Dear Roger, Andy Burnham has now announced his full team: Cabinet, ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries - and I wanted to share what it means for us before you read it anywhere else. Twenty members of the APPG for Fair Elections have been given a role: four ministers, one whip, and fifteen PPSs. A quick note in case the term is unfamiliar. A Parliamentary Private Secretary is an unpaid aide to a minister, chosen from the backbenches to be that minister's eyes and ears in the Commons. Unglamorous, unpaid, but can genuinely be influential. The APPG members given the most senior posts are Florence Eshalomi, now Minister of State at Housing, Communities and Local Government, and Andy Slaughter as Solicitor General. What's more, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter and Lord Wood of Anfield became junior ministers. The remaining fifteen are scattered across almost every major department, and one of them sits in Downing Street. Ministers conventionally step back from APPG activity when they're appointed, so in the short term, our parliamentary group is smaller than it was. But it's the good kind of problem.
Every one of those twenty took a position on fair votes when there was nothing in it for them, and they have carried that thinking into government with them. Our argument is no longer confined to the backbenches. It is in the departments, in the ministerial boxes, in the conversations that shape what a government decides to spend its political capital on.
The work now is to make sure they keep hearing from us - and from you - so that they continue to speak out against First Past the Post, and make electoral reform a priority.
In the meantime, if you are looking for an action to take, why not sign this parliamentary petition for a National Commission for Electoral Reform? The petition was created by Dame Joan Ruddock: former MP, friend of the campaign and all-round good egg. | 
