Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
THURSDAY 15 OCTOBER 2009
PROFESSOR ANTHONY
KING, MR
JONATHAN POWELL
AND LORD
TURNBULL KCB, CVO
Q20 Mr Prentice:
Sir Richard Dannatt has run something, has he not? He ran the
British Army, and David Cameron thinks that his Defence team does
not really cut the mustard because they do not have military experience.
So General Sir Richard Dannatt is taking the Conservative whip,
becoming a peer, and will probably end up in the MoD. Should we
welcome this or be concerned about it?
Lord Turnbull: If you want my
personal view—
Q21 Chairman:
When you were Cabinet Secretary you did not tell us these interesting
things but now you do.
Lord Turnbull: I think this is
a very major error of judgement, to be perfectly honest. Why is
it objectionable? One, it subverts the chain of command. One day
the Chief of the Defence Staff has this guy as his deputy; a few
weeks or months later he is issuing instructions to him. Where
does it leave the position of the new Chief of the General Staff
if his predecessor is in the ministerial team? In the Diplomatic
Service there are very strict understandings that if you are the
ambassador in Rome, you do not hang around in Rome after you have
retired. It is a nice place to be, but you leave and you do not
take a job there and you do not live there. Bishops are encouraged
to leave the diocese, and for very good reasons. This appointment
undermines that. The second reason is that there will be something
like a Defence Review—either capital letters or lower case—and
different services are going to have to give up their toys. What
objectivity does the former Chief of the General Staff have as
part of the ministerial team deciding this? If you talk to admirals,
they are incandescent about this. They do not believe he can be
objective. Most important of all, it casts a shadow over his successors.
In the Civil Service Code there are words that you have to behave
in a way which gives an assurance not only that you are serving
with commitment your current boss, your current political master,
so to speak, but that you would do the same for a different government.
I think this appointment calls that into question because ministers
will be thinking "Which way is he going? Is he one of these
new Labour people?"
Q22 Mr Prentice:
Would it be okay if General Sir Richard Dannatt took a job in
the Department of Children, Families and Schools or whatever it
is called now? Would that make a difference? Is it only if he
goes back into Defence?
Lord Turnbull: You are on to the
Admiral West case. You can argue that even that was not desirable
but there is a huge difference: Admiral West does not work in
the Ministry of Defence.
Q23 Chairman:
If you say, as you do, it was a major error of judgement, was
it a major error of judgement on the part of Sir Richard Dannatt
or David Cameron or both?
Lord Turnbull: I will leave you
to judge that. I do not know who proposed him, for example, so
I cannot say.
Professor King: I will have a
go: both.
Lord Turnbull: I think it is thoroughly
...
Q24 Chairman:
Reprehensible?
Lord Turnbull: Yes. Another thing
is, I was part of the small cabal that eventually forced a change
in the constitution whereby we no longer accepted that a senior
judge could be a minister at the same time, and that we should
get rid of the conflicting role of the Lord Chancellor. I think
it would be a great shame if we started having one of the top
three or four military people in the country coming back as a
Minister. I think that is retracing ground which I thought we
had won with the Lord Chancellor case.
Q25 Chairman:
Thank you for all that. Tony, you wanted to add something?
Professor King: I simply want
to repeat that I think it was an error of judgement on the part
of both David Cameron and Sir Richard Dannatt to do what the two
of them have done. Just quickly going back, I do not want to give
the impression that there was a golden age, or it was at most
ever a silver age, but if you go back to what I acknowledge as
an extreme case, the immediate post-war Attlee administration,
we talk about GOATs, we talk about people being brought in from
outside. Somebody who was brought in from outside was a man called
Ernest Bevin, who really worked out rather well, first as Minister
of Labour during the war and then as Foreign Secretary, and one
of the reasons he worked out well was that he had done something;
he had run a very large, complicated trade union in difficult
circumstances. He had dealt with Communists within his union and
he knew what they were like, and he knew a bit about negotiating.
Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson's grandfather, had run the London
County Council before he became a minister. Stafford Cripps had
run one of the most successful law practices in the country. I
do think there is a problem to have the kind of political class
we now have and rely on that political class, largely people without
much in the way of background, actually, to use the phrase I used
before, to run the country. I think there is a problem; there
is a dysfunction there.
Q26 Chairman:
Surely, if all that is true, the choice is either that you attack
it from the end of whether we can change the political class by
saying someone should have 10 years of a proper job before they
come in, they must have been involved in running something, and
therefore you improve the recruitment pool for ministers, or you
say, as Charles did, that people who come into Parliament come
in to represent people in a whole variety of different ways, and
what we need to do therefore is to correct the problem with ministerial
talent by being able to recruit from outside and let Parliament
just do the job that Parliament does and be the political class
that it is.
Professor King: I cannot speak
for others but, speaking for myself, I would come at it from the
latter angle rather than the former, not least because I have
thought about it quite a lot and I have totally failed to come
up with any account of what one might do about the political class,
holding the rest of the system constant.
Q27 Mr Walker:
A tiny question: if we had the separation of powers, David Cameron,
Gordon Brown, would be free to pick whoever they wanted from across
the UK to be their ministers but then you could also have less
Members of Parliament, you would perhaps cut Parliament down to
400 or 450, and you would get by dint of that better Members of
Parliament potentially because competition would be higher and
the cream would rise to the top. Is that not a possibility? Then
you would satisfy the public's desire for less politicians and
better government potentially.
Professor King: It is a possibility,
though an improbability.
Mr Powell: About the House of
Lords, which we have not discussed, which I think is a problem,
I think if you put these ministers who you bring in from outside
in the House of Lords, they are not accountable to the elected
representatives of this country and that is wrong. You need to
have these people able to appear before the House of Commons.
Putting them in the House of Lords is a distraction. They do not
need to be in the House of Lords. They should be doing their ministerial
jobs and be able to come along here and answer questions, move
legislation, and act as they do in most other European countries.
I cannot see why that should be a problem. As I understand it,
it does not require a huge amount of change; it is a matter of
changing the rules and procedure of the House of Commons rather
than anything else.
Q28 Chairman:
That would be the answer to the Mandelson issue.
Mr Powell: Yes. There is a reason
why since Lord Carrington there have not been senior Secretaries
of State in the House of Lords and they have all been in the Commons:
because people did not think you could have Secretaries of State
in the Lords who were not answerable to the Commons. I think there
is a problem if you are going to bring in people from outside.
You need to find a way of making them accountable here.
Q29 Paul Flynn:
One of the issues that has disturbed us greatly on this Committee
is the revolving door and the way that the decisions of ministers,
generals and top civil servants when they are in office might
well be distorted by their hopes of better jobs when they retire,
when they stand down as ministers. We have striking examples of
this. In evidence when I said to a witness "Surely pay is
distorted because there are 179 people in public service earning
more than the Prime Minister," the answer was "Ah, yes,
but when you stand down as a Prime Minister, you can get a job
that earns millions." We have a case now where recently John
Hutton, who gave a contract worth £12.5 billion to a company
this time last year, was reported to be considering an offer of
a job with that company, which I think he has delayed for a little
while but we have ministers who have given contracts while in
office and within a year of standing down as ministers, they get
lucrative jobs. The problem is the distortion of their decisions
when they are in office. If we take this with General Dannatt's
position now, is it not extremely dangerous if we do not put some
period of five or 10 years before former ministers, former
generals, former civil servants, can take work with the bodies
they deal with? Otherwise, there is a grave danger that their
decisions will be influenced by nods and winks in order to look
forward to having their Hacienda in Spain when they retire rather
than doing a proper job when they are holding their high offices.
Lord Turnbull: Well, we have a
system for vetting..
Q30 Paul Flynn:
We have had a look at that. Yes, go on.
Lord Turnbull: I can only answer
from the civil service point of view; I obviously cannot answer
from the ministerial point of view. What you are saying is that
when you become a civil servant, once you have joined, you have
no possibility of going out and doing anything else. That means
you also have no possibility of bringing anyone else in mid-career
because first, there are not the spaces because people do not
go out and also anyone who comes in then finds that they are locked
in because they cannot go back to the world that they came from.
I think is absolutely essential that we have people moving across.
The Civil Service for years was too hermetically sealed. You need
a process which enables this to work. If you are going to say
to someone effectively "You have worked here for 15 years
but you cannot work for another five years," you have to
pay them for the five years that they are effectively on gardening
leave.
Q31 Paul Flynn:
I am not sure you are getting my point. If I can take an example
of a minister, a Health Minister, who objected strongly to a report
by the Health Select Committee because it attacked the pharmaceutical
industry and, remarkably, when he stood down as a minister, he
is employed by five pharmaceutical companies. What determined
his judgement in office? Should you not be automatically debarred
from working in that area after you stand down as a minister in
order that your decisions as a minister or as a general or as
a top civil servant are not distorted?
Lord Turnbull: If you have been
a regulator of someone or a contract issuer, then the bar needs
to be set higher, the quarantine times need to be longer or the
conditions attached to it, but for a large number of people, you
have to look at whether you really think this has actually distorted
their behaviour. The test is not does Mr Paul Flynn think that
their decisions may have been distorted. That is what this Committee
has to look at.
Chairman: This takes us into territory
we have been in on other occasions. I do not want to go down that
route particularly.
Q32 Kelvin Hopkins:
Underlying all this there has been a massive shift of power from
all the institutions of Britain into the Prime Minister's office.
That is what has really happened over the last 20 or 30 years,
but particularly since 1997, and it was done deliberately. I have
described it as a process of Leninisation. I am not a Leninist
myself; I am a pluralist. Lenin secured control of the party first
of all and used that as a weapon to drive power to the centre.
You talk about Parliament but is it not the case that the crucial
difference now is that the control of who is in Parliament is
now almost entirely with the party leadership and we have thus
eliminated some of the democratic constraints within Parliament?
It may be true of the Conservative Party as well but it is certainly
true of our party. Democratic constraints have been hacked away
so that the leader has enormous power. Cabinet government has
been praised—and I think rightly so—for a long time.
I think it was one of Andrew's predecessors who at this Committee
said that the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets typically would consider
some 200 policy papers a year. Cabinet meetings would last a long
time, there would be a range of views expressed, a consensus would
come out of that. The Prime Minister was primus inter pares
but not an absolutely dominating, controlling figure, which is
what happened under Blair. The Cabinet became a cipher under Blair
and one guesses it still is, more or less. Is that not unhealthy
and have we not gone wrong simply because we have allowed that
accretion of power to the leader and not maintained democratic
constraints through Cabinet government, through a strong independent
civil service, a strong Parliament and so on?
Mr Powell: No, I do not think
it has. Actually, what happens if you look at it historically
is that it varies depending on how strong or weak the Prime Minister
of the time is. It tends to be weak Prime Ministers who talk about
Cabinet government and stronger ones, like Thatcher, for example,
or Blair, who have a more directive view of what they want the
government to achieve. I do think there is a point relating to
that which Charles Walker made, which is that there ought to be
an alternative career path for MPs where they are not aspiring
to be ministers but are aspiring to hold the executive to account
through committees and through fulfilling their job in that way.
I do not think it requires the separation of powers but I do think
it requires the ability to bring in ministers from outside. I
think Prime Ministers would be slightly disinclined to do that
because they like having the payroll vote. The reason they appoint
the number of ministers allowed in the Ministerial Salaries Act
is that that is a way of making sure you have that many votes
in the House of Commons. That is why you have unpaid ministers
increasing in number too, because they all have their private
secretaries, their offices and their drivers and all the rest
of it. If the Prime Minister had his way, he would appoint every
single backbencher in his party to a ministerial job to ensure
their vote. They may be disinclined to do it but actually, if
they think about it a little bit longer and they are planning
to stay around and be Prime Minister for a while, they might take
into account the equation you run into as Prime Minister if you
have been there a long time, which is the balance between the
appointed and the disappointed, and the problem with ministers
who are MPs is that they do not go away when you sack them; they
sit around on the backbenches and make your life miserable. So
it may be an advantage to have ministers who come from outside
because at least they will go away when you sack them rather than
still being there.
Q33 Kelvin Hopkins:
It is not surprising that you see things entirely through the
eyes of the Prime Minister, preferring strong Prime Ministers
who are more dominant. If we want strong leaders, we can go to
North Korea. I do not think that is a good idea personally. If
you go back to the Cabinet of Wilson and Callaghan, and it was
said, again by one of Andrew's predecessors when they came to
this Committee, that any one of perhaps a dozen of those could
have been a very fine Prime Minister. We had everybody from Benn
and Castle, right across to Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Denis
Healey, and a dozen more, each of whom would have been a perfectly
credible Prime Minister, but there was a range of view there.
There was debate in Cabinet; strands of opinion even within the
party, let alone the country, were actually heard in Cabinet and
the Prime Minister had to work with this team. There was a collective,
consensual view and also better decisions, because if you isolate
yourself from opposition, as I think our leaders have done, and
isolate yourself even from countervailing voices, surround yourself
with people who will just do what you want and do what you say,
always saying, "Yes, Prime Minister," that is not healthy
for democracy and we do not see the country properly represented
in government.
Professor King: Can I go back
to the point that Paul Flynn was making earlier on? Notice that
the problem of the revolving door exists whatever your arrangements.
You can have a complete separation of powers, you can have any
old system you like, you can have the American, you can have the
UK, and the revolving door problem is there. In that sense, it
is tangential to what we are talking about here. Can I just go
back to the point that Jonathan touched on a moment ago, and that
is the question which I think you are interested in, which has
not to do with where ministers come from but how many there are.
Lord Turnbull has a table that he has worked out and that he was
showing us in the corridor in which you might be interested—I
do not think it is a secret document. I did a back-of-the-envelope
calculation. A hundred years ago in 1909 there were 34 ministers,
leaving the whips out of it. Fifty years later in 1959 there were
58 ministers. There are now, using the same basis of calculation,
95 but since the number of ministerial opportunities has grown,
it is at least 95—I think Lord Turnbull thinks it is well
over 100 and I am sure he is right. That seems to me to raise
all kinds of serious questions about the sensible use of resources.
There is an old saying that the devil makes work for idle hands.
I suspect a lot of junior ministerial activity is motivated by
the desire to do and to call attention to oneself rather than
fitting into any kind of sensible programme of government.
Lord Turnbull: Can I give you
the figures?
Q34 Chairman:
Yes. In fact, could you leave your table with us?
Lord Turnbull: Yes, certainly.
In 1997 I am told that the number under the Ministerial Salaries
Act was 110 but there were actually 113 ministers, so three unpaid.
That included the ministers who oversaw Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland. We now have 122 ministers and because the Lord Chancellor
has gone, I think it is 109 who are paid, so there are 13 unpaid.
I think, on a quick calculation, if you add up the number of ministers
and deputy ministers, i.e. basically people who get a car, in
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is something like 75.
You would have thought the number of ministers would go down when
we gave power to Scotland but it has actually gone up. So the
ministerial cadre for the United Kingdom is now around 190 whereas
it was about 110.
Q35 Chairman:
I think we are at one in thinking we are over-ministered and now
we have these breeds of quasi-ministers and all the rest of it.
It is a rash that has to be dealt with. Can I just ask this question:
the problem in a sense with some of this argument is the assumption
that bringing people in is (a) a great idea and (b) a great success.
The problem is we have a lot of experience which suggests that
it is not often a great success, and it is not a great success
in part because of what the ministerial job is, which is all this
heavy grind of accountability, which some of the kind of people
that we bring in do not want to do. We have heard from some of
them here. Is that not a real problem? It is all right saying
there are all these talented people and we had better bring them
in, but actually, if they are not very good at the political stuff,
which is what ministers in our system are required to be, they
are going to fail, are they not?
Mr Powell: I think that is a fair
comment. If you look at the history, as Tony was, there are some
very great figures who came in in recent times. Most people who
have come in have not necessarily done that well because they
cannot do the politics. There may be two reasons for that. One
is that they are stuck in junior ministerial jobs, generally speaking,
and they are not able to take Secretary of State jobs, where they
can play that politics in a sensible sort of way and, secondly,
because they are not answerable to this House, and playing politics
in the House of Lords is a second-best type of thing to do. It
may be because the system is stacked against them that the right
sort of people are not coming in and they are not able to exercise
that political skill. You do not have to appoint experts, as I
was saying earlier in answer to Julie Morgan's question. You can
appoint partisan people who just do not happen to be MPs who may
be just as good at politics.
Professor King: Can I just add
very quickly to that by pointing out—I notice this in the
newspapers endlessly—that attention is drawn to the ministers
who have been brought in from outside who have been failures.
They are never matched against the people who have been brought
in from outside who are successes, and they are never matched
against the people who have been brought in from inside who have
been failures. I am not at all clear that the ratio would be all
that against people brought in from the outside. I think there
are successes and failures under both headings.
Q36 Mr Prentice:
Was Digby Jones a success or a failure?
Lord Turnbull: He was a caricature.
Q37 Mr Prentice:
I was looking at you, Tony. You were hesitating; you did not know
what to say!
Professor King: I did not know
what to say because I am not a student of the career of Digby
Jones, so I lack an empirical base, as we social scientists say.
In addition, success and failure vary along different dimensions.
If you had asked me about Lord Darzi, he left soon. It is alleged
his only accomplishment was to save the life of a fellow peer—that
might be regarded not as a success by some people! If I knew more,
I might be able to make out a case that he achieved a great deal
in two years or however long he was there, which nobody without
his particular background could have achieved. In other words,
I would want to ask what the criteria were and I would need to
know more about some of these people than I do.
Q38 Mr Prentice:
Do you think it is a good idea for the Prime Minister to put people
in the House of Lords when they are going to stay for a very,
very short period? Digby Jones told us that he had told Gordon
Brown, the Prime Minister, that he only wanted to stay in government
for two years but he only lasted 14 months. Malloch-Brown said
that he only wanted to stay two years. Lord Carter, with his peerage
for life, lasted 12 months. Do you think it should be in the public
domain, that when these talented people are brought into government
it should be a matter of record that they are only going to be
ministers for one year or two years or three years?
Professor King: I think the House
of Lords is a separate question and a second-order question. I
share the scepticism that I think the three of us have about the
central place that the House of Lords currently plays for all
kinds of reasons. No, I do not think that people who come in from
outside should be term-limited. Again, I am not a romantic about
the past but Ernie Bevin was brought in in 1940, he was still
there in the late 1940s, he was there for nearly 10 years—should
he have been chucked out in 1942 on the grounds that he had been
time-limited? I would not want to be that rigid.
Q39 Mr Prentice:
That is not quite my question. My question was: should we have
been told that Digby Jones was only going to be a minister for
two years because that is what he told the Prime Minister on his
appointment?
Professor King: Probably.
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