Why the battles for select committee chair are worth watching

Good morning. Although parliament is not sitting during the summer recess, an election contest is under way that will shape how we are governed for at least the next four years. Some candidates are moving sedately — others are campaigning hard already.

I am referring of course to the select committee chair elections. Some thoughts on those below.

What’s the 411

Select committees are cross-party groups that scrutinise the work of government departments and agencies, and are one of the few vehicles through which MPs can probe ministers and the civil service.

From the house’s return, MPs will vie for the role of select committee chair between September 2 and September 11. All MPs can vote (using the alternative vote, fact fans!) but not every MP can stand. The vast majority of posts (18 out of 26) will be reserved to Labour MPs, because they won so many more seats at the election. Conservative MPs will chair the public accounts, public administration and constitutional affairs, home affairs, standards, and culture, media and sport select committees. The Liberal Democrats will chair the health, rural affairs and petitions committees.

Although the proportion of select committee chairs is decided by the proportion of seats won, and a handful of them, like public accounts, are always held by the largest opposition party, precisely which party gets what is decided by the parties themselves. The Lib Dems have done very well indeed to get rural affairs, which is such an important portfolio for them. Whoever ends up with that post will play a big role in how successful the party is at holding on to and winning more rural seats.

Now, we haven’t had very many select committee chair elections, because while the modern select committee is a late 1970s innovation (they were devised under Harold Wilson and came into being under Margaret Thatcher), until 2010 the chairs were appointed essentially by the party whips. Thanks to David Cameron they are now elected, but these are the first elections to take place under a Labour government, and also the first to occur under such a significantly changed parliament.

Don’t forget that the majority of MPs are new to the house: they don’t know their colleagues in their own parties, let alone anyone else. Up until now, winning a select committee election tended to be a question of who could get the most support from outside their own party, because most candidates took a roughly equal share from their own party, with the votes of other MPs the deciding factor.

Some Labour MPs have been sufficiently enterprising in their bids that during the election, they specifically travelled to some Conservative-held marginal seats in part to get a foot in the door early with their new Labour colleagues. So too have some Conservatives: one MP, who is running for the public accounts committee, provoked wry amusement among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs by sending some of them messages praising their contribution to parliament before they had even delivered their maiden speeches.

The reason why this matters is these committee chairs can, if they manage their committee’s agendas effectively, become significant figures in Westminster. The Labour government has a swath of ministers — from Rachel Reeves to ministers of state like Stephen Timms — who partly owe their jobs in Starmer’s administration to their previous stints as select committee chairs. Tom Tugendhat’s first bid for the Conservative leadership used his successful tenure as chair of the foreign affairs select committee as a springboard.

And who gets these roles also matters for the shape of our politics more broadly. Tugendhat’s work, and that of his successor as select committee chair, Alicia Kearns, made a significant contribution to the Tory party’s Sinosceptic turn and the general shift in the last government’s China policy.

So these elections, which will spring out into the open in early September, really do matter for how we are governed and who holds the government to account. In many ways, it may well be more significant than whoever emerges as the Conservative party’s leader in November.

Now try this

I have been very disorganised about actually buying tickets to the Proms this year, but I have been listening to them avidly at home. Yesterday’s, which you can listen to here for the next 60 days, was particularly good.

Top stories today

• Inflation undershot | UK inflation rose less than expected to 2.2 per cent in July, with underlying price pressures falling sharply, according to new official data that will be welcomed by the Bank of England.

• Hearsay Sue Gray | Downing Street is fighting charges that the prime minister’s chief of staff has become a decision-making bottleneck and that the former civil servant is at odds with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s closest political adviser.

• Crash course | Newly elected MPs are signing up for management training and support as they set up offices in parliament and their constituencies, with some leading a team of staff for the first time.

• Slump in uni applications by over 30s | The UK is facing a worrying fall in applications by mature students to study strategically vital professions such as nursing and teaching, the head of the country’s university admissions service has warned.

• Brace for cuts | Scotland’s finance secretary has ordered a halt to spending and the cancellation of key projects under “emergency controls” to allow public sector pay deals to be struck, the Times reports. Shona Robison is worried about the impact of the financial audit announced by Rachel Reeves and does not believe that any additional spending will cover the costs of a series of pay increases.