Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
TUESDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2009
SIR JOHN
MAJOR KG, CH, ACIB
Q180 David Heyes:
I wonder how we would get to this better political world you paint
for us. The reality is that no Prime Minister, no government in
power, is going to yield the power which exists in the payroll
vote, in the number of ministerial appointments available to him;
is going to yield power to potentially troublesome select committees
like this one. You did not do it when you had the chance, how
is it going to be brought about, how are we going to achieve it?
Sir John Major: I think the answer
to that question is because there is a general recognition amongst
senior politicians and among every Member of Parliament that the
reputation of the House of Commons has fallen and needs to be
restored. One of the methods of restoring the House of Commons
would be reforms of that sort. I hope it is not too starry-eyed
to imagine there are still a lot of people in the House of Commons,
to borrow Charles Walker's point, who are concerned about the
reputation and nature of the House of Commons. I am sure you are.
I think if that is the case, then you can have these reforms and
see them implemented. I think they should be implemented. If we
continue as we are, if the reputation of the House of Commons
continues to fall, for whatever reason, then I think that is immensely
damaging to almost every aspect of our way of life, and it needs
to be reversed, and I think politicians know that. If that means
some uncomfortable decisions for an incoming government or a continuing
government, well so be it. That is a necessary change which I
think they would be prepared to accept. You are quite right, I
did not do it. I have not come here to plead there was some golden
age in which every democratic reform which needed to be made was
made by me. I am not saying that. What I am saying is that having
had the experience of being in government and then seeing it from
outside, I can now see more clearly than you can from within the
Westminster/Whitehall circus the sort of changes which I think
need to be made and which would be well received across the country.
Q181 Julie Morgan:
Sir John, going back to your discussion with the Chairman, why
would you be so much against coalition governments, particularly
if that reflects how the public feel and voted?
Sir John Major: Only because I
think it is more difficult to take really difficult, structural
decisions. One point about politics at the moment is that the
decisions government has to take are more complex and more difficult
than the decisions we have had to take in the past. The easy things
have been done, the difficult things remain to be done. If you
have a coalition government, there is always the tendency that
when something is very unpopular but necessary, if you try and
put it through with a minority government, the third party or
fourth party, whatever it may be, which supports that government
may withdraw their support and the government may collapse. I
think that does mean the really serious problems which need to
be tackled—and there are going to be a lot of them over
the next few years—are now and will probably not be taken
because the government of the day would fear they could not get
them through the House of Commons. The example I gave will not
appeal particularly to many members of this Committee, but I very
much doubt, whether you agree with them or disagree with them,
that the trade union reforms of the 1980s could have been got
through a Parliament in which a government did not have a majority.
I doubt in future that some of the difficult decisions which may
have to be taken about retirement age and things of that sort,
would necessarily get through with a minority government, and
everyone in this room can think of other examples like that. So
I think the advantage of the government having a majority, particularly
in terms of a crisis, is that it can actually do things which
are unpopular but necessary, whereas I think with a minority government
that is less likely to be the case unless you have a very mature
series of opposition parties who will recognise the national interest
and push aside the short-term political advantage of ousting the
government.
Q182 Chairman:
Your Government was a coalition, was it not?
Sir John Major: I did once say
that, I believe. It was an unstructured comment caught on a microphone—not
the only one of mine I recall. Certainly I did say that once,
I think it was in Canada.
Q183 Chairman:
Life would have been happier with a proper coalition, would it
not?
Sir John Major: I doubt it. I
doubt it, because a coalition partner would have demanded policies
which I might not have liked, that my party might not have liked,
and another set of difficulties I could have done without.
Q184 Julie Morgan:
Going back to ministerial appointments, looking back at them with
your experience and if you had brought people in from outside
much more widely, looking back do you have any regrets that there
were some you did not bring in or you should have appointed?
Sir John Major: It is difficult
to re-invent the past looking back at this distance in time. I
am sure at the time there were people who would have made a contribution,
either in the Lords or the Commons. Looking back at this time,
it would probably be invidious to name them but I am sure the
answer is, yes, there would have been. I think also today, when
the policy gets so much more complex, that is more so than it
was then.
Q185 Julie Morgan:
What about party allegiances? Do you think that if you bring in
people from outside they should be of the party allegiance of
the Government?
Sir John Major: I think they should
commit themselves to collective responsibility, yes. It is a mistake
that we politicians make that we believe everybody is a Conservative,
a member of the Labour Party, a Liberal Democratic, or whatever,
but the truth is for a lot of people who have no particularly
strong political allegiance, more so these days than for a very
long period of time, they vote for the party which they think
might be the most competent and the most amenable; they are largely
apolitical. I see no reason why people like that should not come
into the Lords, but I do think they would need to commit themselves
to the principle of collective responsibility in the House of
Lords and not take a free ride by saying, "Yes, I will come
into the House of Lords, yes I will support the Government when
I think they are right, but I reserve the right to exercise my
conscience in an awkward way whilst retaining my position if I
think they are wrong." I think you would get a chaotic situation
then.
Q186 Julie Morgan:
So you think it is possible for people to come in, completely
apolitical and function successfully as a minister from outside?
Sir John Major: I do, yes I do.
I can think, and do not ask me to name them because it would embarrass
lots of people, of quite a few politicians over the 30 years I
have been in the House of Commons or close to it, who might have
served in more than one party and who were concerned about pragmatic,
good government rather than ideology. So I do think it is possible,
yes. Some of them have served in rather senior positions.
Q187 Mr Prentice:
So we would have a government stuffed full of technocrats, with
no ideological leaning really, but they would just kind of do
the right thing?
Sir John Major: The words "stuffed
full" are rather evocative. I do not remember, Gordon, saying
"stuffed full". I was thinking of the occasional people
with particular skills. Do I think the government can survive
with one or two people, or quite a few people, in it, who are
not ideologues for their particular philosophy, most emphatically
I do. Indeed I sometimes think government would be more effective
if there were more pragmatists and fewer ideologues. There is
a distinction I think between ideology and conviction, and I do
think people need to have their convictions, but I do not think
you need to have a government of ideologues, and some people who
had no particular ideological bent but a pragmatic wish to serve
and an intellectual and other capability to be of service, could
be useful in government.
Q188 Mr Prentice:
I am just wondering if the grit in the oyster you talked about
earlier could end up as Prime Minister as you ended up? I have
this quote in front of me, you talking about your own regrets,
and you say, "I shall regret always that I found my own authentic
voice in politics, I was too conservative, too conventional, too
safe, too often, too defensive, too reactive, later too often
on the back foot." Just reading that quote and reflecting
on it, it surprised me that you ended up where you did in Number
10, and I do not say that in an impertinent way at all.
Sir John Major: I was referring
to my time in Number 10 rather than prior to that, and I do not
move away from that quote at all. That was a reflective and I
hope honest view, after the event, of how things might have been
different. I do not want to traipse over the problems of the 1990s
again, they were there, they have gone, we have moved on, but
I think you have to learn from it. There is no point denying what
the problems were, or not reflecting honestly upon them. The quote
you produced just now is a perfectly fair reflection of what my
view was some time after I left government.
Q189 Mr Prentice:
Can I turn to the problems of 2009 because we had Ann Abraham
in front of us, last week I think, talking about the Equitable
Life saga, something which has been going on for years and years
and years, and she bemoaned the fact that for "Parliament"
you might read "Government" because of the strong whipping
system, with MPs voting the party line instead of standing back
and looking at the issue in the round and coming to their own
conclusions about it. My question to you is this, would you like
to see more free votes, not on peripheral matters but really quite
big issues like Equitable Life? Is there a role for more free
votes in this Parliament which you envisage?
Sir John Major: I think within
limits, yes. I think within limits there are. I mean it is a problem,
that if ever a government is defeated on a major issue technically
it needs to resign. In practice I think there are occasions—and
we do this in terms of things like embryology—where we have
free votes on really important issues. I think there may be some
other issues—I do not know whether this one would fall in
that category—where it might be wise to let the House of
Commons have its head without a whipping system; I would not object
to that.
Q190 Mr Prentice:
You were a previous Chancellor, a previous Chief Secretary, and
you will be familiar—even though you spend so much time
out of the country—with the history of Equitable Life. Do
you think—looking at that issue in particular—there
is a case for a free vote on something with the huge public expenditure
ramifications that there could be?
Sir John Major: I did say I do
not know whether I can comment on that particular issue. As it
happens, I may know less about Equitable Life than you may imagine;
I have not particularly studied it. One of the advantages of not
being in politics any more is that I do not have to pretend to
have an opinion upon everything I have not studied. If I have
not studied it I can say I have not studied it and not have an
opinion. So I will choose to do so on this particular occasion.
I do think there may be a case for rather more free votes. I think
the other thing that actually is the flipside of this is, one
of the problems it seems to me in government is that senior ministers,
given the pressure of our political system—which is more
pressurised than almost any in the world, I think—is they
have very little thinking time. They do not have time to sit back
and do blue skies thinking or reflect entirely afresh upon the
policies to which their party is committed. They do not come and
say, "I wonder whether that actually in retrospect is right".
There is an idea that existed some time ago, and I think it was
originally invented by Michael Palliser of the Foreign Office;
he had a policy planning staff in the Foreign Office that was
a sort of antibody to departmental culture, and I think David
Miliband may have revived it—I am not entirely sure about
that—and that (to borrow the phrase of a few minutes earlier)
was intended to be the "grit in the oyster". That would
be an ideal body for some of these outside experts to join. It
would be quite refreshing to see a policy planning staff with
the leeway to be counterintuitive within every department, so
that you actually consistently get somebody within the department
challenging what is being done with external help and asking:
is this really right? We all know you can get caught in a tramline
on policy and find it very difficult to move off it, and very
little fresh thinking often is devoted to that policy. I think
that sort of grit in every department would be an extremely helpful
aid to policy; and it would be very useful to put policy advisers
in it. We have tsars, we have envoys, we have advisers, we have
political advisers, we have all sorts of things now—they
are of mixed value some of them, I think—but a policy adviser
attached to a unit like that with the freedom within the department
to think the unthinkable and question the accepted wisdom I think
would be a very useful addition to the making of good policy.
Q191 Mr Prentice:
Is that not often the role of backbenchers? I remember Tony Blair
when we won that famous victory in 1997, at the first meeting
of the Parliamentary Labour Party, with his jacket off and his
gleaming white shirt, saying to us, "Just remember you
[that is Labour MPs] are our ambassadors, not our shop stewards".
I remember thinking at the time, "My, you've got that wrong.
If we can't tell where the Government is going off the rails no-one
can". I suppose my question is this: to what extent—
Sir John Major: How effective
do you think that was in the next 10 years?
Q192 Mr Prentice:
How? In keeping us quiet?
Sir John Major: I am sorry, I
know I am here to answer questions and not ask them but I would
be interested to know what you thought about that?
Chairman: The answer would differ as
to whether you said five years or 10 years, I think.
Q193 Mr Prentice:
My question is this: in most comparable democracies—and
you mentioned Canada—Members of Parliament, whether it is
the Liberal Party, the NDP, or the Conservatives, they meet together
as a caucus and take a view on the big issues of the day; and
it would be inconceivable in these comparable democracies for
huge policy changes to be made because they are instructed by
the leadership—which is what happens in Britain. Colleagues
from Canada and Australia are just completely nonplussed when
I tell them about the changes brought in by the Blair administration
that were never even discussed or debated in the Parliamentary
Labour Party. We never had a vote on going to war in Iraq—absolutely
astonishing. Is there not a role for the parliamentary caucus—whether
it is the 1922 Committee, the Parliamentary Labour Party or whatever?
Sir John Major: I cannot answer
for the Parliamentary Labour Party. I can only say in the period
that I was there if the 1922 Committee did not like a policy the
Chairman of the 1922 Committee would be in to see the minister
concerned or the Prime Minister pretty quickly or, more likely,
in to see the Chief Whip, and the Chief Whip would be in to see
the Prime Minister or the minister pretty quickly. If you do not
carry your party with you on a policy then there are obviously
turbulent times ahead. Of course there is a role for backbenchers—it
would be absurd not to say there is—there has to be; but
the whole thrust of what I was trying to say earlier was to try
and put Parliament in a position where the executive is more challenged
than it has been in the past. I absolutely agree with the thrust
of your question and I think there are many ways of doing it,
some of which I suggested.
Q194 Chairman:
Can I return, as we come towards the end, to this question about
the professional politician, because it is something that you
picked up in what you said today and what you said in your article
in The Times. We have heard a lot of it and it is obviously
something that we, most of us, talk about as well. Lord Turnbull,
a former Cabinet Secretary, when he came to us said, "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 think we can all recognise the
people that he is talking about right across politics; but it
is a funny thing, is it not, because there is no other area of
life where we would not demand that the people who engage in it
are not professional, and a sense of devoting their life to it;
politics, we say, should be different. But I notice that in the
article you wrote your argument was not that these people, the
people with more experience of life rather than people that I
just described, should not go into government, should not become
Cabinet ministers—because you talked earlier on about the
skills that you need to develop through a lifetime of activity
to be good at it—you say in your piece that you think these
people should come in and be backbenchers; they should be the
"Why?" people. I see the logic of that but, if
we go down that route, with politics in the House as frustrating
as you have described it, and as we all know it to be, why on
earth would such people want to be doing something like that?
Sir John Major: No, I was also
talking about people coming into government, not just into the
backbenches. If I failed to give you that impression let me try
and correct it now. I do think there is a role to bring people
into government. I would like to widen the intake into the House
of Commons. I would certainly like to do that, although I understand
the obvious difficulties of doing that, in getting people selected;
but I do think there is a role in bringing people into government
who are particularly talented.
Q195 Chairman:
But your article with Douglas Hurd says, "We have in mind
professionals who have succeeded in their chosen career and have
years of energy and good health ahead of them, which they could
use not as ministers but as backbenchers to control the government
of their country". That was your proposal?
Sir John Major: Yes, but not instead
of being ministers. Of course, we were assuming that some of them
might come in as ministers; I am not excluding that at all. We
would like some of them to come in as backbenchers if we can—we
certainly would. That is why I advocated an alternative career
structure that would give more incentive for people like that
to come in. Somebody coming into the House of Commons at over
50 is not realistically going to expect a ministerial career that
is going to end up in Number 10, Number 11, the Foreign Office
or the Home Office; they are not going to expect that; but they
certainly could come in with experience and expect to be maybe
Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee or the Public Administration
Committee, have a senior place in Parliament and make a proper
significant contribution to the way Parliament works. That was
the point we were seeking to address in that particular sentence.
Q196 Chairman:
Let me then try a different approach to it, which is: you have
been pretty damning in your description of the feebleness of Parliament
now, but positive about the proposals that you have to do something
about it; but is not the problem that we talk endlessly about
the problem of the feebleness of Parliament and the need to do
something about it—and we talk about it especially now but
it is not a new theme—but we have a system where the Government
controls essentially the entire business of the House; reform
could only come through a government deciding to change things
and governments for very sensible reasons—their own reasons—do
not?
Sir John Major: Governments respond
to stimuli like everybody else; indeed, we might argue that governments
respond too readily to stimuli too often. I think a good deal
of that stimuli could well come from the sort of reports that
committees like this can produce. That is why select committees
are so important. I think they have to push at that door until
it opens and—if governments do not like it—continue
to make the argument. I am afraid I do not believe that we should
have an elected dictatorship for five years, whatever its majority
is. I simply do not believe that. I think that is simply not the
democratic system that I find attractive. There should be many
more stresses, many more balances; and if that is inconvenient
for governments, well, it is inconvenient for governments and
I think they have to live with it; but you are going to have to
push them. I can make speeches about it outside; I can offer evidence
to you; but you are going to have to push for it inside the House
of Commons. You are going to have to say, "The present situation
is unsatisfactory. We, the select committee, recommend that it
is changed".
Q197 Chairman:
We have been pushing—
Sir John Major: Keep pushing!
Q198 Chairman:—
almost fruitlessly for years; but the point is, the brute reality
is, governments have no interest—no self-interest—in
making life more uncomfortable for themselves.
Sir John Major: Hang on a moment,
government had no interest in 1979 in introducing a select committee
system, but they did. Why did they do that? They did that because
they thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps a similarly
enlightened moment might come about in the future. When it does
come about in the future, let us make sure the right ideas are
in the ether so they can be adopted. I do not take the view that
every government is automatically going to be so self-centred
and so cynical that it will not try and produce a parliamentary
system that will be more popular, more workable and more effective
in the future.
Q199 Kelvin Hopkins:
Are there not differences between governments? Between your government
and the government that followed you immediately there were considerable
differences in the attitude of the Prime Minister to opposition,
the attitude to strong backbenchers and strong Cabinet ministers
that—whom you seemed to readily accept—but were not
popular with your successor.
Sir John Major: I am sorry, I
missed the last part?
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