How the pandemic changed Westminster

They say a week is a long time in politics.

So it’s no surprise that a full year of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions appears to have shaken up Westminster for good.

After MPs were sent home last March as the new coronavirus tore through London, it was clear radical changes would be needed to parliament’s centuries-old traditions if U.K. politics was to continue in any meaningful form.

“At that point, we really had no idea about how parliament could come back at all,” House of Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg tells this week’s edition of POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast.

“We didn’t know the level of seriousness, the level of the disease’s infectiousness, and we knew that parliament had its constitutional duty to do. So we were trying to work out anything that could get parliament back in some form or another.”

Some innovations brought in during those frantic locked-down weeks in April and May — such as an electronic voting system designed to prevent MPs crowding together in congested voting lobbies — look like they’re here to stay.

“It seems to me that works really well,” admits the famously traditionalist Rees-Mogg. “It saves six clerks being on duty, sometimes at antisocial times, and it’s a little bit faster. So I see no reason not to continue with that.”

He’s less receptive, however, to those who want the new ‘hybrid’ debates — which allow MPs to dial into the Commons chamber from home via video link — to continue beyond the pandemic.

“It makes life much too easy for ministers,” Rees-Mogg complains. “There’s no real challenge to ministers without the full chamber, the interventions, the spontaneity. And I’m afraid the speeches are also pretty boring, because they’re not debates — they’re people reading out a speech that they’ve prepared the day before, and not responding to points made by the previous speakers. So my view is that face-to-face dealings are better.”

He does concede, however, that the technology may prove useful when MPs temporarily decamp Parliament while the historic building undergoes long-overdue renovation works.

“There’s one thing we can learn, and that is hybridity may be a cheaper option than [creating] another chamber during restoration and renewal (of parliament),” he says. “And we certainly shouldn’t ignore that possibility, depending on how large the saving is.”

Another COVID-era innovation set to become a permanent fixture is the nightly Downing Street televised press conference, introduced by Boris Johnson last spring when the pandemic was at its peak. The format will change — Johnson has hired TV journalist Allegra Stratton to front the briefings on his behalf — but for the antiquated world of British “lobby” journalism, it will be nothing short of a revolution.

ITV Political Editor Robert Peston tells the podcast that the televised press conferences will need to be significantly more informative than the private briefings currently offered daily by No. 10, where journalists’ questions are routinely stonewalled.

“I do think that if those private briefings simply got translated into television, most people watching would lose the will to live,” Peston says. “So much of it is basically all of us asking the same question 4,000 ways, and not being answered 4,000 times. If we don’t all change, and it doesn’t become more of a genuinely open forum where we learn things, then I don’t think any of us will emerge from this with any credit.”