More changes on committee corridor?
Good news for the individual MPs, maybe bad news for the select committees. Ed Miliband's decision to catapult a fair number of newly-minted Labour MPs into his front-bench team may cause a bit of havoc up on the committee corridor.
Take the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee - three of its five Labour members (, and ) now have front bench jobs. By convention, they now have to quit the committee - and now that MPs are supposed to be elected, I'm really not sure what the mechanism is for choosing replacements. The elections take place within each party - so do they hold a new poll, or do the runners-up from the vote back in July gain an unexpected promotion?
The most interesting question mark hangs over , who has already established himself as one of the characters on the Treasury Committee, but is now one of his leader's two bag-carriers - his parliamentary private secretaries.
At the moment, the word is that he plans to stay on the committee. But he will have to be careful to avoid accusations that he is not speaking with his leader's voice.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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