Robert Orchard
Blog posts in total 14
Posts
Preparing to be hung
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell (below), has confirmed that he is drawing up guidelines for senior civil servants and the parties in case the next election produces a hung parliament with no clear winner, an outcome more and more polls, politicians and pundits are predicting. Spe...
Hanging on
Talk of a possible hung parliament is back on the Westminster agenda as an increasing number of commentators and politicians predict that no party will have an overall majority of MPs after the general election in 2010. The shadow Business Secretary, and former Chancellor, Ken Clarke provoked ...
Kelly's crackdown
At least someone in the Westminster village has a sense of humour. Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chose to publish his report on MPs' expenses on the eve of Bonfire Night. So he lit the blue touchpaper and stood well back - and the explosion o...
The Legg letters
The audit of MPs' expenses by Sir Thomas Legg, little mentioned over the past few months, turned out to be a massive parliamentary time-bomb just waiting to explode at Westminster. Hundreds of MPs have received letters from Sir Thomas calling on them to repay some of the expenses paid over the...
Jacqui Smith's apology
An inquiry by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, John Lyon, upheld two complaints against Jacqui Smith - that she'd wrongly designated her sister's London property as her main home and that she'd claimed for pay-per-view adult films on her second homes allowance. The Commissioner, i...
Parliamentary reform: what next?
There's nothing like a bit of bad news to concentrate the mind. And in June 2009, Gordon Brown had bad news by the bucketful. There was uproar over MPs' expenses. Labour had done disastrously in the local and European elections, with the BNP winning its first seats in Europe. And yet another...
Gordon Brown's big idea
Gordon Brown announced in June 2009 the creation of a new parliamentary committee - headed by the senior Labour MP Tony Wright - to look at further ways to modernise the Commons. This Select Committee on Commons Reform reported back in November 2009 with a series of proposals designed to give mo...
War-making powers
A White Paper published in 2008 proposed that MPs should be given the final say on whether British troops should be sent to war - stripping the Prime Minister of his war-making powers under the so-called Royal Prerogative. This has been a running sore within the Labour Party since Britain wen...
Dissolution powers
A 2007 Green Paper suggested that the power to dissolve Parliament and call a general election should be removed from the Prime Minister and given instead to MPs. It also proposed that the Speaker should be able to recall the Commons to sit during a parliamentary recess if a majority of MPs requ...
Recalling MPs
One of the eye-catching ideas in Gordon Brown's Labour Conference speech in September 2009 was the suggestion that voters should be given the power, in effect, to sack any sitting MP found guilty of gross financial misconduct. If more than a quarter of voters in a constituency demanded the "r...
Cameron's cull of MPs
The Conservative leader David Cameron says that a Tory government would cut the number of MPs by nearly 10%, from 646 to 585, saving about £15 million a year. He's also threatening a 5% reduction in ministerial salaries and - possibly the unkindest cut of all for many at Westminster - the ab...
Bercow's backbench Bill of Rights
The new Commons Speaker, John Bercow, has been quick to make changes. He is introducing elections for his three Deputies who, up to now, have been appointed following agreement between the "usual channels" - the Government and Opposition whips. And Mr Bercow told the Hansard Society in Sept...
Peers' expenses
The scandal over MPs' second home allowances has been followed by a series of Sunday Times articles alleging that some peers have been abusing their own expenses system - an affair that's still rumbling on. The newspaper has named more than a dozen peers. It accused some of pocketing tens of t...
MPs' expenses
Adult films, moat cleaning, floating duck islands, silk cushions - flippin' heck ... was there anything that MPs weren't claiming for in the great expenses scandal of 2009? It all began in the New Year when the Commons authorities announced that Parliament would be publishing details of MPs' e...
