for political thinking with nick robinson. we must not let the public think that we are the parliament that licensed cash for questions. that was the warning from my guest on political thinking this week chris bryant who chairs a house of commons standards committee. his words won him the plaudit of being the parliamentary speech of the year. he also secured a government u—turn and a change into the approach and standards. now, chris bryant is a labour mp, he represents one of the poorest constituencies in the country, yet his background doesn't suggest preparation for that. he was a public schoolboy, he trained to be a vicar in the church of england, and he was, at university, a student conservative activist. chris bryant, welcome to political thinking. you've now made me seem very odd already! in the words of stephen sondheim, "i've went from careered to career." i've made you interesting rather than odd! orweird. we are going to explore the interesting and the weird, perhaps. we are going to examine happy and sad. let's start with that speech. i, as it happens, by sheer chance, sat next to you and your husband as you got that accolade. you were told it was speech of the year. at the time you were delivering the speech, were you conscious this may be one of the speeches of your lifetime? no, completely not. i was completely mystified by what the government were up to. i had been predicting they would let it all pass because that's what has always happened in the past with every single report from a committee finding that a member of parliament has been up to no good. so i was mystified that jacob rees—mogg gave this 45—minute speech in which he basically tore up all the rules at the 11th hour in what is meant to be an independent disciplinary process — so no, i thought i'm still going to try and persuade people in the chamber and sometimes as mps we go, right, i'm just going to rant and get it off my chest and deliver my single transferable speech, but sometimes you do actually just want to try and persuade everybody you possibly can. it's interesting that you say you were mystified. i felt you were angry, very much in control. you talked about what the government was doing as being immoral. you talked about it being the polar opposite of the rule of law. you were pretty cross. you were pretty cross too. i didn't feel cross, actually, i'm going to stick with the word mystified. it perplexed me that somebody could make an argument that owen paterson had not had a fair hearing and therefore we had to completely throw the whole process up in the air. he was the tory mp, the former cabinet minister at the centre of this, we're not going get into his case because you've done that elsewhere, but you felt that all the rules were effectively being torn up for the sake of one man. completely, and that's what they do in russia. i know when you had me on — you raised an eyebrow on the today programme when i used the word russia — but it's true. when you suddenly change the rules three quarters of the way through a disciplinary process solely to benefit or to harm a named individual. that's bonkers. i didn't raise an eyebrow and i'm not raising two now because that point is invalid — but the comparison with russia leads some to say, and indeed the prime minister himself tried it, didn't he, just a hold on, we are not fundamentally corrupt country. and once you compare us with russia you're making us seem to be. i'm terribly sorry but if a prime minister has to announce we are not a corrupt country, you do start to think, hang on, what's going on here? i passionately care about parliament, as you know, because through parliamentary democracy you can change people's life. when i was born, homosexuality was illegal. when i entered parliament, there was no such thing as a civil partnership and i was able to sit next to you at a dinner with my husband. that's because parliament changed the law. i desperately care about making parliament work. it's tricky, if we have a standards process based on the house of commons for perfectly good reasons, because you are elected and it is your constituents that put you there, it's quite tricky if you are having to work with someone as the sort of parliamentary policeman, as a leader who doesn't believe in rules and a leader of the house of commons who doesn't seem keen on the rules. they seem to have gone back to liking the rules now. so let's hold them to the sticking point, to quote macbeth. i think we are in a better place now. we in the standards committee are advising the code. as it happens, there is a bit of an irony about me being the chair of the committee on standards because i've been in loads of scrapes of my own over the years. we may come back to those. i thought if i said it then, we wouldn't come back to it, whatever it is. but i'm not veryjudgemental. i think mps should have a fair hearing. you're a surprising person to be chair of the committee on standards for some reasons, but actually, i listed some of the ways in which you might be seen, might be seen as an establishment figure, the public school, oxford, the church of england, we will come to some of those. but a conservative student. how do you knock back on that? i was brought up as a conservative. my mother ended up not voting conservative but my dad certainly would have done. right now he would say the conservatives are too left—wing and lily livered. it was only at university i started thinking about these things myself. in my first term i met some people who wanted to make sure that william hague did not get into power so i got elected into the student body which was very weird. i'm a very different person from the person who arrived at oxford back in 1980 in hundreds of different regards, not least because at the time i thought i was heterosexual. when i went to theological college i had a girlfriend and it was she who told me that i was gay one morning when we woke up together and i don't suppose at theological college you're supposed to be sleeping with your girlfriend! but i was quite late in working out that i was gay, around 24. let's dwell on the church for a second. you've said in the past that one of the reasons you were drawn into the church is the support they gave you, it gave you, when you were, despite on the surface this very comfortable background, a very, very tough upbringing. there are two parts of my childhood. my parents met because dad left school with relatively few qualifications and went to work in spain in the summer to work in a hotel in the 1950s and played rugby back in cardiff and ponty in the winter and my mother went on holiday and was doing make up for the bbc and that's how they met. spain became a very important part of my childhood, we lived there for five years, i speak fluent spanish and there is a little bit of me that is forever in spain. phase two was we were living in cheltenham and i remember mum coming into my bedroom on my 13th birthday and telling me that she drank too much and the next few years at home were a version of hell really because mum was drunk every night and there were all sorts of horrible, difficult times and there was a period when my mum and dad got divorced when i was 18 during my a—levels and then i had to look after my mum for quite a while. and i needed a lot of help and support and sam and his wife margaret looked after me in my final year at school and their daughter rebecca is my sort of surrogate sister, she's the first woman president of the royal academy. let me dwell for a little time without being too painful to relive, i hope, to have your mother tell you effectively she is an alcoholic even though i guess at 13 you might not have known what that word really meant, how was that? it was just a terrible time. it meant i learned to cook and to iron because mum was not able to do that. i think it was terrible for my father as well, mum was a very unhappy woman. i took her through withdrawal, very dangerously, i now know, she had terrible seizures and fits and was in and out of various different institutions. i felt very angry about it a lot of the time because there were so many lies. i can't tell you how many bottles of vodka i poured down the drain and when mum and dad finally split up, she flooded the flat and got into really bad company which was pretty violent and abusive and she flooded the flat twice, she ended up in a mobile home. then we don't really know whether she took her own life or she had just taken too much alcohol and paracetamol together. it's a grim story. do you find there is value in telling it? do you use your experiences to try and help other people? did you when you moved into the church of england when you went on to theological college and went on to be a vicar in the c of e? i suppose the thing i thought was that after all of that i could have come out as a mess and i wasn't a mess. there's all sorts of bad things about me, i know my failings better than anybody. but i must have strength of character and i had three elderly relatives, my mother's mother's cousins, three spinsters who were very wealthy and lived in edinburgh and aviemore and they were lovely and supportive of me. i remember going back after an oxford term to the house we lived in cheltenham and mum had not got out of bed for three months for anything, literally for anything, so it was a medical disaster zone and very, very upsetting and she was in a terrible state, i had to get her to hospital. i sorted the place out and i had to go and stay with these three sisters who were wonderful and it was a completely different world from today. i remember getting on the train from cheltenham to aviemore, it took hours and hours and just collapsing when i got there. you were changed clearly because notjust your politics which we will come unto, but you give your life for a period to the church. was that one of the things that changed your politics as well? absolutely because this was the time of thatcher and you did placements in local churches so i had three months working in newcastle in an inner—city parish which was different to me. i'd been infected a bit with the socialist virus by the national youth theatre because i was in that for quite a while and i was the only public schoolboy. so i had seen a completely different world. so you were forced to confront a world you didn't really know existed both there and in the parish in newcastle. it was a culmination of that and my mum because in all of these things i knew what it was like to be on the tough end of life where things were just not working out or everything was completely chaotic. it wasn't a question of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, that wasn't the option, you had to have a world that could support people. then as part of my training i lived in a shanty town in peru and six months working for human rights organisation in argentina. then you got thrown out of chile. yes! i was meant to be there for three months but the day after i arrived, two young chileans had been set on fire by the chilean police and one of them died and i took part in the funeral. i was asked to say prayers at it because i was staying with roman catholic priests. it was in the big cathedral in the middle of santiago and we were all singing gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto, and wonderful protest song of the period. the police came in and the army with tear gas and water cannons, sprayed the bishop and all that kind of stuff and i saw all the tear gas canisters were made in britain. literally, the words? made in britain. we were not supporting chile theoretically but margaret thatcher was. you took those canisters and drew them to the attention of politicians. the labour person george foulkes brought me into the house of commons and we asked questions and we had the sale of tear gas canisters stopped. i was reliably on the left by that time i got back to the uk. were you partly on the left because of your sexuality in the sense that when you were at oxford and you were a student tory, you couldn't be, in the phrase of the time, which i know many gay people hate now, openly gay. it wasn't only that, it was a criminal of anchor for offence. —— it wasn't only that, it was a criminal offence! the age of consent was 21 when i was at university and there had been an amendment — section 28 to the local government finance act — which treated homosexuality as worse than dirt. as it were, teach "homosexuality". because it was a pretend relationship. and that is the phrase that really grated. undoubtedly that added to it but it wasn't the bit that got me there first. what's interesting is that you have become, since becoming an mp, now what i guess you would call a house of commons man. you are not a shadow minister — you have been one. you refer to good and bad ambition in the past. did you want to have what you call bad ambition? yeah, i think i wanted everybody to see me when i first arrived in parliament — and in particular, the prime minister so he would make me ministerfor tiddlywinks or whatever. and... did you think you could be prime minister, one day? no, i never ever wanted to — or thought i could. i remember once telling james pernell that i thought i was of middling talent and i might knock at the outside of cabinet door one day. that's extraordinarily modest for someone who wants to be the performer and to be seen. well, but i — the thing is... and this is where i would draw a distinction with the kind of good ambition because i think there are things i much prefer, i prefer getting things done. i've had a battle for the last eight years, i think, about acquired brain injury. i really care about the rugby players on my patch who have suffered from concussion and dementia and depression and the people who have had road traffic accidents whose lives are saved today but they don't get the support they want and i'm hopeful that by the end of the week the government will have announced a fully fledged strategy for dealing with acquired brain injury. and that is the good ambition — getting things done. in a way, it's a surprise for someone who is still driven — albeit not driven by getting to the top of the greasy pole — that so much of your time and energy is dealt with kind of lot of what people would think is boring — procedures, standards, rules. oh, i know but there's quite a lot ofjoy in working out a clever way of getting something on the order paper. you know, what's the first rule of politics? turn up. second rule — learn how to count. third — don't leave until the vote is taken and fourth, make sure you remember to vote. and so, knowing all the rules, i think, isjust a really important part of being able to pursue the things that really do matter. but my point was, given all the energy and passion you have, is that the best use of it? well, i'd prefer to play doctor who but nobody has called me up and asked if i was available! well, they may after this — as you say, you were in the national youth theatre! with daniel craig, incidentally. in terms of that standards committee, there are some who now look at our politics and the conclusion — you said you cannot leave mps to deal with this any more, they are not mature enough, that you have to have an independent standards body to do this adjudication — why not? i think on some issues, it's right that we should have a completely independent body, which is what we have for sexual harassment and bullying cases in parliament. but on questions like whether you have used your stationery inappropriately for electoral purposes when it should only be used for parliamentary purposes, i think it's quite valuable to have a mixture of laypeople —we have seven lay members of the public — and mps on it. you are a labour mp but you are opposing — are you not? — keir starmer�*s plan for dealing with this independent commission. i'm just... i mean, one of the things about being the chair of standards is you have to be non—partisan and you have to sort of surrender you — god knows i can be partisan. i think david cameron told me once that he used to hate the fact that i regularly got called in prime minister's questions because i would always be so sharp towards him. but i just think that sometimes, persistence is the single most important thing. sometimes with a bit of a cheeky smile, because it means — especially at the moment, they've got an 80—seat majority. if i want to get anything done i've got to get tories to sign up. how is that to get that done? you were at university with borisjohnson. do you remember him? i remember him very well- _ do you remember him? i remember him very well. nothing _ do you remember him? i remember him very well. nothing has - him very well. nothing has changed. him very well. nothing has changed-— him very well. nothing has changed. when it comes to standards, _ changed. when it comes to standards, he _ changed. when it comes to standards, he is _ changed. when it comes to standards, he is relaxed, l changed. when it comes to l standards, he is relaxed, he changed. when it comes to . standards, he is relaxed, he is notjudgemental, to use your words. do you buy that? it’s words. do you buy that? it's funny because _ words. do you buy that? it's funny because i _ words. do you buy that? it�*s funny because i now feel more nervous as a gay man in britain but i have for 30 years. why? i've discussed this with people who work in downing street — it's because i think they are very happy to have culture wars. and — because some, you know, they have learned this trick from america, from trump, and in the end, culture wars will always pick on those who are slightly different and that means the gays, thejews, the blacks. that's always a list that crops up when any populist government gets into power. you are nervous because of what they have done already? or where you fear they may go? i think the place they have taken the debate about trans has contributed to that. the fact they are not prepared to implement a proper ban on conversion therapy. gay conversion therapy. boris's own history is about tank topped bully bum boys. saying that if you are allowed gay marriage, why not allow two men and a dog to marry? all of that kind of stuff. it fills me with a great deal of unease. so you think borisjohnson is guilty of those attitudes and willing to exploit them? —— orjust willing to exploit them? somewhere in that mix i think there is a world of people who think that that's politically advantageous. it makes me genuinely fearful because i don't think margaret thatcher was homophobic, but she still introduced section 28 because it was necessary politically. i think if boris johnson was here... he would be absolutely fuming. he would say, "look, i was mayor of london!" and what was the first thing he cut? all the money for lgbt events. but he would say he went to them, he's liberated them. of course, yer... i don't want to overstate this — i'm not accusing the prime minister of being homophobic — but i do feel less safe, physically safe, than i did 30 years ago as a gay man — as an openly gay man, to use the phrase that you used earlier. i'm just describing an emotion ifeel at the moment. i don't wake up every morning and think i am going to be gay bashed, but that is a strong part of people's experience of modern britain and i just worry about some of the language. we've talked about some of the anger you feel with conservatives, but it's clear that you build relationships with conservatives to get things done. and at the beginning of this conversation, you said you were not judgemental. is that crucial to your politics? it's crucial to me being me. i'm not a fundamentalist either so i have lots of friends on the conservative benches — genuine friends, people i would go for a drink with — and we will have a good old row and a barny. i don't take it personally. and i just think that's a really important part about recognising the nature of representative democracy. does the labour party, though, need to discover that? people have sat in that chair and boasted, notjust in the slogan, "never kissed a tory" but they could never, ever, ever have a friendship with someone on the other side of politics. i was at a by—election and one of the researchers was driving me somewhere and i said, "are you sure we're on the right road?" he said, "i'm100% certain." i said, "i wish you had said 95% certain, because that would have meant you had checked." and of course, he was wrong. so i always prefer people to be 95% certain. it's the absolutism that leads to — sorry to bring him back again, but putin and donald trump, orban, and xi, and so on. that, i hated it in religion, in iran or wherever or in the uk, and i hate it politics, as well. if i could introduce you to the young chris bryant, would you say, "carry on, boy! "go on and be a member of parliament?" or do you think you would say, "be careful, i'm not sure "if this is the life for you"? i think i might have been a lawyer in a different world. could you have been an actor? you mentioned you went to the national youth theatre, sorry, a member, ishould say, alongside some reasonably distinguished people. well, no, some very distinguished people. douglas hodge is kind of my best friend from that time, we went on tour playing richard ii and good lads at heart and various other shows. doug is in nearly everything you watch these days. and daniel craig was — daniel and i, when we were both having — well, i shouldn't speak for daniel, but i was having a difficult time and we both had a very close friendship with ed and brian, who ran the national youth theatre, and they were very helpfulfor us, so we ended up becoming sort of friends for a while, as well. but could i be an actor? no, it all went wrong when i had glandularfever and i was playing mercutio in romeo and juliet and we realised that, in our production, in act 5, juliet is meant to wake up and turn to tybalt and say, "in thy bloody shroud". but our tybalt was playing a guard in the last act, so i had to put on tybalt�*s sweaty tights — because i had died in act three — and i had to put on his sweaty tights and lie on his cataphract. but, unfortunately, ifell, asleep every night. and sometimes — i'm meant to be a dead body and sometimes i turned over. now, i couldn't even play a dead body! but presumably if that hadn't happened, it would be you and not daniel craig as james bond! laughter. no, i don't think... know! a load of us went to see daniel in the first one in the cinema and we all dressed in black tie and at the moment where he comes out of the sea, everybody applauded and i don't think anybody would have applauded for me. chris bryant, thank you so much forjoining me on political thinking. thank you. chris bryant is one of those who believes, who proves, that there is a whole lot more to being a member of parliament than simply being someone who peddles a party line. exactly what i hope this broadcast helps to show week in, week out. thanks for watching. hello there. another band of rain and hills no sleeping and across the country today.— no sleeping and across the country today. no sleeping and across the count toda . ., ., country today. some of the rain will be quite — country today. some of the rain will be quite heavy _ country today. some of the rain will be quite heavy for - country today. some of the rain will be quite heavy for a - country today. some of the rain will be quite heavy for a time i will be quite heavy for a time but it brightens up into the afternoon with sunshine and blustery showers. he is the weather front i'm talking of, spreading into western parts of the uk first, some snow initially over the scottish hills, and then as the rain begins to spread across the rest of england we are likely to see a spell of snow over the pennines for a time. eventually it will clear away into the afternoon. could be a bit of a hang about briefly in the south—east but it brightens up for many with plenty of sunshine. the north and west, some frequent and heavy with some frequent and heavy with some wintriness over the higher ground. a cold day but no or 10 degrees 10 degrees is possible in the south—west. this deep area of low pressure has been named storm barra, the second named storm barra, the second named storm of the season. it is likely to cause significant impacts across western parts of the country throughout tuesday. gail or severe gales, a spell of heavy rain and some amounts of heavy rain and some amounts of snow crossing northern areas, so stay tuned to the forecast. welcome to bbc news — i'm david eades. our top stories: pope francis warns europe against �*narrow self—interest�* over the treatment of migrants as he pays a visit to the greek island of lesbos. translation: let us not let our cb transformed _ translation: let us not let our cb transformed into _ translation: let us not let our cb transformed into a _ translation: let us not let our cb transformed into a desolate l cb transformed into a desolate sea of death. more than 20 countries join an urgent demand for the taliban leadership in afghanistan to honour its promises over the safety of state workers and soldiers. us politicians pay tribute to the former republican senator and presidential candidate, bob dole who's died at the age of 98. japan goes on a hydrogen drive in a bid to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. what fuel is