Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship
We are delighted to announce that The Rt Hon Damian Hinds and Ms Stella Creasy will be the St Antony’s Visiting Parliamentary Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year. The Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship elects two Members of Parliament – one from the governing party and the other from one of the main opposition parties – each year. These Visiting Parliamentary Fellows will visit the College regularly and organise a series of seminars on important political and other matters.
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2026 seminar series theme: 19th century institutions, 21st century problems – what should MPs do next?
The 2026 Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship seminar series is jointly hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations.
Please note that the seminars are in-person only and not streamed or recorded.
Seminar 8: Is the changed relationship between voters and legislators due to the development of the Internet a boon for good decision-making – or a challenge?
Deliberative politics versus the Internet: is technology creating a democratic deficit?
Monday 9 March, 5.00pm, Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre
Constitutions like the US’s were deliberately designed to slow down decision-making and put ‘grit in the system’ (and England’s did so organically). Tech can speed things up dramatically with real-time polling and electronic voting, and facilitates a huge increase in immediate voter-to-legislator contact. Is that a boon for good decision-making or a challenge? Are there implications for parties and parliaments?
Speakers:
Jolyon Maugham KC (he/him) is the founder and executive director of Good Law Project, a non-profit which uses the law to hold power to account and protect the public interest. It took a leading role in overturning Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament and in exposing the cronyism at the heart of the government’s £50bn Covid procurement, and more recently has forced the government to rewrite its threadbare net zero strategy. Good Law Project remains almost entirely funded by members of the public, which keeps it fiercely independent.
A tax barrister by trade, Jolyon became a Queen’s Counsel in 2015. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Durham and is the author of the best-seller Bringing Down Goliath.
Nusrat Ghani is the Conservative MP for Sussex Weald. In 2015 Nusrat made history as the first female Muslim MP ever to be elected as a Conservative and remains a minority of one in her party.
In July 2024, Nusrat was elected Chairman of Ways and Means, becoming only the second woman to hold the post and the first person of colour to serve as Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. In this role, she chairs daily debates in the Chamber and holds senior responsibilities, including Chair of the Speaker’s AI Steering Group.
Nusrat migrated to the UK along with her family and not only is she the first female to attend University but she is also the first girl to attend school. Her mother and grandmother are illiterate as they were denied access to formal education.
As an MP, Nusrat has served on the Business, Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs Select Committees and as rapporteur for NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly Science and Technology Committee. She has led major inquiries into antisemitism, child sexual abuse, violent extremism and Uyghur forced labour, resulting in sanctions against her by both China and Russia—the only woman in Parliament to be sanctioned by two countries.
She became the first female Muslim Minister in 2018 and has since served in senior ministerial roles across transport, industry, economic security and foreign affairs, including as Minister of State for Europe at the FCDO.
Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet in the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford. She is Senior Advisor and Visiting Professor at LSE’s Data Science Institute, where she is helping to found a new Global Institute for Technology and Society at LSE. From 2018 to 2025, she founded and directed the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, which gained national and international recognition for its pioneering work on AI and government.
She has researched and written extensively about the relationship between technology, politics, public policy and government including over 150 articles and six books on the topic, including Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008) and AI and Digital Era Governance (OUP, forthcoming). Her book Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press) won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017.
Public service appointments include the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC, from 2019) and the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA, from 2025).