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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters Whipping Yarns, our series peering into the hidden world of Westminster's whips. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy for decades, the Lib Dems had hoped to win enough MPs to force their way into government in coalition with one of the bigger parties. In 2010, under Nick Clegg, they finally achieved that dream, only to see the prize turn to ashes in an electoral debacle in 2015.

[00:00:41] Ruth Fox: And one of the few senior Lib Dems to survive the wrath of the voters was Alistair Carmichael, who entered government as Deputy Chief Whip, and soon had to persuade his MPs to abandon key promises to the electorate, in particular on student tuition fees.

[00:00:56] Mark D'Arcy: We began by asking him what it was like after long years as the third party to enter government.

[00:01:03] Alistair Carmichael: I don't think I can really actually sum it up in a single word. I mean, first of all, we had had a run up to the 2010 election campaign that had lasted for about six months. You know, everybody knew it was coming, but you had to wait, and we were in constant campaign mode. We then had the campaign itself.

[00:01:22] You may remember, in the middle of the campaign, we were hit by a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. Which, if you were, as I was trying to do, get round 34 inhabited islands in Orkney and Shetland, plus be available to take part in television interviews and debates in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it was exhausting.

[00:01:44] The first memory I have of the period after that election was on the Saturday morning, I was flying out of Orkney to come down here for the first meeting of the parliamentary party, and in Kirkwall Airport, having got my boarding pass, I went and sat down with a cup of coffee, and on a pretty hard, uncomfortable airport seat, fell asleep.

[00:02:07] The airport staff came and sort of woke me up and said, Alistair, everybody else is on the plane, you have to go through security now. So, I got here, and actually, although I had seen the arithmetic, I knew what the outcome of the election was, it was only really when I got to the LGA building in Smith Square that I had to fight my way through the waiting press corps, which is not normal, let me tell you, for Liberal Democrat parliamentary party meetings.

[00:02:37] And that was when the political reality of the situation in which we were, just hit me, you know, like a steam train. You have to then start applying your political mind. Where does the national interest lie in this? Where does the party interest lie in this? Where does your constituency interest lie in this?

[00:02:57] And there was then about three or four days of pretty constant hectic negotiation before we completed the prototype of the coalition agreement. There was a fuller document came along later on. And it was done in a fairly febrile environment because we were getting advice from the Cabinet Secretary or getting advice from the Governor of the Bank of England on the need to get a government in place and to get some stability back into things because remember in the rest of Europe in Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Spain, there was a sovereign debt crisis that was just about to tip over the edge, and with the size of the deficit that we had in the United Kingdom at that time it was by no means impossible that we could have followed them.

[00:03:50] So you know, there was a genuine sense that this was politics that really mattered in a way which I, having been in Parliament for nine years already at this point, even at the moment of going to war in Iraq, you know, it didn't feel ever that it quite felt like this. And into this, I was dropped as Chief Whip.

[00:04:13] Mark D'Arcy: So you're through the pearly gates into government,. as a Liberal Democrat, the first time Liberals have been in government since Churchill's wartime coalition. Were you scared? Were you exultant? What was the set of emotions playing through you and your colleagues minds?

[00:04:27] Alistair Carmichael: I think like everybody else, I was predominantly still exhausted at this stage.

[00:04:33] But yes, you know, look, it was a moment of pride. Paddy Ashdown used to say I'd never want to lead a debating society, and I always took that to heart. And I still take the view that if there is an opportunity and if there's an imperative for you to be in government, as there was in 2010, then you shouldn't walk away from that if you are a serious political party, and otherwise you are just there campaigning for the sake of campaigning. And that's certainly not what I signed up for when I left legal practice to become an MP in 2001. There are moments, I remember going in to Number 11 Downing Street, where the Government Whip's office was then, and what looks like a pretty standard London office building, you realise when you try and open the door and it has got all the reinforcement that this door has, it weighs a tonne, that's when you realise actually you are working in a completely different environment.

[00:05:34] Ruth Fox: That of course wears off after a time. From your perspective as a Chief Whip, how do you hold your troops together during that coalition and what sort of strategies do you have to think about?

[00:05:45] Alistair Carmichael: It was different from doing it in opposition. Because, especially in a coalition, because in opposition you really have to just get everybody to talk things through. So when we had all the difficult Brexit votes, for example, we talked and talked and talked and talked until we came to a place where we could all agree. In coalition, it was for Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander to go into the quad with George Osborne and David Cameron and agree a government position.

[00:06:15] And then we had to take that back to government. Now, we created our own mechanisms, our own backbench committees to engage with government, speak to civil servants, speak to ministers, to shape policy as far as we were able to. But it was difficult. I always say that you will never coerce a liberal to do anything, but you might persuade them.

[00:06:40] So, you know, you just needed to spend the time talking to people and hope that they would engage, you know, in a responsible, reasoned way. Most of the time, most people did. Occasionally, you would come across people who just didn't want to listen anymore. And that was the days when it got difficult. I'll share with you in complete confidence, obviously, I do have a reputation for occasionally lacking patience.

[00:07:10] And that was perhaps the days when my lack of patience might have been most obvious, perhaps to the more sensitive insiders, never to the outside world, obviously.

[00:07:22] Mark D'Arcy: Who is it more troublesome for being in coalition? Was it more difficult for the Lib Dems? Was it more difficult for the Conservatives?

[00:07:28] Because you were conscious quite early on that there was a very organised group, the ERG, the European Research Group, on one wing of the Conservative Party pushing the agenda that became Brexit. Was there a Lib Dem equivalent lurking in the shadows?

[00:07:42] Alistair Carmichael: Nothing, thankfully, like the ERG. For Liberal Democrats, looking back on it, it was a fascinating dynamic that was at play.

[00:07:52] I think the received wisdom was that it would be most difficult for the Liberal Democrats because it was so long since we had been in government and the Conservatives had traditionally had this reputation for doing and saying almost anything to be in government. And point of fact, I think there were difficult days for us both.

[00:08:13] For Liberal Democrats, a lot of my colleagues, remember, weren't entirely uninitiated in coalitions, because a lot of my colleagues had run councils up and down the country, some quite big councils, often in coalition with other parties, and they understood how that worked and how it would have to work. So I think a lot of the very clever people, the commentators, underestimated the Liberal Democrat professionalism and determination and resilience, and overestimated the willingness of the Conservatives, because you did see from time to time, as David Cameron's political capital ran down, the way that government would begin to seize up because he couldn't bring his party along with him.

[00:09:02] Whereas if you look at the way in which that coalition was made, we had our process, we agreed it, there was a vote of the House of Commons parliamentary party, the House of Lords parliamentary party, I forget the full detail now, I think the Federal Executive of the Liberal Democrats and maybe the Policy Committee as well.

[00:09:22] And then after we'd been through all these hoops, we got on a train to Birmingham and had a one day conference in the National Exhibition Centre there to approve the coalition agreement for a party as a whole. But that actually mattered then come the difficult days. Because the Conservatives did it very differently.

[00:09:44] They just took the coalition agreement to David Cameron, who would just say, right, well, you know, show me where I sign. Whereas the Liberal Democrats went through this somewhat tortuous process. But we were always then able to say to people, this is what you signed up for. You know, we always knew it wasn't going to be easy, but you had your say and you said you wanted to do it. And that was a persuasive argument a lot of the time. Not always, but a lot of the time.

[00:10:11] Ruth Fox: One of the criticisms, I think, is that if you look at the relationship between Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander, David Cameron and George Osborne, the quad, a lot of obviously the work going through the quad, one of the accusations is it got a bit too chummy.

[00:10:25] Was that an accusation that was discussed within the party? Do you think that was part of the problem or not?

[00:10:31] Alistair Carmichael: One of the things I used to say to people and I would still believe to this day is that all governments are coalitions and the big difference between the Cameron-Clegg coalition and the Blair-Brown coalition, which it more or less replaced, was that the two people at the top of the Cameron-Clegg coalition actually quite liked each other, whereas the relationship between Blair and Brown, we know, was stretched and occasionally fairly fraught.

[00:11:00] Was it too cosy? Look, I don't know. I think probably I would still need a few years perspective to get a view on that. But what I do remember is from day one of that coalition, all the clever people, all the commentators said, this won't last. You know, a coalition doesn't work in Westminster. Liberal Democrats are too flaky. Conservatives are too arrogant. You'll never hold it together. In fact, the glue that held the coalition together was deficit reduction and fixing the economy after the crash of 2008, and the predictions right at the start, it'll not last a month, it'll not last six weeks, eight weeks, three months, six months, and then after a while people realised actually, yes, this is a government that has, you know, a political coherence to it through deficit reduction, and it is going to last.

[00:11:56] So they then started to write a very different story about this is a government that's going to last until and after the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. They could name the date of the following general election. And I do remember there was one moment when David Cameron went off to Brussels, vetoed the EU budget in the middle of the night, and didn't refer it back to ourselves in London.

[00:12:25] Nick Clegg was incandescent, and there was a DUP opposition day lauding this you know, we eventually said no look we're just not gonna be part of this. So we kept it pretty tight, come the moment of the vote our people stayed away, the Conservatives and the DUP and whoever else just voted the motion through that they wanted and the moment passed.

[00:12:53] Mark D'Arcy: Is that the most dangerous moment?

[00:12:54] Alistair Carmichael: That was the moment. As I say the glue that held the coalition together was fixing the economy, it was reducing the deficit. And that was something that both parties could sign up to, albeit, you know, there were moments when we all felt it might be done differently. Within both parties, to be honest.

[00:13:13] But, for that one day, it just looked as if suddenly we had found another issue that was going to be more important than the economy. And it was an issue on which you were never going to build a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. So, it was a moment where I felt this could all just turn to dust having come this far.

[00:13:38] But all the clever people who had been telling me, you're on a hiding to nothing, this is never going to work, they didn't even notice it just passed them by and I was not going to go around pointing it out to them. Until now.

[00:13:50] Mark D'Arcy: But that was one of the big fault lines in the coalition, wasn't it, the European policy, especially with David Cameron having to fend off his Brexiteer wing, as it then wasn't quite, his Eurosceptic wing, it would have been called at the time.

[00:14:04] And what was clear from quite an early stage in the coalition was that those tensions were just growing and growing on the Tory wing. Did you, as Deputy Chief Whip, did you talk to the Government Chief Whip about all these things and see these tensions boiling up?

[00:14:17] Alistair Carmichael: There was one moment, I worked very well with Patrick McLoughlin, who was the Conservative Chief Whip, because I suppose politically, in the sort of determination to deliver something, we were compatible personalities, shall we say.

[00:14:33] And there was one day, when - and Patrick has spoken about this himself - there was one day when the first time the Conservatives suffered a big rebellion on the issue of Europe. We were in his office at the end of the day, as we often ended up, occasionally with a bottle of single malt, because these things all help to keep the machinery of government lubricated.

[00:14:59] Lubricated, never well oiled, obviously. And Patrick said to me, Well, I guess this is my day of tuition fees, and I couldn't help but laugh. I said, Patrick, cup your ear for a second. Listen, what can you hear? Are you hearing riot police in Whitehall at all? And he said, well, he had the good grace to accept that, no, it was, it was a different order.

[00:15:23] But the point was that that was a day which was enormously difficult for them as a party, albeit one that actually David Cameron got to a place that he wanted to get to, which was more pro European mainstream, and he got there as a consequence of having Liberal Democrats in coalition with him.

[00:15:47] Mark D'Arcy: Did you get a sense of the building tensions in the Tory ranks?

[00:15:51] Alistair Carmichael: Well, one of the things actually that worked very well in coalition was the scepticism, shall we say, that both Whip's teams had in relation to their own parliamentary colleagues. And I do remember there was one day when - I'll not name names here - but there were two arch Eurosceptics who were then jockeying for position amongst the Conservatives about who could outdo the other.

[00:16:21] And this fairly long-standing Conservative Eurosceptic sidled up to his whip one day and said, you'll have to watch this guy, meaning his would be contender, you'll have to watch this guy, he's a bit mad when it comes to Europe. Now, we all within both parties, as the whips, kind of thought this was just hilariously funny, because frankly, when it came to madness in Europe, you wouldn't put a cigarette paper between either of them.

[00:16:52] I have seen saner boxes of frogs.

[00:16:55] Mark D'Arcy: While the European tensions were brewing on the Conservative side, on the Liberal Democrat side, there must have been increasing consciousness that, uh, your voters were deserting you over the coalition. It was happening in wave after wave of local elections, European Parliament elections, every other kind of election.

[00:17:12] Even by-elections were pretty troublesome for a party that used to thrive on them. Were there were people who were starting to think, maybe we need an exit strategy, maybe we need a few years out of the coalition rather than go the full parliament.

[00:17:23] Alistair Carmichael: First of all, in by-elections, remember of the promising by-elections, if you like, there was Oldham East and Saddleworth. Which was the first one, very early on. We didn't win it, but we ran the Labour Party quite close there. And then of course we had the Eastleigh by-election with Chris Huhne that we did win. So, you know, look it was, there were some enormously difficult electoral days. I remember spending I think about 18 hours, 20 hours, in television studios when, frankly, there was no other Liberal Democrats in Scotland who really was prepared to go on television and talk about the results, which were really, really bad for us.

[00:18:03] And you saw really good people who'd given great service to their communities, leading councils, just losing time after time. And that really was heartbreaking. We did occasionally have these conversations within the party that said, you know, we should disengage six months out from an election or whatever. I was never convinced, I have to say.

[00:18:25] I think the idea that you would be in a coalition that had done all the really difficult things for four and a half years and then you would remove yourself from it, thus removing this political stability that we had given the country that was so important in 2010, and that somehow or another there would be an electoral advantage to be had from that because people would forget that we'd been in government. I just never found that a credible proposition and I think that was a fairly widely held view in the party. So I think at the end of the day, we did the only thing we could do which was to see it through to the end. There is no pretending that the electoral consequences from the 2015 general election were anything other than carnage, but there were by that time other forces at play as well.

[00:19:16] The story of the 2015 election for the Liberal Democrats, I think, was not just one of punishment for coalition, but it was the coming of nationalism and the impact that that had on us in both England and Scotland. I still think that Conservative poster that had Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond's pocket really spoke to the concerns that a lot of people had in England.

[00:19:45] And, you know, somebody who believes in the continuation of the United Kingdom, to see people in England voting to protect a distinctly English national interest as opposed to a British national interest was really worrying in 2015. That, you saw it in the map blue from the tip of Cornwall right up to the Scottish border and then yellow, with the one blob of blue in the south of Scotland, the red little blob in the south of Edinburgh and of course the glorious gold of Orkney and Shetland right at the top of the map.

[00:20:20] Ruth Fox: As your colleagues are obviously facing this political pressure over the course of the coalition, did your job as Chief Whip take on more in terms of the pastoral role and the support role as well as the kind of the hard business management of getting legislation through?

[00:20:34] Alistair Carmichael: The pastoral role is always there, it never goes away. MPs, especially dare I say, Liberal Democrat MPs, who take a real pride in the work that they do as community advocates and helping people in their communities, very often find that you spend your whole life picking up other people's mess, but then when you've got a mess of your own, you need somebody else to pick it up for you.

[00:21:01] And I think that's a constant part of the job. It's where the relationship that you have with your parliamentary colleagues really matters. Because they've got to feel confident to come and see you. You might find colleagues who will tell you differently, but I flatter myself that anybody who ever needed help, when I was Chief Whip at that time and subsequently, you know, the the second time when we're in opposition would tell you that they would come to me and trust me to help them to the best - money problems, marriage problems, you know their own health problems, whatever else it was. And that's where the way in which you do what you call the hard nosed business management matters, because your colleagues professionally will respect you professionally if you're professional in the way that you handle them. And if you've got that professional relationship then come the day when there is a personal issue that requires to be dealt with they will come and talk to you.

[00:22:09] Ruth Fox: That must wear quite heavily on you as well as an individual because, you know, you don't come into Parliament to deal with your colleagues' marital problems and money problems and so on. And there's no real training in this, so sort of human resource support as a Chief Whip. So how do you get through it?

[00:22:26] Alistair Carmichael: When Nick Clegg asked me to be Chief Whip, he said, look, you understand Parliament, you have some good emotional intelligence, and sometimes, when it matters, you can be a bit of a thug. As a job description, I guess that's probably going to be as good as you get.

[00:22:49] I mean, look, I'm sure he meant something different when he said a bit of a thug. What I will do, and what I've always done. If I have a disagreement with someone, I'll tell them. I have little appetite for the people in Parliament who go around bitching about people behind their back. If I've got a problem with you, I'll tell it. And you will know it. And you might not like it, but you will know where you stand. And I think that's an important part of it. You're right, it's not a job for which there is any formal training. Who knows, that could be a future gap in the market for somebody. But I had been a solicitor in private practice and I spent my life picking up other people's problems, giving them the best advice I could.

[00:23:36] Generally I would expect my clients to follow my advice, occasionally they didn't and sometimes they were right, most of the time I was. And you know, that did, I suppose, in many ways give me a background in this. Politically, not in any other sense, but politically I have a kind of engineer's mind. So I like to see how the machine works and how you can make it work better.

[00:24:00] So that, I think, is the sort of approach that you have to have to be an effective weapon to do the job properly. The other thing you need to have is a bit of self awareness, so that you know who your strengths and weaknesses are and then to have a team of people around you who will complement your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. And both in terms of the party colleagues, you know, the MP colleagues I had as deputy chief whips and the staff that I employed as my special advisor and the head of the whips office, I was incredibly well served in having people around me who who would be alive to the things that might go down badly with me and engineer circumstances such that they would be kept from me as long as possible.

[00:24:53] I'll name check one of them, Hollie Voyce, who was our head of office, an enormously talented young woman who I'd really like to see come back into politics at one point. She used to say that she was quite happy as long as I was shouting and slamming the door and being demonstrative because she knew that was just how I kind of managed my own stress.

[00:25:18] She knew though that the moment when there was serious trouble in the offing was when I went quiet and she says "you do this thing with your mouth where your lips go into a straight line". And she's absolutely right because since she told me this I've become very conscious of it. And now when I feel myself with that straight lined lips I try to sort of relax it but it doesn't always work.

[00:25:45] So your own self awareness and the strength of the relationship of the team around you. Because whipping is a team sport. As the Chief Whip you're the team captain, but don't think you can do it all on your own, because you would need to be virtually schizophrenic. So, after I've had a difficult conversation with somebody, they might go out the door in a not brilliant mood. But having somebody on the other side of the door, ready to catch them, take them away, offer them a sympathetic ear, keep the relationship and the line of communication open, that's enormously important.

[00:26:21] Mark D'Arcy: Now, as we record this, we're on the cusp of a general election, and I was just wondering, you're one of the few surviving ministerial veterans of the Lib Dem ministers during the coalition.

[00:26:33] Has your party had its fingers so badly burned by that experience that it's never going to do it again? I mean, a coalition of any kind looks quite improbable, given the current polls, but who knows? But would the Liberal Democrats dive in again? Would you prefer to keep your distance next time?

[00:26:51] Alistair Carmichael: I think it would be a much more difficult sale for the party.

[00:26:54] And I think rightly so. People say, you know, what's your ambitions for the party? And I say my ambitions are that if we find ourselves in that situation again, then we have the ability to make new mistakes, rather than just repeat the old ones. Everybody makes mistakes, every government makes mistakes, and we wouldn't be any different from that.

[00:27:16] Mark D'Arcy: Well, was one of the mistakes, though, that you were almost too disciplined, too good a set of soldiers for the coalition government, and maybe if you'd been a little bit more obstroperous, you'd have got your way a bit more and had more to visibly show the electorate that there was a distinctive Lib Dem contribution to the coalition.

[00:27:31] Alistair Carmichael: Well, that's possibly true, but you know, it is wisdom with hindsight. And I come back to this point that in the early days in particular, the maintenance of that discipline was very, very important because we had to show to the world that we could make coalition government work. And we did. That government was by some measure much better than anything that has followed it.

[00:27:57] So I don't think, when Rishi Sunak goes to, around the country talking about the danger of the instability of a coalition government, he will find there is much of an audience for that argument, coming as it is from the leader of a party who's provided three Prime Ministers in one parliament and five Prime Ministers in eight years.

[00:28:21] My goodness, I wish we could have the instability of coalition again. It served the country pretty well when we had it. But to come back to your question, I think it would be virtually impossible for the Liberal Democrats to go into any coalition arrangement that didn't in some way offer electoral reform.

[00:28:39] That's something that I would take from it, but it doesn't look like that's a prospect at the moment, but you never know.

[00:28:47] Ruth Fox: It does seem improbable from where we're sat today, but if it were to happen, what would your one piece of advice be to the person who might be where you were in 2010 as Chief Whip going through the doors of Number 10 into a coalition? What would you say to your successor?

[00:29:03] Alistair Carmichael: I think I would say that if it is possible to do a deal, to go into government and to make a genuine difference, in the way that we did in that coalition, you know the, the work that we did to raise the level at which people started paying tax made a massive difference to people, especially in lower paid employment.

[00:29:24] The money that we put in to the Pupil Premium, again, for children from the poorest backgrounds to get the best possible start in life. If you can achieve that sort of change, then you absolutely should do it. I would never go into government at any price, but government at the right price is something that you should be prepared to undertake and to take seriously.

[00:29:49] I think the only other piece of advice I would ever give anybody is, don't think it's going to be easy. Being in government is enormously difficult. It is all consuming, especially in a coalition government. My wife, who was, and is, enormously supportive right through these coalition years, would sometimes say, even when you're here, as in physically here, you're not here. Because you're thinking about what's happening somewhere else. You're thinking about the political problems of the government, the personal problems of your colleagues. Thinking about whether the plane is going to fly out of Orkney again on Monday morning, or whether you're going to be left trying to manage things from an airport lounge in Kirkwall Airport. So, it is difficult. It's all consuming, and it will take as much of you as you're prepared to give it and I think therefore, having talked myself round into this, the best piece of advice I would give anybody in the Chief Whip's job in these circumstances is sometimes be prepared to say no, sometimes be prepared to put yourself above all the rest of it, because frankly even if you do that just for a day or two, it'll all still be there for you when you've done that.

[00:31:07] Mark D'Arcy: Alistair Carmichael, thanks very much for joining us on Whipping Yarn's Parliament Matters.

[00:31:11] Alistair Carmichael: Thank you very much, I've enjoyed the chat as always.

[00:31:17] Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, what do you take away from that, uh, that conversation with Alistair?

[00:31:21] Mark D'Arcy: Well, one of the things that immediately strikes you is that there can't be many MPs who've been through more severe ups and more severe downs in Parliament than Alistair. From central player in a coalition government to one of the senior surviving members of a tiny minority party and then back again because now of course they've got 72 MPs and they can start thinking again about maybe being in a coalition sometime soon.

[00:31:42] Ruth Fox: Yeah and you do get a sense of how all consuming the job was and of course for Alistair the additional challenge that he's a representative for one of the most remote constituencies in the country so he must have the constitution of an ox manage all of that.

[00:31:55] Mark D'Arcy: All of those anecdotes about dozing in the airport waiting room, waiting for his plane to take off from the Shetland Islands and take it, take him back to the mainland so that he could then make the hop down to London.

[00:32:05] He must have spent an awful long time travelling.

[00:32:07] Ruth Fox: Yeah, but also that sense that he still thinks in the end it was worth it.

[00:32:12] Mark D'Arcy: I do wonder if a lot of Lib Dems who were involved in that government Do feel that they got enough out of it. Were they strategically smart enough? And if ever the situation of a hung parliament arises again, I think some of the lessons that Alistair was mulling through there will come back and resurface.

[00:32:29] He'd certainly be, I imagine, someone that a future Lib Dem leader would consult in some detail about a future coalition.

[00:32:36] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, I think that's all for this edition, Mark.

[00:32:38] Mark D'Arcy: We'll be back with another edition quite soon, looking at the challenge of whipping SNP MPs, talking to their former Chief Whip patrick Grady. Join us then.

[00:32:47] Intro: See you then.

[00:32:54] Ruth Fox: Well that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands.

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[00:33:12] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[00:33:14] Mark D'Arcy: What do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon.

[00:33:21] Ruth Fox: Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety.org.uk/PMUQ.

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[00:33:46] Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @HansardSociety.