recounts. Why don’t the people get on with a recall petition. Enough already.
Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth (majority 1426) has become Nige’s nemesis. I try to avoid them both just in case my temper gets the better of me, but Lowe is making a killing by posting defamatory things on Elon Musk’s social media platform. Yet because of our wonderful democracy, Lowe serves on the hallowed Public Accounts Committee alongside a dozen or more others including lovely Watford MP Matt Turmaine (majority: 4700). Yesterday the Committee took evidence from the HS2 CEO Mark Wild(!) about how things were going with this never-ending project to modernise the London-to-Birmingham trainline that carves up the country. Vish is in the middle of summarising the evidence.
We are now up to five Green MPs, not including their quirky leader Zach Polanski, who wants me on his podcast (Em-Dash vetoed it on the spot) and who wants to represent the people of Holborn and St Pancras. The by-election falls on October 8, and the deeply impressive Labour candidate is Sagal Abdi-Wali; Mail journalists, start your teeth-clenching.
Of the Green quintet, my favourite is Carla Denyer (Bristol Central, majority of 10,000), who took a mental health break this year due to burnout. Co-leader Adrian Ramsay, with a majority of 5500 in the seat of Waveney Valley in East Anglia, took up the slack. The Gorton and Denton MP Hannah Spencer is always a good laugh, although she is busy representing the party in matters Education, Culture, Business and Housing.
She is not the only multitasker: Sian Berry was handed Dr Caroline Lucas’ Brighton Pavilion seat (majority: 14,000), and is party spokesperson for Justice, Transport, Work and Pensions and all things Home. Dr Ellie Chowns won North Herefordshire from the Conservatives with a 6000 majority, and is the go-to person for Foreign Affairs, Defence, Treasury and Constitutional Issues. And you are quite right to wonder who has the Environment brief; maybe they all do, as befits members of what used to be called the Ecology Party.
These are the kinds of MPs I see in the tea room, in the Chamber and in the security queue when I come into work fumbling with their passes. When I entered This Place as part of the Conservative intake in the glory years of Brexit (paging Dr Oxymoron), I was one of hundreds; now there are barely 120 of them left, with five ex-Tory Bendelo Party members (pronounced with the stress on ‘Ben’ so it sounds like ‘pedalo’) snarling at them across the opposition benches. Jenrick, Braverman, Kruger, Rosindell and Anderson: the famous five, famous for being part of the government and not able to sustain life in the Conservative Party. At least Tice, Pochin and Farage (and Lowe and McMurdock) wore a teal rosette when they won their elections. Enough already.
It really is fascinating to look at a coloured-in map of Britain that shows just how pathetic the Conservative Party looks in 2026. London is almost entirely red for Labour, and there are chunks of yellow around Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton. It’s also very lonely for Tories in Scotland, with three MPs up in Aberdeen and four more representing the Borders, including David Mundell, who won the seat down in Dumfriesshire in 2005 and has survived Cameron, May and some others whose names history will not remember or just be deeply embarrassed by.
The Tories do far better in Essex and the South East, plus the old heartlands of Wiltshire, Devon, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, the Three Counties (Herts, Beds and Bucks) and the posh bits of Yorkshire. Witness the type of MP who kept their seat in 2024. They were usually a big beast who had served in one or more Conservative cabinets, and among their number are Karen Bradley, Gavin Williamson, Jeremy Hunt and the man formerly known as Lame Duck Billionaire, Rishi Sunak, who rarely shows his face in This Place these days and is more interested in writing for the Sunday Times, working for an AI company and representing the people of Richmond. He is one of only five Tory MPs with a majority of over 10,000.
For fact fans, the other four belong to the new Chancellor Andrew Griffith, the new Shadow Foreign Sec Tom Tugendhat, the lovely Alicia Kearns and Harrow East’s very own Bob Blackman. LOTO’s majority is a very slim 2610, not much more than the one held by Shadow Home Sec Chris ‘The Philpster’ Philp. Even Jesse Norman, the wisest owl in opposition and author of very chewy books (and husband of the great Kate Bingham from Covid), barely scraped 1000, with Jeremy Hunt winning by a nose with 891 and Sir Mel Stride by a toenail with 61.
As for Ric Holden, who shuffled from Durham to Basildon and Billericay, he won by 20 votes, which represents 0.04% of the electorate, and that is still not the smallest margin in This Place (that belongs to a man we shall discuss next week, David Pinto-Duschinsky). What good luck that Holden’s partner is Kate Ferguson, the political editor of the Sun on Sunday and owner of the lobby’s finest diastema. I am sure they both prefer Essex to Durham, given that Ferguson works in Whitehall and writes, I imagine, for the super soaraway Sun reader who also loves the music of Depeche Mode (from Basildon) or Ian Dury, writer of the song Billericay Dickie.
Then there’s Esther McVey in Tatton, with a comparatively enormous majority of 1136. Tatton is the constituency whose voters, aside from a brief flirtation with independent MP Martin Bell, elected Neil Hamilton and Austerity Osborne. One of them has disappeared from public life; the other is Neil Hamilton (haha just kidding, Baron Osborne and your VIP Palantir friends who got a preview of the Bayeux Tapestry). McVey, meanwhile, presented on SovereignTV until 2023, since when she has devoted all of her time to the people of Tatton.
Aphra Brandreth is the Conservative MP for Chester South and Eddisbury, keeping the seat by 3000 votes after it was gifted to her by Edward Timpson, brother of Baron James and scion of the great family who runs the high street keys-and-shoes business, and also (did you know) Snappy Snaps. Aphra is thus one of very few MPs in her part of the world who aren’t Labour. The people of Runcorn and Helsby, which neighbours Chester South, is represented by (I choose my words carefully) the lovely Sarah Pochin, who won a majority of 14,700 to become the Bendelo Party’s token woman (Suella Braverman has since become the token former Home Secretary).
Aphra appeared on Any Questions the other week when it landed in Bury, not far from her seat. She thus could be heard on the station where her dad Gyles appears to speak without hesitation, repetition or deviation on the comedy slot. I asked Aphra in the tearoom yesterday, after commending her performance, to tell me the truth about her dad, whom Private Eye have branded Brandeath, grim reaper to the stars. She laughed politely and said she would keep him away from David Attenborough. I asked her if Vish could give someone in her office a copy of Breaking The Code to sign, her dad’s unexpurgated diaries of his time as a Tory Whip and MP for Chester in the 1990s; it is, he would surely quote Oscar Wilde as saying, full of sensational things to read on the train.
Gyles B lost his seat when, as he writes, ‘they didn’t want us anymore’; out with two decades of Thatcher and Major, in with a man with a Bambiesque smile who was to turn 44. In 2024, Aphra was one of only 26 new Tory MPs; must be those jumpers wot won it. I was in the chamber for her maiden speech two years ago, since when she has been part of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (chaired by Dame Emily Thornberry) and has sought to improve the broadband service in the North-West. She also presented a bill asking for food to be better labelled with their country of origin, which will not be debated for another six months: it will make clear that food grown, rather than assembled, here will be called Beautiful British Food.
Aside from her time in This Place, Aphra’s career has gone in a completely different direction from her dad’s, and indeed her brother’s; Benet is a former World Public Speaking Champion and author of books on Shakespeare. Her house must have been very loud growing up, and full of famous faces; Gyles, a Scrabble nut who has written books on A.A. Milne, the Royal Family and Scrabble, doesn’t so much drop names as cause the earth to shake with them. His daughter did Economics at UCL and worked for a decade for DEFRA before joining her husband in the family vet business. She also owns two tortoises, which lumber around telling anecdotes about Her Majesty the late Queen and popping up on Radio 4.
Aphra got her campaigning experience in the Boris Election of 2019, when she gracefully lost to Sir Ed Davey in Kingston but still won 20,000 votes. How many people were voting for her surname, I wonder. I also wonder if she took Gyles’ advice that there are two kinds of people in politics: ‘people with problems and people who are right’. Another aphorism towards the end of the diary is that ‘nobody really knows anything’ in This Place, which I should put on my office wall.
Aphra reminded me that she and Gyles have worked together, even as she represented the people of Chester South. Between 2022-25, the Commonwealth Poetry Podcast celebrated the fine works of verse from across the realm we used to call Empire. To celebrate this sceptered isle’s verse, Her Majesty Queen Camilla (clang!) was a guest, with poems by English writers read by Gyles’ friend Dame Joanna Lumley (double clang!)
Gyles is such a gadfly that he now has ex-podcasts to his name. Something Rhymes With Purple, which he hosted with Countdown’s Susie Dent, was essentially dropped into the Radio 4 schedule as Unspeakable, hosted by the great and funny Phil Wang. It now lives in the slot that Just A Minute often lives, Monday night at 6.30pm; it’s on at the moment. I do sometimes try to listen to Gyles fail to repeat, hesitate or deviate on Just A Minute. ‘Has he ever managed a full hour?’ I asked Aphra, and perhaps she has a drawerful of broken stopwatches which waved a white flag after 40 minutes.
I’ve even subscribed to the Oldie magazine in order to read Gyles’ monthly diary. It appeals to my inner Victor Meldrew, which I am positive is a reference nobody younger than I am will get. I don’t believe that. One day I hope to pop up on Rosebud, Gyles’ chatty podcast, one of the best of the genre. He has so far welcomed over 200 famous people to talk about their formative experiences and childhoods. Whenever he gets a week off, he provides listeners with some of his old diaries. Truly, the man does the Lord’s work.
He sold out his Edinburgh run of, essentially, talking for an hour about his specialist subject: Gyles Brandreth. You know how Ken Dodd used to talk until they physically told him to stop, or how there was that movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They about dance marathons in a time even before wireless radio? I think, for charity or for democracy, we should see how long Gyles lasts. I bet he’d easily clear 48 hours.