who s got loads to say. it s thangam debbonaire, shadow leader of the house of commons. hello, hello, hello. and thank you so much for mentioning us in the house of commons last week. this is how it went. the leader famously once reassured this house that another prime minister wasn t hiding under a desk. words immortalised on the bbc s newscast intro. now i hear from the parliamentary press gallery reception news that she s a big fan of the podcasts. so, mr speaker, i ll end by tempting her to update newscast and update this house. is that where the prime minister really was on monday evening, hiding under a desk? so this is a great way for our politicians to get on the podcast. just name check us in parliament, put us in the historic record forever for historians to read about. and then you can come on. yeah, but i m the first, i was the first to put newscast in hansard and that was very exciting moment. i mean, if this starts an arms race, it will be amazing. who knows? bu
now, i think it s worth putting in some context, which is that these were a small number of vociferous supporters of boris johnson. they were a lot of people who either were supporters of borisjohnson or never were who would make an argument that would say, look, you ve got to be quite careful about the extent to which you criticise a committee like this when it s doing its work, not least because the members of that committee can t actually say anything in public about the work that they are doing when they are doing it. and they were particularly critical of what they felt were coordinated, systematic attempts to undermine their work. and they drew a distinction between the tweets and the tv and the radio contributions of some of them, and others like bill cash, the veteran conservative, who had his issues with the committee but had made those submissions in what were deemed to be a parliamentary way. so either by writing to them or by saying stuff in the house of commons as opposed
give me great advice. in her exact words, it was, your colleagues will always thank you for your brevity. that s so true. well, let s give this a go then. so the first thing we re going to talk about is the privileges committee. that s the committee of the house of commons, which originally investigated borisjohnson and found that he d misled parliament in his comments about party gate and they recommended the 90 day suspension. now, one of the reasons the suspension, how am i doing? ok so far? good, good. was so long is because he himself had criticised the work of the committee and kind of tried to shed doubt on the work it was doing. but it wasn tjust him. it was also some of his parliamentary allies. people like nadine dorries and jacob rees mogg could also very publicly criticise the committee and challenge the political background of the chair, harriet harman, and things like that, and dragged up all the tweets of her about party gate. so the committee did another inquiry into
up on parliamentary terms and one of the things that they are claiming is that this could have been what s called contempt. now, contempt means if you look in your erskine may, the parliamentary rule book, and there is an online version so people can look it up to check my working. the important point here is that contempt is any act or something that someone says or the opposite. so not saying or not doing something in a way which would obstruct parliament s work. now that really matters because parliament is here to represent the people, to serve the people, and if we are obstructed in our work, then we can t do that properly. and i felt like last monday, when we debated the original privileges committee report into borisjohnson, who had been shown to lie, that was a really important moment of reasserting democracy and reasserting, frankly.. and that still happened fine, despite these comments. yes. but what would be an ok thing to say about a committee that might be a bit critical b