Last week I had the honour of chairing party conference’s debate on Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It was a very high calibre debate on an extremely sensitive issue and we managed to get through it without anyone departing from the measured tone of a conference debate, despite the strongly held views.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of people wanted to speak in the debate and submitted speaking cards. However we only had an hour, and so I was only able to call half of those who had wanted to speak.

This is where it got interesting for me. I was mildly horrified to discover later in the bars how some (not all) of those who had been called thought I had called them because I wanted to do them personally a favour, and conversely even more how people who had not got the chance to speak, thought I had made a decision not to call them for some personal reason as that I didn’t know or like them.

This really is not the basis for how chairs to decide who to call in debates or not. I guess many of the speakers and non-speakers would realise this if they thought about it from the chair’s point of view but I guess they often don’t do that.

Before you are allowed to chair a conference session you have to go through quite a lot of training, much of which is about which cards to call. And it struck me that although this is very well known to members of the Conference Committee and others who chair conference, it may not have been written about outside, so I thought it might be interesting to set out the outline of how I did go about selecting speakers for that debate. I won’t mention individual names, as that doesn’t seem appropriate, but I will set out the basic outline. I don’t think my approach is really different from any other chair - I guess there will always be minor variations between how different people do things but I think I followed the rules (and I had the chair of FCC aiding me to help keep me on the straight and narrow!).

So the reasoning went something like this.

Firstly, we had 60 minutes for the debate. The proposer of the motion had 7 minutes to speak, and all other speakers 4 minutes. With 2 amendments, and summators, this adds up to 27 minutes of the 60 already pre-allocated to particular speakers, over whom the chair has no control at all. Allowing as a planning assumption perhaps 5 minutes for over-runs and the votes at the end, this then allows about 28 minutes for other speakers, which is just 7 speakers (of 4 minutes each).

Ensuring balance in calling other speakers is the most important guiding principle (and is set out in Standing Orders). Almost all cards were in to support the motion, with just a few against. So I decided that we should allow about 2 speakers to speak in opposition to the motion, which would slightly over-represent that point of view compared to the balance of cards submitted, but it seemed important to allow this case to be made - and there would be more than 10 speeches from people supporting the motion.

Of the 2 amendments, there was almost no opposition at all to the second one, and I suspected that the movers of the motion would probably be willing to accept it. We checked and they did indeed - so we then asked the proposers of amendment 2 if they would be prepared to waive their right to summate on it, as no-one was opposing it. They kindly agreed to do so, which therefore freed up another speaking slot, rather than just another speech in favour of something which had already been accepted and was not being opposed.

Amendment 1 was rather different - there were a lot of cards in to speak against it. Since there would be 2 speeches in favour of it (from its proposer and summator) I decided that we ought to have 2 speakers against it as well. Together with the speakers for the motion as a whole, whom we knew would argue against it, this seemed broadly to reflect the cards submitted - while not allowing the debate on one amendment to take over the whole debate.

This therefore set the framework for which speakers would get called for the seven (now eight) ‘free’ slots: a couple against the motion, a couple against amendment 1, leaving about four slots for those who wanted to speak in favour of the motion generally as a whole, for which there had been quite a lot of cards.

Only at this point does the chair really start to have much discretion about who to choose. And this is still not on the basis of whether I like them or not! From among those who had submitted cards in each of the categories above, I had to choose those who, on the basis of the information they had submitted on their card, would make the most useful contributions to the debate - particularly ensuring that conference heard as wide a range of views as possible. We also picked out a ‘reserve’ speaker to call if some of the speeches ran under time - and in the end we were able to call him.

We are also under instruction to ensure that there is as good a balance as possible between men and women, of non-white speakers, and I was particularly keen to do this. There were also an unusually large number of cards from MPs who wanted to speak and I felt I needed to find a balance between Parliamentarians and non-Parliamentarians, despite being aware of how cross some of the former can get when not called. A further duty that I felt strongly was to ensure that conference was able to hear the various points of view put as strongly as possible. And there were some cards from people who had prominent roles speaking for the party on this issue outside the conference, and I was keen that if possible we should be ensuring that they should be debating these issues at our party conference, and not somewhere away from it. An example of this (to make just one exception to my rule about not identifying individuals) was a card from someone who was Chairman of the relevant House of Commons Select Committee, which seemed to me to be a very strong claim to speak.

As you can imagine, trying to put all this together and balance these various competing imperatives, was something of a challenge. But without wanting to sound (even more than usually) pompous I am completely confident that we did a good job of this and I would be quite happy, if I were ever forced to, to go through and defend the choices. Other chairs might have made very slightly different judgements - in particular I think I made more of a priority to ensure another speech from a woman than some other chairs might have done (though even still women were still woefully under-represented, but quite simply I could not call cards from people who had not submitted them). But I am completely confident that we were well within the bounds of what was reasonable.

What I absolutely didn’t do, and no chair does, is decide to call someone because I had known them for a long time, or conversely because I happened to fall out with them a couple of years ago.

So after doing all that, that’s roughly your list of speakers. All this planning is of course done before the debate starts and cards can still to continue to come in - and indeed a small number came in during the debate itself (as is typical). Since the debate has been so carefully planned to be balanced, and the Standing Orders explicitly give the chair even greater discretion over whether to accept a card submitted during a debate or not, chairs would not normally do so. I think the only usual exceptions would be if a late card expressed a radically different and new point of view (for example wanting to speak against a motion when no-one else at all had submitted a card against it), or alternatively that the chair was extremely short of cards indeed, so much more likely to call almost any card submitted. Neither of these applied in this case, so they were left uncalled (again, one was from a Parliamentarian).

So that’s it. Choosing speakers is really not about who’s in, who’s not, who’s up, who’s down - it’s about balancing the debate.

I think anything that helps the process of selecting speakers is helpful, as far as the chairs are concerned - and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it! Next week: the interpretation of Standing Order 12.6 in relation to late submission of requests for separate votes (OK, only kidding…)