The Times Guide to the House of Commons

The second part of the opportunity relates to Mr Cameron’s own party. Five years of work to rebrand the party did not change perceptions as much as his team had hoped. But now this. Mr Cameron has the potential to lift himself and the party above normal partisan politics.

And so, after some of the most dramatic days in modern politics, David Cameron found himself waving to the photographers outside No 10, flanked by Nick Clegg. But he has made a huge gamble. Could this move split his party? Might the Liberal Democrats prove not merely prickly partners, but impossible ones?

Unknown, unknowable. But this can be said with certainty. Politics has changed for ever.

Meet the Class of 2010, the new politics in person

Rachel Sylvester

Times columnist

There is a black-belt karate expert, a female football coach, a Mormon, a former television presenter and a bestselling author who has had the film rights to his life bought by Brad Pitt. A total of 232 new MPs were elected for the first time on May 6, 2010, including 147 Conservatives, 67 Labour members, 9 Liberal Democrats and the first representative of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, who won in the Brighton Pavilion constituency.

They are the novices in the Virgin Parliament, the new boys and girls who were swept into Westminster on the wave of public revulsion that followed the expenses scandal in what was widely perceived to be a House of Whores. Some were elected purely as a result of the swing away from Labour to the Tories that came after 13 years of one party having been in power, but many replaced MPs who had either resigned or been voted out by an electorate angry about the duck houses, moats and mortgages. The turnover at the last election was unusually high. The result is that more than a third of those now sitting on the green benches in the House of Commons are innocent about the wiles of the whips, ignorant of parliamentary tricks and unequipped by the now-abolished John Lewis List. Half the Tory MPs have just been elected for the first time. The Class of 2010 is the physical embodiment of “a new politics”. They are younger on average than in 1997, the last time power changed hands: 34 per cent of the new MPs are aged in their thirties. There are more black and Asian faces on the green benches than ever before: 26 MPs from ethnic minorities and marginally more women. Three Muslim women were elected, including the bright and beautiful Rushanara Ali, who regained Bethnal Green for Labour from the Respect party’s George Galloway.

Matthew Hancock, a former economist at the Bank of England who was an adviser to George Osborne before being elected Tory MP for West Suffolk at the election, says: “I’m 31 and I don’t feel particularly young. There’s a feeling of a huge generational shift.”

Michael Dugher, a former aide to Gordon Brown who is now Labour MP for Barnsley East, agrees. “People are very keen to learn the lessons of the past,” he says. “We are going to do things differently now. It is noticeable that the new MPs are hanging around with each other rather than the old hands. There is a togetherness about the new generation.”

As the new arrivals gathered for training sessions on parliamentary procedure, security and the expenses regime at the start of the new session, it became clear that whatever their party allegiances they were united by a determination to represent a clean break with the dirty past. Nicholas Boles, the new Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford, who until recently worked for Boris Johnson and is seen as one of the party’s smartest policy brains, says: “Everybody is obsessed about not getting caught up in another expenses scandal. It is not that we are a bunch of selfrighteous men and women in white suits but there is an overwhelming feeling that that was terrible, that we are at the beginning of our careers and the last thing we want to do is to have even the slightest hint of anything improper.”

Among the new Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs there is a sense of excitement about the possibilities opened up by the coalition Government. One session of the induction course took place in the chamber and the two parties’ members drifted to the Government side and sat among each other, intermingled. “We chatted very easily and got on in a way that would have been much more difficult for the old guard on either side,” one Conservative member says.

The Class of 2010 is more professional than previous generations. About 20 per cent of the new MPs are defined as having come into the Commons from politics, having worked either as advisers or councillors, 15 per cent from business, 12 per cent consultancy, 12 per cent law and 10 per cent financial services. Only 6 per cent have come in from charities, 5 per cent from the education sector and 5 per cent from the media.

According to an analysis by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, 35 per cent of MPs in the new Parliament went to independent schools. More than half of Conservative MPs were educated privately and 20 out of the 306 on the Tory benches went to one school – David Cameron’s alma mater, Eton. On the Labour side, it is rather different. “There are a lot of regional accents, most of us are working class-made-good,” says one new MP. Several union officials won seats, after a successful operation by Unite.

There does, though, also seem to be a hereditary principle at work in the House of Commons across the board. At least nine children of politicians were elected in 2010. They include Zac Goldsmith, the new Conservative MP for Richmond Park, who is the son of the late Referendum Party leader, Sir James Goldsmith; Ben Gummer, elected in Ipswich, the son of John Gummer, the former Tory Cabinet minister; and Anas Sarwar, who took over as Labour MP for Glasgow Central from his father, Mohammed Sarwar. Harriet Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, joins her in Parliament as MP for Birmingham Erdington and Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, is the sister of Keith Vaz, the longstanding Labour MP for Leicester East. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of the former Times Editor Lord Rees-Mogg, was elected in Somerset North East.

The new Conservative members are generally socially liberal and supportive of David Cameron’s modernisation of their party. A few days after the election, the Tory leader held a meeting of all his new MPs and was rather astonished by the attitude he found. “The general mood of the group was that, if anything, we had not gone far enough on modernisation,” one of those present says. “David said afterwards how remarkable it was, he was quite taken aback.”

Like Mr Cameron, most of the new Conservative MPs, are also pretty Eurosceptic. According to George Eustace, the former campaign director of the anti-euro “no” campaign, who is now MP for Camborne and Redruth: “Most think we should be taking powers back from the EU, but the new intake is also very committed to the idea of social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups being involved in public services. The Iain Duncan Smith agenda is where traditional right-wing Conservatism can come together with the more liberal modernising wing of the party.”

Other high-profile Tories include Rory Stewart, in Penrith and the Border, a former deputy governor of Iraq and bestselling author. He once walked across Afghanistan and also spent a summer as a tutor to Princes William and Harry. It is his life story that has been snapped up by Brad Pitt. Dan Byles, the new Tory MP for Warwickshire North, is almost as adventurous – he has rowed across the Atlantic and skied to the north pole with his mother.

Mr Goldsmith, the brother of Jemima Khan, will add a touch of glamour to the green benches, but could also clash with the leadership over green issues. Tracy Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford, is the qualified football coach. David Rutley, a former banker who represents Macclesfield, is the House of Commons’s first Mormon. Helen Grant, in Maidstone and the Weald, is the first black woman Conservative MP. Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton, a lawyer by training, has represented Britain at karate.

On the Labour side there is a fighting spirit as well. Those to watch include Tristram Hunt, the television historian who has just been elected in Stoke-on-Trent Central, and Chuka Umunna, the new MP for Streatham, a former lawyer who has been described as a potential British Barack Obama. Rachel Reeves, in Leeds West, is a former Bank of England economist with a reforming zeal, and Gloria De Piero, who was until she became MP for Ashfield a GMTV presenter, is certain to attract plenty of attention. Two former ministers under Tony Blair who lost their seats in 2005 also returned to Parliament: Stephen Twigg in Liverpool West Derby and Chris Leslie in Nottingham East.

One new MP says: “It is nothing like 1997, when lots of people got in who never expected to. Everyone here now has got black under their fingernails from having scraped their way up. They are quite a brutal, hard-headed bunch. They don’t look at the world through the prism of Blair-Brown or Left versus Right. They look at the world through the prism of Labour’s defeat.”

Whatever their party affiliation, those elected this year also look at the world through the prism of the MPs’ expenses scandal. There is the possibility of a really quite dramatic change of culture, brought about by a younger, more independent-minded intake who are all too aware of voters’ anger with politicians. Some of the Conservatives have been chosen in open primaries, which may make them less willing to toe the party line. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have used the election campaign to make clear their determination to alter the way in which politics is done. Across the board, the new intake is generally more receptive to constitutional reform, including changes to the voting system, than their parties’ older grandees.

Just as the Blair Babes transformed how the House of Commons looked in 1997, bringing flashes of feminine colour to the rows of grey suits, so the Class of 2010 could alter for ever the way in which politics is conducted. One new Tory MP says: “We get the scale of the public’s anger over the expenses scandal in a way that those who were in Parliament when it broke do not really get. We understand just how much change is needed.”

Women failed to break through

Rosemary Bennett

Social Affairs Correspondent

The 2010 general election was, pretty much, a male affair. Senior women from the main parties were curiously absent from the campaign and silent during the rows that blew up over taxation and spending. Attention was resolutely focused on the three leaders as the TV debates dominated the campaign and, in the end, more column inches were devoted to their wives’ outfits than equality.

At constituency level the story was not much better. In as many as 262 seats the three main parties all fielded male candidates, compared with just 11 seats where the main contenders were all women. The election was just too close to make gender an issue.

Not surprising, then, that there was no great breakthrough in the numbers of women entering Parliament. For all the talk of new dawns, it was old politics as usual when the 2010 intake took their seats for the first time. In terms of the numbers, there were 142 women MPs, compared with 126 in 2005, equivalent to 22 per cent of the total. That puts Britain on a par with the United Arab Emirates in terms of female representation.

The Conservatives made the most headway from their low base of just 18 MPs, 9 per cent of the parliamentary party, when the election was called. They emerged with 48 MPs, 16 per cent of the parliamentary party. Their success did not come easily. It was the result of considerable efforts, not in the approach to the election but throughout much of the previous Parliament, to make sure that a decent number of women candidates ended up in winnable seats.

For a while, they had the controversial “A” list comprising 50 per cent women from which the best seats were required to choose. In the end it was scrapped, such was its unpopularity, but it did help to boost the numbers. There was also a mentoring programme and, of course, plenty of encouragement from David Cameron.

In the end, though, it was not the sea change that the leadership had hoped for and privately senior party figures would admit that there was clearly farther to go.

Campaigners for equality worry that if this was the Conservatives’ best chance to push the agenda then the results look particularly disappointing. “The Conservatives do deserve to be congratulated. They trebled the number of women MPs. But you cannot help being left with the feeling that they could have gone a lot further. They had a new leader, they were ahead in the polls. They might not have such a good opportunity in the future to push this agenda,” Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said.

Labour lost women MPs in terms of numbers, with 81 in the new Parliament compared with 94 in the last. In percentage terms the total rose slightly to 31 per cent from 27, largely owing to the party’s use of all-women short lists in many winnable seats. That is unlikely to change in future elections.

The performance of the two main parties left the Lib Dems looking particularly feeble. They lost two of their already tiny pool of female MPs and now have only seven, equivalent to 12 per cent of the parliamentary party. Their poor record was underlined when the party had no woman MP senior enough to be in contention for the five Cabinet positions offered to the party under the deal.

Ms Goddard said that the Liberal Democrats were left looking very exposed, and had a fundamental problem if they were serious about increasing female representation. The party has an ideological opposition to positive action, a position backed powerfully by younger women in the party despite warnings from grandees such as Baroness Williams of Crosby that they will never get anywhere under existing procedures.

“To be fair to the party, they ran about half and half male and female candidates, but clearly the men were in the best seats. The party consistently refuses to adopt positive action to increase the number of women, which we think is an odd position given they are the party of electoral reform,” Ms Goddard said.

So what do the new women MPs now amassed on the government benches want to do with their power?

Despite the derision of the Blair babes, Labour women used their numbers to push for more maternity leave and pay, and new rights for flexible work, very much bottom-up reforms. Conservative women say that they will push for even grater reform on flexible work so that as many men and women as possible can work part time and, perhaps surprisingly, equal pay. And they may make their presence felt most by opposing a key leadership policy, tax breaks for married couples, that many think is not the best use of money.

They may, however, have to expend their political capital in other ways too. There is already concern that the “new politics” of the coalition is perhaps not so much of an opportunity for women as a challenge. Women were absent from the coalition negotiations with both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats fielding all-male sides. And in the scramble for a workable deal between the parties, the argument for fair representation at Cabinet level was somehow lost.

The first coalition Cabinet had just four women, and only one running a big department, with Theresa May at the Home Office. Analysts say it was not a great start. “Cameron and Clegg were acutely aware they have very few women on which they could credibly draw,” said Colin Hay, Professor of political analysis at the University of Sheffield. “The politics of the past was gender discriminatory. The irony, in a way, is that the Cabinet remains a sort of last bastion of that old order.”

Bad news for big spenders: money can’t buy you votes

Sam Coates

Chief Political Correspondent

For donors thinking of filling the coffers of Britain’s political parties, there could be few worse advertisements than the previous Parliament. Three of its five years were stained by continuing police investigations; Scotland Yard interviewed a sitting Prime Minister for corruption offences; and more than half of its MPs had to hand back money after claiming for expenses they were not rightfully owed. Trust in politicians dropped to levels never seen before: only one in ten people thought MPs told the truth. Public antagonism was stoked by an often hostile media and insurgent blogosphere picking over the personal lives and motivations of public figures, especially donors who were often treated as if they had already been found guilty of paying for access to power.

Given the contempt with which so many politicians came to be held – one utterly blameless Lib Dem quit the Commons after his wife was spat on in the street – it is perhaps a surprise that just so many moneymen kept their faith and continued to write their cheques, mainly to the Conservatives. Over the course of the Parliament donors gave money to David Cameron at rates never seen before in British politics.

In his four years as Leader of the Opposition, from January 2006 to May 6, 2010, a record £122 million went through Tory coffers, by any international political yardstick an extraordinary amount. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign committee in 2008 raised £450 million. That was to fund a campaign that won decisively in a country where campaigns hinge on TV advertising and with an electorate five times the size. In domestic terms this figure is also striking: Labour’s income was £71 million over the same period, although £22 million of this came while Tony Blair was still in office. It also beats sums raised in previous Parliaments: the Tories’ income was £49 million and Labour’s £61 million between 2001 and 2005.

Perhaps more intriguing is the limited impact that this vast spending appeared to have. By Mr Cameron’s own yardstick, set in a Spectator interview shortly before polling day, his own campaign was a failure. The Conservative vote increased by 3.8 percentage points on its 2005 vote: an increase of 2 million votes net, or, taking into account the higher number of votes received by rival parties, 1.1 million more than last time. In other words, every additional vote cost the Tories £111.

What is more, for the shrewd financial investor, the archetype of the modern Tory donor, the way the Conservative Party operated under the stewardship of Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton and ultimately George Osborne as general election co-ordinator, must have seemed horrific. At a national level, half a million pounds was gambled on cinema advertisements that were never shown, £400,000 on a January 2010 “cut the deficit not the NHS” poster campaign later disowned by some senior figures. About half a million was spent on a much-ridiculed “don’t be a tosser” campaign on the national debt and the same sum again on a national newspaper campaign to recruit internet “friends of the Conservatives”, which was never mentioned again by the leadership.

The previous Parliament brought the downsides of political giving into sharp relief. Of these, the loans-for-peerages saga, which overshadowed Mr Blair’s final year in office, was perhaps the most seismic, involving the Prime Minister and senior staff, 136 people questioned by Scotland Yard’s Special Crime Division, 6,300 documents handed to the Crown Prosecution Service and four people arrested, including a Downing Street aide at dawn. At its heart was an allegation, never tested in a court and strongly denied by all those involved, that Labour figures seduced wealthy donors with promises of peerages in return for vast secret loans to bankroll the party through the 2005 election campaign.

It came to light in 2006 after it emerged that four Labour supporters had been turned down for peerages by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Chai Patel, the founder of the Priory healthcare group, publicly complained after his application was leaked to a newspaper, then rejected. It soon emerged that three other businessmen were put forward for peerages – Sir David Garrard, Sir Gulam Noon, and Barry Townsley – having all made huge loans to Labour before the election at the behest of Lord Levy, Mr Blair’s gregarious fundraiser. Sir Gulam even revealed that he had been told by Lord Levy to remove references to his £250,000 loan to Labour from his peerage application form.

Despite an ignominious political tradition of peerages for donors, epitomised by Harold Wilson’s Lavender List, opposition MPs started complaining that there had been a breach of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, introduced after David Lloyd George sold honours for cash. An initial inquiry by the Public Administration Committee was halted after Scotland Yard agreed to investigate a complaint by Angus MacNeil, a Scottish Nationalist MP. The police investigation was initially treated lightly by Downing Street, until a number of arrests culminating with that of Lord Levy, who was brought in for questioning. Ruth Turner, an aide to Mr Blair, was arrested at dawn and questioned under suspicion of perverting the course of justice. The inquiry had reached the heart of No 10. In December 2006 Mr Blair became the first serving Prime Minister in history to face a police interrogation, seeing officers three times in Downing Street.

Mr Blair’s staff had raised the stakes, warning Scotland Yard that the Prime Minister would resign if he was arrested while in office. In fact, Mr Blair left office before the investigation was complete. After 16 months, the inquiry was dropped without charges by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS said that it had never intended to go to court unless there was “unambiguous agreement” between two people that a gift would be made in exchange for an honour, adding: “There is no direct evidence of any such agreement.”

Officers in the Speciality Crime Unit, which had pursued the case, were unhappy. They believed that they had two strong pieces of evidence: the diary of Sir Christopher Evans, who loaned money to Labour and was later arrested, which detailed conversations with Lord Levy. Detectives believed that this provided “spectacular” evidence of what they interpreted as an agreement for Sir Christopher to be ennobled in return for the loan. Detectives had also discovered that Downing Street officials initially drew up a plan to give peerages to eight of the twelve businessmen who secretly bankrolled Labour’s 2005 general election campaign: four more than had been thought.

The reason for the CPS decision, apparently late on in the investigation, to demand “unambiguous” evidence as the basis of a criminal case and thus rule out the use of the two strongly circumstantial pieces of evidence in police hands remains a mystery. The investigation, which spanned the transition of power from Mr Blair to Gordon Brown, highlighted the culture clash between politicians and police, with the friction between both sides often played out in the media. It highlighted the levels of ignorance among many officials about the electoral reforms Labour had brought in during the first Parliament but now showed little sign of bothering with. It also came as the Labour Party was adjusting to life without large numbers of individual donors, forcing a return to a reliance on trade unions.

By the end of the Parliament, notions of abandoning the union link, once aired by Blairites such as Alan Milburn, seemed fanciful. At the lowest point in its popularity early in 2008, union funding accounted for 92 per cent of donations to Labour, amid claims that the party was solvent only because of a guarantee from Unite, the super-union, that it would never allow it to go bust. In November 2007, it emerged that Labour’s third biggest donor, David Abrahams, had concealed his identity and given hundreds of thousands of pounds in the names of his secretary and a builder, illegal under electoral law. Mr Abrahams, a colourful Tyneside lawyer, said he had done so to avoid the limelight. Facing a police investigation, Mr Brown fired the Labour general secretary, Peter Watt, who carried the can for the arrangement set up by his predecessors. In May 2009 the CPS decided again that there was insufficient evidence for any prosecution.