A History Of The House Magazine
3 min read
The House magazine was born in the 1970s soon after Patrick Cormack, then the Conservative MP for South West Staffordshire, met the newly-elected Newcastle MP Mike Thomas.
Cormack would later write: “Although on different sides of the House we hit it off immediately, and when he had been in the Commons for a few months he talked to me of his plans for a parliamentary magazine. We were almost of an age, but I had been in the House since 1970 and did warn him that some of our senior colleagues, on both sides, would think this was a risky – even foolhardy – idea. I welcomed it, and we continued to talk.”
Thomas gathered together backers for the magazine, including Richard Faulkner, who would go on to become Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and in November 1976 the first issue of the magazine was printed.
Cormack noted that despite its amateurish production quality, it stood out: “Its distinguishing feature was a front cover cartoon of a Member drawn by Glan Williams, a particularly fine caricaturist. His first victim was George Strauss, the Father of the House, who had first been elected in the 1920s.”
In its early years, the newfangled magazine faced disapproval from some on both sides of the House, despite being little more than a diary of what had happened in the previous week. In a bid to secure its future and cement its impartiality an editorial board was set up – an institution that survives to this day. This first iteration included the Sergeant of Arms and the Clerk of the House. It soon became clear that it would need financial support, and a backer was found in 1978 in the publisher Keith Young.
Young never had editorial input but did ask that the magazine have a parliamentary editor, so Cormack, along with Chris Price, the Labour MP for Lewisham, took a role as joint editors. After Price lost his seat in 1983, he was replaced as senior assistant editor by Austin Mitchell, and shortly after that Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dem MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, would join them.
Cormack – by this time Lord Cormack - would recall: “The magazine flourished, not least because of a decision in the 80s to include the House of Lords on a weekly basis. Shortly after that, peers were invited to join the editorial board.”
In later years, the magazine would go on to be edited by both Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston (now Baroness Gisela Stuart), and Graham Brady, the Conservative MP for Altrincham and Sale West (now Lord Brady), and its ownership would pass to Dods Parliamentary Communications, and then to Total Politics in 2022, which remains its current parent company.
In 2020 the journalist and author Alan White was appointed editor-in-chief of The House magazine and its sister publication, the news website PoliticsHome. He appointed the former Telegraph reporter Rosa Prince to be the magazine’s editor; she was succeeded by the former Times political editor Francis Elliott in 2023. Its current advisory board consists of Meg Hiller MP (chair), Karen Bradley MP, Sarah Owen MP, Alistair Carmichael MP, Yuan Yang MP, Lord Graham Brady and Baroness Gisela Stuart.
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