Welsh Labour MP deletes fact that colleague hasn't spoken in the Commons since the general election

Martin Shipton

A Welsh Labour MP who promised to create greater transparency about the work done by fellow politicians at Westminster has been ridiculed after suppressing the fact that one nearby colleague hasn’t spoken in the Commons since last year’s general election.

Vale of Glamorgan MP Kanishka Narayan, who unseated former Tory Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns in the July 2024 election, has launched an online search engine called Kanishka Kloud.

He introduced it in a video that has been viewed more than 123,000 times. In the video he states: ”So a constituent emails me and said ‘what do you actually talk about in Parliament?’ So I thought, ‘Vale of Glamorgan, jobs, veterans’. But then I thought, hang on, do I actually know what I talk about most? Sure, my speeches are online, but the website’s slow and clunky. So I built a tool, Kanishka Kloud.

"People in the Vale can now know what I get up to in the Commons. First of all, I pulled all my speeches from Theyworkforyou. Then I wrote a script to extract every word and counted every word. To clean it up I filtered out filler words. And I thought, hey, what if this was available for every MP? So I built a website. You can type in any MP’s name and boom, their most used words appear in a cloud. The bigger the word, the more they’ve said it. If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out the cloud here - allhandsontech.uk.”

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Grinning

The video then shows Mr Narayan grinning, with manic laughter in the background. He screws up a piece of paper and throws it at the camera.

When the website went live recently, tapping in the name of Cardiff North Labour MP Anna McMorrin showed that she hadn’t spoken in the House of Commons since being re-elected at last year’s general election. Shortly after, the website was amended so Ms McMorrin’s name could not be searched at all, as well as the names of ministers.

The word cloud for Mr Narayan himself shows that the word he has used most frequently in his Commons speeches is ‘vale’.

Tapping in the name of Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader Liz Saville-Roberts, for example, shows that her most frequently used word has been ‘Wales’.

On the allhandsontech.uk website a statement says: “Kanishka Kloud was built by Kanishka and his team to show his constituents what fighting for the Vale of Glamorgan looks like in Parliament. It maps the most-used words in his speeches since election day. He later scaled it to cover all backbench MPs, to highlight the role tech can play in boosting transparency in democracy and showcasing how local champions are making their mark in Westminster.”

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Tech jobs

Another feature of the website tracks progress towards a target of bringing “1,000 tech jobs to Vale residents” by 2030. So far it’s stated that two such jobs have been created.

The Linked-In profile of Mr Narayan, an Old Etonian who was little known in Welsh political circles before being selected to stand in the Vale of Glamorgan seat, lists five volunteering experiences, including a five-year period from 2016 to 2021 when he advised a number of Labour Shadow Ministers on economic policy, national security and investment and public service reform.

In the run-up to Christmas 2024, Mr Narayan ran a Gavin and Stacey-themed quiz and in February 2025 he launched a campaign called Pothole Patrol in which he encouraged local residents to report potholes to Vale of Glamorgan council.

Former Cardiff Labour councillor Siobhan Correa posted a message to X stating: “A Labour MP made a tool so you can see what your MP has been up to. Like telling on your big sister.”

A Labour source said: “Presumably Anna McMorrin hasn’t spoken because she is a whip. When you searched her name originally, it came up that she hadn’t spoken in the Commons since the election last year. Now she is not on the system at all, slightly undermining his message of transparency.

“It’s difficult to know what is more ridiculous. That we should judge an MP by how many times they have said a given word, or that he had to remove a load of MPs because it embarrassed them.

“Is there any chance he could just do a normal day’s work representing his constituency? Last time it was pot hole hotline vans, now it’s metrics that monitor the irrelevant.”