On every corner of the Portcullis House atrium were House of Commons staff, holding up giant green paddles with two words written on them: “Ask Me.”
“Ask you what?” I asked one of them. “You can ask me anything you like. Ask me, ‘Where’s the Post Office?’ Ask me, ‘Where’s the toilet?’”
The corridors of power don’t feel very powerful at the moment. They feel like a freshers’ fair. On Monday morning, the usually deserted “Information Hub” was throbbing like a high-street bookies on Grand National day. There’s a stall for “Temporary Locker Allocation”. There’s a pop-up pass office to go with the normal pass office, to cope with unprecedented demand.
The only one of these crucial services to not have giant queues snaking away from it was the information point for the Register of Members Financial Interests. That one, for whatever reason, they’ve decided to leave for another day.
Wide-eyed dreamers in their brand new MPs’ lanyards wandered about in a daze. Who knows, these people, in time, may have to make grave decisions on war or peace. For now, the most pressing problems were rather more mundane, like working out which is the way in to the canteen and which is the way out.
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First time visitors to the Strangers’ cafeteria often learn the hard way that if they walk straight past the easy-to-miss pile of trays and through the big oak door then there’s no quick way back out to grab one without doing a full lap and starting again. They will be Masters of the Universe soon enough. For now, they were being politely told to “try again” by a very nice woman with a ladle full of bolognese sauce.
One extremely young chap, clearly a new Labour staffer of some kind, sat down in the members-only area all by himself and whipped out his laptop. It would surely not be long before he was politely moved on. But no, hang on, he really was an MP, Sam Carling of North West Cambridgeshire, 22 years old, Westminster’s very first 21st-century boy, with a majority of precisely 39 votes. He looked like he’d been dragged in to the office and was quietly getting on with his geography homework while waiting for his mum to finish her meeting and drive him home.
Young Mr Carling had all these cheap shots fired at him on BBC Breakfast over the weekend, as it happens. Asked whether he could really offer “real-world experience”, he had a sharp answer. He politely pointed out that the “real-world experience” he could offer was living in insecure rented accommodation, graduating with a mountain of debt and having not much prospect of ever getting on the housing ladder — precisely the kind of “real-world experience” that’s urgently needed.
Even the ones that do know their way around, temporarily seemed to have forgotten — forgotten, that is, how to find the exit. Dame Anne McGuire, the Blair years grandee, would regularly advise MPs to pack up their office the moment an election’s called “because you don’t know if you’ll be back”. This wise advice is not universally followed.
David Linden, the SNP’s no-longer-MP for Glasgow East, was bobbing about outside the coffee kiosk in his hoodie, looking like that bloke who everyone knows graduated last year but who keeps turning up in the student union.
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Nigel Evans, the former deputy speaker, no longer of Ribble Valley, was staring up the lunch line in the Lords’ canteen, readying himself for one last misty-eyed run at the subsidised salad bar.
Copies of the in-house magazine, The House, were still laid out in their usual spots in the members-only area. The current edition has a great big picture on the front of the no-longer Tory chief whip, Mark Harper, and the strapline, “Keeping the Show on The Road”. The show is no longer on the road, but Mark Harper is.
Quite literally, in fact. I was typing the above paragraph into my phone while strolling through the cloisters beneath Big Ben and, not looking where I was going, walked straight into him. He was rushing towards a parked car, carrying a big box and a suit carrier, wearing the look of a man who was late to his own funeral. That really happened.
New dawns take a while to break and for the moment we’re still in the twilight zone. On Monday mornings, Westminster journalists go for a briefing with the prime minister’s official spokesperson. Currently, there’s a new prime minister but the same old spokesperson. The first page of his briefing notes was a blown up copy of Labour’s pledge card. He was explaining how immigration has soared. Six weeks ago he was telling us how it had plummeted. A new dawn. A new broom. A new arm up the jacksy.
Not everyone in this moment of breathless excitement is necessarily all that excited. There are 26 new Tory MPs, possibly wondering quite what they’re in for. One of them is Nick Timothy, former Downing Street chief of staff and erstwhile mastermind of Theresa May’s lost majority, which viewed from today was a stunning success.
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These people will have a leadership contest to vote in soon. It is up to the 1922 Committee to organise it, though no one’s quite sure when. Around Westminster, that hallowed committee is currently going by a different name, “Bob and Geoff”, after its two remaining members.
These are especially curious times because, beneath the grand history of it all, there’s not a lot happening. Parliament isn’t sitting. The new prime minister is on his second 24-hour “tour of the nations” in five days. After that, he’s off to the Nato summit, not here.
Rachel Reeves gave a set-piece speech over at the Treasury. “Hello and welcome to the Treasury,” said the brand new chancellor, her voice already shaking before she made it to the T of treasury. She was extremely nervous. She has every right to be, but however daunting the challenges ahead, it’s not her who’s staring down the barrel of at least five years of trying to write parliamentary sketches about Rachel Reeves.
It was on this day, in this room, in 1997, that Gordon Brown granted independence to the Bank of England. She wasn’t quite going to do that, but she was going to scrap various planning reforms, not least the banning of onshore wind. These are big deals but they’re slow-burn not big bang. What’s required to get them done is to be willing to be unpopular. That’s how they all start. You can get away with anything in the “Ask Me Where The Toilet Is” days. It’s not always quite how they manage to go on.
