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Mr. Evans: The hon. Gentleman spoke about the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Wales. In his estimation, how much time should the right hon. Member for Neath (Peter Hain) spend on Welsh matters as a percentage, and what percentage should he spend on being Leader of the House of Commons?
Mr. Bryant: One hundred per cent. on both.
Huw Irranca-Davies: Absolutely. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State should spend all the time necessary to ensure that both jobs are fulfilled to the nth degree. I am sure that he will do that; he has proven it already and he will continue to do so.
Pete Wishart: It is fortuitous that the Leader of the House is a Welsh Cabinet member. I understand that there are currently two Welsh Cabinet members who could fulfil the role of Secretary of State. What would happen to that role, however, if there were no Welsh Cabinet members?
Mr. Bryant: It is inconceivable.
Huw Irranca-Davies: Yes. In the near future, the hypothetical situation that the hon. Gentleman posed is inconceivable. Should it come about, it will need to be dealt with, but at this moment, it is inconceivable.
I urge colleagues not to view Opposition Members too harshly. As I hope that I have explained, they aspire to inhabit a very different world, so the motion is somewhat detached from reality. Please treat Opposition Members gently, but send the motion back to the realms of fantasy whence it came.
2.42 pm
Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): That was a most elegantly written and beautifully delivered speech, but it was pretty high on the grovel scale. We are discussing a very important matter this afternoon, and I have to say something that I said a fortnight ago when we held one of those short foreign affairs debates. I deeply regret the fact that neither the part-time Secretary of State nor the very full-time shadow Secretary of State is in the Chamber for the duration of this debate. In short debates, there is no reason why the principal participants should not stay. I hope that that will be registered.
We have to try to make sense of one of the most chaotic reshuffles in British political history. The hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) was right that this debate is not a question of discussing the detailed merits of the proposals, putting to one side the fact that we do not know precisely what the proposals are. The manner of their introduction was an insult to this House and to the other place. I wonder whether the Queen was told. We shall never know, but, frankly, it was thoroughly insulting to play around with the constitution in this way.
I wonder how it happened. I do not think that the Prime Minister is a malicious or malevolent man. I think that he has no real sense of history and no real regard for this place. He regards us as a bit of an inconvenience and encumbrance, and we distract him from the vision thing. I think that last Thursday he was sitting in his office at No. 10 and talking about the new Ministry of justice, for which we had all been prepared by the spin doctors. Then, Sir Humphrey, or whoever plays that role, said "Well, Prime Minister, the Home Secretary won't stand for that; you can't do it." The Prime Minister said "Oh dear. Well, I can't upset David, can I?" The reply was "No, Prime Minister, you can't upset David, it wouldn't be right", so he said, "I know what we'll do. There's my friend Charlie. He's a proper Charlie. We'll give him the job." So the flatmate was sent for and given a very good job.
The only problem was that nobody else principally involved had been informed of what was going to happen, and the Prime Minister himself had not for a moment thought of the implications. So there followed the extraordinary stream of announcements that my right hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House read out to us in his inimitable fashion in a brilliant speech. First, the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished. We were going to have a Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Wales Office and the Scotland Office were to be subsumed. That seemed to the Prime Minister to be "a good thing", in the words of "1066 and All That", but he had not thought it through. He had not realised that one cannot abolish an office that, as the hon. Member for North Cornwall said, is mentioned in no fewer than 500 current statutes. One cannot abolish the other two offices either, as they are again mentioned in a significant number of current statutes.
Mr. Bryant: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Patrick Cormack: In a minute.
Sir Patrick Cormack: I would not dare to be cruel to such a delightful hon. Gentleman.
One cannot simply abolish things in that way, so there was backtracking, corrigenda were issued and we were told that the office of Lord Chancellor had not been abolished. I was standing at the Bar of the House of Lords last week. This House had adjourned at six o'clock, so I went to the House of Lords to see how it would receive the changes and what it had been told. As I told you, Madam Deputy Speaker, when you so kindly dealt with my point of order on Friday morning, it had been told nothing. I think that it was Lord Onslow who raised a point of order and moved the Adjournment of the House. It was absolutely plain from the sparsely populated Government Benches that nobody had a clue. The Leader of the House of Lords, amiable Welshman that he is, came bustling in and tried to be emollient—I had a pleasant little chat with him afterwards—but he did not have a clue either. He made the best of a very bad job with his carefully chosen words, but nobody knew what was happening or what the implications were. Nobody knew whether there was a Lord Chancellor and what the new Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs was going to do, or otherwise.
Mr. Bryant: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Patrick Cormack: The hon. Gentleman is obviously pregnant with speech.
Mr. Bryant: Much as I was enjoying the hon. Gentleman's musings about what might or might not have happened at No. 10 Downing street last Thursday afternoon, and much as I am now enjoying his Stanley Holloway-like monologue on his Bar time encounters in the House of Lords last week, I wonder what his position is on the supreme court. After all, that is one of the most important of the constitutional implications that we are meant to be talking about.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Frankly, we are not meant to be talking about that. The motion makes it plain—we are talking about processes of consultation and a botched reshuffle. There will come a time for discussing other issues and I shall be very happy to debate the need for a supreme court or otherwise. Hon. Members on both sides of the House will not be entirely surprised to hear that I am an innate conservative and that I do not believe in change unless it is absolutely demonstrated that it will be for the better. I believe that there is a perfectly coherent case for a supreme court and for divesting the Lord Chancellor of many of his responsibilities in the way mentioned by the hon. Member for North Cornwall, but I think that that needs to be debated in detail.
We need a White Paper setting out the Government's proposals. Personally, I believe that it is such an important matter that I would go through all the stages—a Green Paper, a White Paper, a draft Bill that could be examined, with pre-legislative scrutiny so that witnesses could be called, and then the Bill itself. At this stage, I cannot say to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Mr. Bryant) precisely what line I would take on the question of a supreme court. I am truly open-minded about that, although I have a slight predisposition in favour of not changing.
Mr. Tyler: I am following closely what the hon. Gentleman says, and I have a great deal of sympathy
with it. Has he had an opportunity to read yesterday's exchanges in the other place, where it became clear, as the discussions proceeded, that a great many important issues have not yet been faced? Perhaps even more significantly, there has been a full discussion in the other place, but we still have not had one—we are hoping to get one tomorrow.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Precisely. As the hon. Gentleman will know, I raised a point of order yesterday to ask for it. In response to my having alerted Mr. Speaker to the fact that I was going to do that, he said that he had been in touch with No. 10 and that we would get our statement tomorrow. We are all very grateful to Mr. Speaker, but frankly it is still not good enough: we should have had it yesterday at the same time as the statement in the Lords.
In those exchanges, many of the implications of the changes were discussed. They range from the very profound, such as the fact that—as even the hon. Member for Rhondda would acknowledge—the Lord Chancellor's ancient office has attached to it some exceptionally important functions that must be discharged by somebody, to what some would consider trivial, such as who presents the Queen with the speech at the state opening of Parliament. [Interruption.] Well, somebody has to do it: it is an important minor role in our constitution. None of those things has been thought through.
Another aspect that I deeply resent is that the Government have done exactly what they allege that they do not want to do—they have politicised the role of the Lord Chancellor. The Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs are now, and for an indefinite period, one and the same person. Lord Falconer will sit on the Woolsack and preside over the House of Lords for what could turn out to be a long time. He will have the job of appointing judges—an important part of the Lord Chancellor's role, which, I rather agree with the hon. Member for North Cornwall, should go elsewhere. All the while, he will be a highly political member of the Cabinet, wearing his dome-like hat as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, with a relationship that has not yet been worked out with his two underlings, the Secretaries of State for Wales and for Scotland. Are they, in fact, underlings? Again, we do not know.
In the first flush of happiness from his new marriage, on which we all congratulate him, the Secretary of State for Wales may think that he is about to enter a double honeymoon—one with his wife and the other with Lord Falconer. However, I wonder how long the latter will last, and what he will do when real issues of substance crop up between them. I also want to know—the Secretary of State did not reply to this part of my intervention, but the Parliamentary Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs, the hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) will no doubt tell me—how much of his time he envisages devoting to being Leader of the House and how much to being Secretary of State for Wales. Similarly, how much time will the Secretary of State for Transport decide to devote to that role and how much to being Secretary of State for Scotland?
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