A Tory Party fringe event this afternoon saw Tory deputy speakers Eleanor Laing and Nigel Evans speak at a “The Future of Parliament” chat hosted by Conservative Young Women, in which it was revealed the new Covid-friendly voting method in the Commons – with MPs tapping their vote in via a card reader in the No or Aye Lobbies – will stay forever post-pandemic, signalling an end to the ancient method of six Commons clerks recording votes by hand (and latterly by iPad), based on members’ name. Hopefully this will both speed up divisions and the time it takes to get MPs’ votes up on the Parliament website…

During the Zoom fringe event, Evans also revealed that while Big Ben’s scaffolding has begun to come down, it will take a whole six weeks for the metal casing to be removed entirely.

When asked about the legacy of John Bercow, both were very diplomatic however conceded the former speaker allowed too many Urgent Questions and Sir Lindsay has now got the balance right and is making the right procedural calls, including disallowing the Brady amendment. Finally, they supported the u-turn on cutting the number of seats in parliament and keeping the figure at 650 due to there now being no MEPs. Bravely they even spoke the unspeakable truth: that rejigging seat boundaries will actually “benefit the Tories”…