Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollis, and for the next in our summer series of one-on-one discussions,

going more in depth with interesting people in around politics.

We have today Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rondo in South Wales,

and chair of the Committee on Standards, who's just written the book Code of Conduct, Why We Need to Fix Parliament

and How to Do It.

So Chris, you were first elected in 2001. You've seen an awful lot of elections and governments

come and go, pandemic, all sorts. So why is this really, and is this really the worst

Parliament ever?

You make it sound as if I was around for Queen Victoria's coronation.

Or the rump parliament, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, sure. The fact is, at this moment in time,

22 MPs have been either suspended, thrown out for a day or more, or have left Parliament

because a report was coming which was going to

suspend them. I'm not including Chris Pinter in that because at the moment he's appealed so we don't

know where that will end up. And there may be more before the end of the next of this parliament.

That is by a country mile and a country mile is apparently as far as you can see into the distance

and to the horizon

the worst parliament ever now you could say that that is because we are more punitive we punish

more MPs than we used to and there's an element of truth in that because you know in the past

what we used to do was we would just expel an MP and we didn't expel very many, 74 across about 250 years. But the instinct I

have is that this is probably the worst parliament we've ever had. One government chief whip,

Tory Chief Whip said to me, there are some people in Parliament who should never have been

...