Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
THURSDAY 15 OCTOBER 2009
PROFESSOR ANTHONY
KING, MR
JONATHAN POWELL
AND LORD
TURNBULL KCB, CVO
Q1 Chairman:
Let me call the Committee to order and welcome our witnesses this
morning to this hearing on our inquiry on unelected ministers
and other similar sorts of appointments. We are delighted to have
Jonathan Powell, former Chief of Staff at Number 10, and many
other things before that and after that; Lord Turnbull, distinguished
former Cabinet Secretary and much else besides; and Professor
Anthony King, who, as I have just said to the Committee, knows
about everything. We are delighted to have you all. We are worrying
away, as you will know, at this issue about whether it is a good
idea to bring these outsiders into government, what issues it
raises and, if it raises issues, how we might solve them. That
is the broad context. Perhaps I could just ask each of you in
turn to say something very briefly, no more than a minute, to
kick us off, and then we will deal with the questions. Jonathan,
would you like to start?
Mr Powell:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. I think this is actually
a very timely debate to have. We certainly, when we came into
office in 1997, had a problem with a lack of talent to appoint
to ministerial jobs, and I think if the Conservatives were to
win the election next year they will have a very similar problem.
They have a very thin layer of talent from which to choose. So
I approach this from a sort of utilitarian point of view, that
it is good to have a wide choice of people to appoint to office,
and you may not have that if you have been in opposition for a
very long period of time. I do not think putting people in the
House of Lords is a very satisfactory way of meeting the point.
They are not accountable to the House of Commons, the elected
representatives, and I think it would be much better if one could
have people who are ministers who came from anywhere in the country,
from any profession, but were answerable to the Commons. I believe
that is a soluble problem. There would be opposition to it from
Prime Ministers, who like to have the payroll vote; possibly from
MPs, who may like the closed shop on jobs, but I do believe—and
I hope we can discuss this as we go on—there are ways of
solving that problem and meeting that need.
Lord Turnbull: I think there are
two related issues. One is the implications of the overlap of
the executive and legislature, which means the pool from which
ministerial appointments are made is limited; and the second is
the way in which political careers are currently developed. Traditionally,
we have seen the overlap of the executive and legislature as part
of the strength of the constitution: the Government gets its legislation,
by and large, and it is politically highly accountable, but people
are beginning to become more conscious of the weaknesses. In particular
as a parliament gets older, by the time we are into the third
term, possibly with a smaller majority, i.e. an even smaller pool
to choose from, and a lot of people who have done their time,
you really are struggling. Jonathan used the word "utilitarian";
I think the word I would use is "expedient"; appointing
ministers to the House of Lords helps the Prime Minister get out
of a hole but I am not sure it is actually the long-term constitutional
solution that we want. Therefore, I too am attracted to this idea
that someone could be a member of one House and have rights of
audience in another. There are one or two jurisdictions—not
many—where you cannot be a member of either House; you may
have started there but you have to come out of them. That is a
possible solution. The second issue is that I think there is a
growing gulf between the requirements to manage a modern, huge
department, with big issues, large budgets and large numbers of
people, huge technological issues, issues of science, in which
the House of Commons has almost zero capability, and also very
international. There is a growing trend for people to come into
politics more or less straight from university. They lick envelopes
in Central Office, become a Special Adviser, on and on it goes,
and by the time they are in their mid-30s they are Cabinet Ministers,
barely touching the sides of real life. I asked, for example,
Nigel Lawson, "How old were you when you came into the House
of Commons?" I think he was 44 and Douglas Hurd was 42. That
is old these days. Those requirements, these two forces, are moving
in opposite directions and the bringing in of older, more experienced
people into the House of Lords is again something expedient to
get round that.
Professor King: Three points quickly:
Jonathan referred to lack of talent. I think there is a real problem
about recruiting to what are nowadays very large administrations
from a very small number of people, since the majority of ministers
of any standing do have to be in the House of Commons. I am very
struck by the number of people I talk to who have had business
frequently with government, with ministers, and they say a lot
of them are not very competent, that few of them are really knowledgeable
about the activities of the department or their bit of it, that
many of them are not very committed to the job but most of them
are committed to furthering their own political careers. As we
know in this country and it is often pointed out, there is essentially
one ladder of career advancement and that is up the ministerial
ladder. Lots of people have said it is too bad that there is not
a House of Commons career and I cleave to that view. The second
point has been touched on by Andrew. Our political class is more
and more recruited from people whose entire working lives, practically
all of them, have been in politics in some guise or another. If
you go back 100 years, the House of Commons was replete with industrialists,
trade union leaders and so on. I published an article in a learned
journal of which I am rather proud. It was called "The Rise
of the Career Politician in Britain and its Consequences"
and it was published in 1981. This has been going on for quite
a long time. My third point is one that has not been touched and
it is this. There is in this country an astonishingly high turnover
of ministers, changing departments, coming and going and so on.
This is a consequence partly of the sheer number of ministers
but notice it is a consequence of having the vast majority of
ministers being also members of the House of Commons. You get
a domino effect: if somebody resigns, dies, retires, is sacked,
you do not just put somebody else in, as you would do in many
other systems; you have to put somebody else in who is probably
at the moment in some other department and the effects ramify
through the system. I do think it is a very general problem, not
unconnected with the fact that we require most of our ministers
to be MPs, that we have this very high turnover of ministers,
which I think is extremely unfortunate.
Q2 Chairman:
Thank you for that. All that is interesting. Let us just take
stock of what you are telling us. I think what you are saying
is that the gene pool of elected politicians is so poor that it
makes forming effective administrations increasingly difficult
and that this is accentuated by the rise of the professional,
career politician, who has done little else in life and probably
run nothing at all, and that we have to answer this in some way
by bringing people in to rectify the problem. Then we have to
deal with the accountability issues that come from having these
non-elected people. What I want to ask is—and we can talk
about whether the analysis is true—is the direction of travel
one which takes us in really a very radically different direction?
Andrew, you suggested in an article in the Financial Times
that this is the case. You have argued not only that we are moving
in the direction of a separation of powers but that we ought to
be. We can tweak the system now but are we not really moving in
a direction which says: let us be like Obama. Let us have the
ability to bring the talent of the land into government and then
separate that off from the business of scrutinising it?
Lord Turnbull: That is the second
half of the argument. Not only is the development of careers of
ministers dysfunctional, but I do not think it is good for the
House of Commons either that 100 and something ministers are taken
out into the government and others become all sorts of quasi-ministers,
like envoys and so on. Who is left to do the work of scrutiny?
You are a shining counter-example to this but, by and large, if
you have a choice, you are a backbencher and became a Committee
Chair, and I believe you get an extra £14,000, whereas if
you become the most junior Parliamentary Under-Secretary, you
might be offered three times that or something. So a lot of the
people in the House of Commons are there really not looking to
make their career as parliamentarians—as I say, with some
distinguished exceptions; they are there waiting for the telephone
to ring next time there is a reshuffle. I do not think this is
good for the House of Commons as a scrutinising body. Therefore
separating the two, the people that are the executive and the
people who do the scrutinising, both of them constituted in ways
where that is the job they really want to do, may be a better
outcome than this historical overlap that we have at present.
Q3 Chairman:
When you were in government as a Permanent Secretary and then
as Cabinet Secretary, did you form the view that actually, these
politicians were not good enough? Is that what you are telling
us?
Lord Turnbull: There were good
times but, in general, no. In some cases I used to think actually
that the House of Lords was the weak part. A bill would be taken
through by a Secretary of State and then it would be handed over
to a Lords minister, who could well have been a hereditary or
something, and was not really plugged into the department. Some
of those ministers really struggled. In some ways I think it is
now the other way round. The Human Embryology and Fertilisation
Bill was taken through the House of Lords by Lord Darzi, and he
made a million times better job of it than the person who took
it through the House of Commons.
Q4 Chairman:
We will come back to the Lords. Jonathan, you said, I think, when
Tony Blair formed his government in 1997 that you felt there was
not enough talent around and wanted to do something about it.
Mr Powell: Yes, I think when a
party has been in opposition for a long period of time, lots of
people do not think it is a very good idea to go and be an MP
and sit on opposition benches for 18 years or, in the case of
the Tory party, 13 years. I think it would be far better if you
have a wider choice. There is a reason that in Europe, pretty
much all of continental Europe, and the US your gene pool from
which you can choose is the entire country to be ministers, whereas
here we have 300-odd MPs on the government benches from which
you can choose. It is a much narrower group from which you can
choose, and I think it would be far better if we were able to
do that. I would not advocate, as Andrew was hinting at, a full
separation of powers. If you actually required MPs to resign as
MPs to become ministers, as they do in some continental European
countries, you would then have to change our electoral system.
You could not start having by-elections every time that happened.
You would have to have a list system and there are quite a lot
of good arguments against that. I would be much happier with a
mixed system, where you can choose people from outside as well
as MPs. That would give you a wider talent pool, as they have
in most other countries.
Q5 Mr Prentice:
Tony Blair famously had not run anything when he became Prime
Minister. He had not even been on a parish council. You said there
was a lack of talent in 1997. How did you know who was talented
and who was not talented? Did the Prime Minister sit down with
you and others to go through the list of Labour MPs, marking out
those people with potential, those people who were talented? How
did it work in 1997?
Mr Powell: Of course, in 1997
we had an elected Shadow Cabinet, as you recall, in the Labour
Party, so the first point was to, generally speaking, appoint
the people who were in the Shadow Cabinet. It was not all of them
but it was a large part of them.
Q6 Mr Prentice:
But Tony Blair struggled to get on to the Shadow Cabinet when
Labour was in opposition. He never talked the Shadow Cabinet elections
so why should being in the Shadow Cabinet be a mark of distinction?
Mr Powell: That is a very good
question but that was the rule in the Labour Party during the
period of opposition. No, we did not sit down and go through every
single MP to work out who was the most talented, but nor were
we able to look around the country and say if we really wanted
to form a government of the most talented people—not necessarily
experts; I don't think this necessarily needs to be a matter of
choosing experts to go into particular jobs; it could just be
choosing very talented people to have ministerial jobs, who could
well be partisan, party members, but might have that wider experience
outside.
Q7 Paul Flynn:
But you had a list which said "possible", "probable",
"over my dead body". I could draw you up a Cabinet now
of present Members, backbench Members, who are brilliant, who
would make wonderful ministers, including some members of this
Committee, but would never have a hope in hell chance of getting
in as ministers. You start off by saying it is a limited gene
pool but it is not the genes that are the problem. It is a question
of whether the MPs at that time had undergone the new Labour lobotomy
and were biddable to some of the absurdities that came from Downing
Street, such as the Iraq war, for instance. It was! You are limited
to the choice of these zombies who do the bidding of the Prime
Minister. Really, it is a nonsense to suggest there is not talent
in the Labour Party on the backbenches. There is an enormous amount
of talent!
Mr Powell: I am not suggesting
there is not talent on the backbenches of the Labour Party, and
it is true that politics enters the forming of any government
or any cabinet. You tend to rule out a number of people who would
be patently mad, and a number of people who patently would not
be up to the job, but you are again limiting your choice of people.
Why should you limit it as opposed to other countries where you
are allowed to choose from anywhere?
Q8 Paul Flynn:
You also limit it to people who are courageous enough to make
an independent stand, which should have been done on the Iraq
war. We have heard a distinguished academic, Professor Hennessy,
saying here that if the members of the Cabinet had had their backbones
removed and replaced by water, they would have made a stronger
stand on the Iraq war and dismissed the shrivelled account they
were given of the advice on whether it was a legal war or not,
and not one of the gutless Cabinet at the time did stand up. Two
of them did resign later but at the time they accepted that we
should send 179 of our soldiers to die in vain in a war that we
could have avoided altogether. What sort of a Cabinet is that?
You want in the Cabinet people who are credible, who will do the
work, but when you have original thinkers and people with strong
backbench opinions here, they are excluded from office.
Mr Powell: I do not think that
is true. A notable example would be Chris Mullin.
Q9 Paul Flynn:
We know Chris Mullin's book very well.
Mr Powell: Exactly. He would be
a very good example of it but there will be politics when you
form a government. You are going to choose people who will support
the Government.
Q10 Paul Flynn:
Chris Mullin's Cabinet career was destroyed because he occasionally
was found in possession of an intelligent idea, and he could not
survive because of that. Read his book! If we take an example
of one of the acts by the new Labour Government when they came
in, when they appointed the drugs tsar, he was a fairly preposterous
figure, a snake oil salesman, in which he came forward with a
list of objectives and targets that were greeted with derision
by anyone knowledgeable. They were completely unattainable. There
were the great trumpets when he came, this was a man who was going
to solve drug problems in Britain and it was a 10-year strategy.
None of those targets were met. He lasted for two years and he
was sent on gardening leave and people wanted to forget all about
him. When the 10-year period came up, there was no examination
of how those targets failed, how there were virtually no improvements:
there were no reductions, there were people still dying of this
great scourge of drugs. All that had happened from the Labour
Government was that they had produced someone who was a PR man
at best, vacuous, useless, and the result of that is young people
die on our streets from heroin. We made no progress whatsoever.
Chairman: There must be a question tucked
away there somewhere.
Q11 Paul Flynn:
How do you, who possibly had an influence on it, look on the drugs
tsar? Was that a success or a failure to appoint him?
Mr Powell: If the test is did
it resolve the problem of drugs in this country, it was a failure
but there have been lots of other failures in trying to meet that
objective. I think the idea of tzars can work if you need to try
to bring together policy areas, for example, with drugs, from
health, the police, try and make them work together, it can help
to have someone at the centre who can try and bring the threads
together but the problem is, if they do not have a budget, they
do not actually have control over it, the departments will continue
to insist on their particular bugbears and you will not actually
achieve much. Probably a few pointers are you would not want to
have a permanent tzar; you would want to make it a temporary job.
Q12 Paul Flynn:
The Strategy Unit under Lord Birt produced a brilliant report,
which was confidential—it was eventually leaked—suggesting
a practical answer to the drugs policy such as has been put forward
in Portugal, for instance, where they have reduced drug deaths
by 50%. Is there anything in Downing Street that says let us look
at the evidence, let us find out what works, or do they say, "What
is going to play to the Daily Mail? What is going to give
us this good feed of adulation in the press?"
Mr Powell: Not on the drugs policy
in particular but I think what you flag up is actually the advantage
of having someone like John Birt, who is prepared to think from
first principles on some of these policy issues. The problem then
comes that he produces a brilliant report, but trying to put it
into practice, a practical policy, this is where the problem happens.
Having someone like John Birt, or someone who is really prepared
to think things through, is an example of how you can have someone
in the centre who can make a difference, even if you cannot necessarily
implement his full report.
Professor King: Can I just say
something that was raised earlier? I think the phrase "separation
of powers" is misleading. The vast majority of European countries
do not have a separation of powers in the American sense, though
France has a partial one—and they are parliamentary systems,
which in many respects, even though they have coalition governments
in most cases, resemble the UK more than they resemble the US.
The fact remains that the only countries which require ministers
to be parliamentarians are the United Kingdom and Ireland. There
are a considerable number of countries—and, interestingly,
it is a scattering of countries—that insist that ministers
not be members of the legislature. In addition, there are quite
a number of countries where ministers may or may not be members
of the legislature. My own view is that there is a lot to be said
for the middle category of saying yes, it probably will be the
case that a majority of ministers are at the time of their appointment
members of either the House of Commons or—and I have worries,
as others do, about the House of Lords in this connection—but
need not be. That raises immediately the question of accountability,
of answerability. Andrew spoke of rights of audience. I would
say requirement of audience. It seems to me that if you are going
to have ministers, they should be able to speak in both Houses
of Parliament, if we have two, and that they should be required,
indeed, to answer questions, to appear before committees like
this, to be able to take bills through Parliament. In other words,
the issue of membership and the issue of the extent to which ministers
are involved in legislative proceedings are separable and are
separated in the large majority of European countries, a larger
number than require, since it is only the UK and Ireland, that
ministers should also be parliamentarians.
Q13 Chairman:
But one of several problems in this area is that we use the House
of Lords as a way of getting people in, as it were, through the
back door into ministerial roles. There is nothing new about this.
We are at about the average level for the whole political period
at the moment. It is a well-used practise. What seems odd though
is that people might come into government to do a job through
that route for what can be a very short space of time and they
finish up as a member of the upper House for the rest of their
lives. That seems bizarre, does it not? I wonder if a better suggestion
is the one that John Major and Douglas Hurd originally made, which
is to have a category of non-elected ministers who are members
of neither House but are accountable to both Houses in the normal
way and they just do the job for a period and then leave government.
Professor King: Yes.
Mr Powell: I would agree very
strongly. I do not know that a person need be answerable to the
House of Lords but I do think they should be answerable to the
House of Commons and able to move legislation and able to appear
on the floor of the House. You should be able to be a minister
without having to go into the House of Lords. Being in the Lords
strikes me as a distraction.
Q14 Chairman:
Once we start having this conversation, we are actually moving
towards a more separated system.
Mr Powell: No, because you can
have a mixed system. There could be some ministers who are MPs—the
Prime Minister would almost certainly be an MP—but others
who would be people appointed from outside but simply answerable
to the Commons and able to appear before the Commons. Just putting
them in the Lords strikes me as an odd thing to do with them.
Q15 Julie Morgan:
I was going to ask whether you thought ministers appointed from
outside should be members of the governing party.
Mr Powell: That seems to me to
be a political decision by the government at the time. If I were
doing it, I would certainly appoint people from the party and
partisan but you might also want to appoint some experts as ministers.
I do not see why you should not be able to do either of those
if you wanted to.
Lord Turnbull: There is a New
Zealand example, that Helen Clark appointed someone from an opposition
party as Foreign Minister and he said, "I will support you
on foreign affairs but I reserve the right to vote with the rest
of my party on everything else." It seems slightly odd.
Q16 Julie Morgan:
That sort of step seems to deny the wishes of the electorate.
Lord Turnbull: You are right.
On this question of doing two years or even less than two years
and then remaining as a member of the House of Lords, basically,
I think there are several steps that are missing. One is that
you cannot resign from the House of Lords and I think that should
be possible. If you are still using the House of Lords as the
vehicle for this—and I think we are really saying if we
have not got anything else, that is a change I would make. In
a new House of Lords I would definitely have term limitation.
I think everyone should have about 15 years and that is it. You
should be able to retire. So someone who comes in, does a ministerial
job, may want to stay as a performing member of the House of Lords
as long as everyone else and, provided they accept those obligations,
then they can stay. If they say "I am now going to go back
to my previous career", I think they should do the decent
thing and resign. The only question then is, what about their
name and title? We then get this ghastly business where basically
you should just be Andrew Turnbull and everything else that describes
what you are or have been comes after your name, and get rid of
this business of giving people names and giving their wives names
but not their husbands names. Then it will be much more flexible.
You could come in, do the job, either stay if you are going to
stay as a member of the House of Lords and work there like everyone
else, or resign from it and go off and do something else. It all
depends if you are still using the House of Lords as the vehicle.
If you devise something else, you would not need to do all that.
Q17 Chairman:
Can I just try one more thing on you and then I will bring Charles
in. Andrew, particularly you, because of where you come from,
are we not really wrestling with the fact that in our system we
are right at the end of the spectrum in international terms in
terms of the political element in government? Because it is a
fundamental principle of our system that we have this independent,
impartial civil service, where ministers do not come in and appoint
their own people to senior administrative posts, we have to find
our own way around getting people that we want, who we think will
deliver our programmes, into government in some way. So we use
these devices like special advisers and all the rest of it, which
get into great trouble because they go off and become spin doctors
and all the rest of it. Would it not be more helpful if we could
be more sensible about thinking about what the right balance is
between the politically appointed element in government and, as
it were, the permanent element in government? At the moment we
seem to be wriggling around a constraint that is built into the
system without being able to think more openly about it.
Lord Turnbull: In parts of northern
Europe, Germany and Sweden, they have this concept of the State
Secretary. The State Secretary is usually the number two level
minister. The minister is usually an elected politician but, if
you take the man who is now the President of Germany, Horst Koehler,
he was a career official in the Ministry of Finance and then he
became the State Secretary, which was a political appointment.
These are effectively unelected ministers but also with a lot
of professional expertise. The difficulty with that is this requirement
that you should hand over an administration of the quality that
you left and not cannibalise it when you leave. Once someone like
Horst Koehler becomes a State Secretary, with a change of government,
they will nearly always move on, so their expertise is then lost
to the successors—that is the advantage of our system—but
it does actually bring some very good people in. You find if you
go to a European or OECD meeting and you meet these people, they
are of a very high quality, but it is just another device. What
I do not like though, particularly about the French system, which
seems to me pernicious, where people all claim to be part of the
fonction publique or whatever, but actually they have undeclared
allegiances, so when the Gaullists are in, you get a job but when
the Gaullists are out, you are sent somewhere else. That is a
system which does not have any rules to it. There are other systems
where ministers, or Secretaries of State, have greater rights
of appointment of the rest of their ministerial team. But you
have to bring in the whole package. I do not think you can just
pick that particular element. The American system has various
checks and balances, there are confirmation hearings and, by and
large, they can bring some very good people in. They also bring
some disastrous people in like, "Hey, Brownie, you're doing
a great job," if you remember the former Secretary of the
Arabian Horse Society who handled Hurricane Katrina. But by and
large they bring good people in but they do get tested through
confirmation hearings. I would not transfer the right appointment
of ministers without also changing some other parts of the constitution.
Professor King: Let us come back
to the question of rate of turnover. I do think this is a very
serious problem and one that is not unconnected to the business
of having most ministers come from the House of Commons, the domino
effect I referred to earlier on. If I look at the UK system of
government and compare it with that of just about any other established
liberal democracy, the rate at which people go from one post to
another—John Reid I lost count of at some point—we
can talk about defence but we have had eight Education Ministers
since the Labour Party came to power in 1997. I do not think we
have an Education Minister at the moment because of course departments
keep swirling around as well. If you count Peter Mandelson twice,
we have had eight Business or DTI Secretaries. This is closely
related to the fact that we have to draw our MPs from the House
of Commons in a situation in which, as you said earlier, Mr Chairman,
most MPs are from a political background. The second point, and
I think it is a serious one, is that I think we ought to be straightforward
about the gene pool—this is the term that Andrew introduced
into the discussion. The gene pool, in my view, for ministers
is simply too small to begin with and, to be honest, not good
enough. Do constituency Labour parties, do constituency Conservative
Associations ask themselves as a core question: "Has this
person had the kind of experience, does he or she have the talent
that would enable him or her to play a major part in running the
country?" I do not think that is very often a serious criterion.
Q18 Mr Walker:
I think I am wholly unsuited to be a minister. I really am. I
am emotional, I judge people quickly, I have none of the characteristics
that would make me a good manager, but I have many of the characteristics
that might make me a good legislator. I can stand up for those
who elected me. I think it is, as you say, madness to expect the
350 people in the governing party to have the requisite skills
to become ministers, senior managers, in a hugely complex world.
I think this really does lead to the need for the separation of
powers, where we can have two big stories. We can have the President
or Prime Minister, whoever he is, picking his team, doing great
things, and we can have Parliament becoming a story again for
the right reasons, holding him to account, holding the Number
10 Policy Unit to account. Do you not think if we move towards
the separation of powers that actually might restore some confidence
in our democratic processes in this country? The one thing it
would do would be to remove patronage from this place. It is patronage
that kills Parliament. If you want to be independently minded,
the Chief Whip says, "We are all working so terribly hard
on your behalf to get you into government. David is desperate
to promote you. Can you just do us this one favour on this one
occasion?" It would be called blackmail in any other walk
of life!
Professor King: I would only just
add to that that I think you can achieve a good deal without going
as far as you are advocating, because there are a considerable
number of—and I emphasise the word—parliamentary systems
where you do not have anything approaching the American-style
separation of powers where nevertheless there is, as it were,
a career structure—I use the term loosely—in the legislature
in countries in which the legislature has a very considerable
say in what actually happens. I cite Germany, for example. The
leaders of the parliamentary factions in Germany are serious people.
The committee system is so structured to enhance the power of
what in this country would be thought of as backbench MPs. In
other words, I am not disagreeing with you. I am just saying that
one does not have to go the whole hog to get some pretty good
parts of the pig.
Q19 Mr Walker:
"Backbench" in this country is a term of derision as
opposed to a term of celebration, and I think that is poisonous.
It really is. "Oh, he is just a backbencher." Being
a Member of Parliament should be an important job in itself. Is
it going to drive David Cameron wild in eight years' time, when
he has worked his way through 150 or 200 ministers and somebody
puts my name in front of him? That is the weakness of the system,
is it not? We have had a Labour government for 13 years. My God,
Gordon Brown must be beside himself when he looks at who is left.
The same after 18 years of a Conservative government. Surely,
the direction of travel must be towards either full separation
of powers or far greater separation of powers but not decided
on the whim of the Prime Minister of the day. We cannot have the
Prime Minister of the day saying, "I think we will cut Parliament
by 60" and the next one saying, "Why not go 180?"
Surely we need some new constitutional settlement, perhaps even
a written constitution.
Professor King: May I say parenthetically
that it seems to me that if one of the principal functions of
the House of Commons at the moment is to constitute the gene pool
from which ministers are drawn, the idea of reducing the size
of the House of Commons has an inevitable arithmetical consequence
of reducing the pool from which ministers are drawn. If that is
what the House of Commons is about, there should probably be 2,000
rather than 500.
Lord Turnbull: That assumes that
the Ministerial Salaries Act is unrepealed. So long as 110 salaries
are permitted, 110 salaries will be given out. If you did a Myers-Briggs
test, one of these psychological tests, I suspect this is partly
why politicians always have tensions with civil servants, because
civil servants are completely different. Politicians I think are
small organisation people—not in the pejorative sense. They
believe that you get results by what you do yourself. You have
been an analyst or a university lecturer or a journalist or something,
or particularly a lawyer, and there is a very direct relationship.
I thought Jonathan's boss used to think that he had an absolutely
direct link, that what he did should then translate into something
else. Civil servants are big organisation people. They think in
terms of structures and hierarchies and mandates. When the Prime
Minister said to me, "I want something done," my immediate
action was "I need to find a person who does this."
I did not think I was going to do it myself. I think one of them
is actually better suited to the running of very large organisations
and very few large organisation people now get into the House
of Commons. Take Peter Mandelson's beloved grandfather. He was
a senior politician over the river there. At the age at which
he came into national politics I would think nowadays all the
jobs would have been taken. You have no chance if you come in
at 50 of getting anywhere in politics now, so how can you develop
in a senior position in local government or in trade unions or
business? You are so far behind in the climb up the greasy pole
that you never catch up.
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