Queen’s Speech

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to propose this Motion and pay my own tribute to the Queen. Some, perhaps many, of us had our first introduction to the medium of television as we watched her coronation in 1953. In the years that have followed, this nation could not have been served more magnificently and with a greater sense of duty than by the Queen, always supported with dedication and style by the Duke of Edinburgh, to whom—slightly early—we send greetings on his 93rd birthday, next Tuesday.

It was also an enormous pleasure to have with us Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. Over the years, Prince Charles has shown himself to be not just a man of action in his efforts to help the employment position of young people—as I well remember—but a man of sound judgment. Perhaps I could add this: I would like to applaud the help and support that the whole Royal Family has given to the many voluntary organisations in this country. As many in this House will know, its support is utterly invaluable.

2014 is a year which sees many anniversaries. Next year, we have one which goes to our heart—the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. As your Lordships will recall, this was the culmination of the barons’ revolt. Indeed, our gallant allies, the Liberal Democrats, appear to have started commemorating that part already.

Last year, the proposer of this Motion, my noble friend Lord Lang of Monkton, made an exceptionally elegant speech, but there was one point with which I disagreed. He suggested that the kind of people who make this speech—“old codgers” I think he rather offensively called them—have abandoned all ambition for an advancement. I contest that particular statement. I have been patiently sitting by my phone for the past 13 years, waiting for the call to come. Although it has not rung yet, I still have my hopes.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Fowler]

I am very grateful.

Consider my qualifications: instant recognition in the street. Only last week a gentleman outside this very House came up to say, “How very nice to see you, Mr Rifkind”. Think of my experience: I was in Margaret Thatcher’s shadow Cabinet back in 1976, when she called me in and said she wanted me to move to transport. “But I know nothing about transport”, I protested. She fixed me with an icy stare. “Fowler”, she said—we always had this close personal relationship—“Fowler, I did transport; you can do transport”. So I did, eventually becoming Secretary of State, which was hugely enjoyable, thanks partly to the high quality of the shadow Ministers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, with his wonderfully engaging transport policy of “Jaguars for all”. As a Westminster MP, I strongly agreed with this; when I can afford it, I personally follow it as well. A little later I went to Health and Social Security and stayed there for six years, with the help of some brilliant Ministers of State, such as Ken Clarke, with his dark brown Hush Puppies and his smelly cigars—or perhaps it was the other way round—John Major, who I have to say we very much hope we will see at some stage in this House, and Tony Newton, who we all very much miss to this day.

In this House I had tremendous support from my noble friends Lord Elton, Lord Glenarthur and Lord Trefgarne. Then there was my noble friend Lady Trumpington—no hand signals, please. She was a formidable ally, but if she had one fault it was a slight tendency to go occasionally off message. She did not really have her heart in Edwina Currie’s healthy living message. We could never persuade her into the woolly hat that Edwina prescribed for cold weather. It was even worse when one day she went off to a press lunch to extol the virtues of our health policy and our success in bringing down waiting lists. The next day the headline was, “Health Minister proposes licensed brothels on the NHS”. No. 10 was not amused. I loyally tried to placate them by saying that we would not expect everyone to be covered by free prescriptions, but I received the reply that the objection was rather more fundamental than that.

My noble friend is genuinely a great lady and it would be entirely inappropriate of me to use this occasion to say that you can read about her adventures in her recently published book. That would be doubly inappropriate, as I have a new book of my own coming out this week and actually it is cheaper than hers.

Obviously when I came to this House I expected my record to be noted and promotion to beckon. I then noticed one or two barriers. My last ministerial job had been in employment, where I was helped by John Cope, now my noble friend Lord Cope, who was absolutely superb and who achieved—I am sorry, John, I cannot read the rest of what you have written here. My second Minister was John Lee, now my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford, making at that time a guest appearance on the Conservative Benches. Since then he has written an entirely useless book for many of us in this House: How to Make a Million—Slowly. We do not want to know how it can be done slowly; for some of us, speed is of the essence.

So there were Messrs Cope and Lee and then came the question of the third man—the third Minister. “I am giving you Strathclyde”, said the Prime Minister. “Strathclyde!”, I protested. “That’s a passenger transport executive. I’m doing employment, not transport”. “No, no, Lord Strathclyde—he’s a quite remarkable man. He’s the only man on the Conservative Front Bench who believes in an elected House of Lords”.

After that beginning, I was not going to get very far with him, and I did not. But surely, I thought, I was owed some debt for my period as party chairman. Then I remembered my efforts to modernise the party organisation and cut back the regional organisations. There was one region which was particularly difficult. I told my chief agent to tell them politely that they were to be amalgamated. A day later I received the reply that the officers there had said that I could jump in the Central Office lake. I was outraged. “Who is behind this revolt?”, I asked. “It’s a lady called Joyce Anelay”, came the reply. As one door closed, another slammed shut.

However, there was a fresh spark of hope when my noble friend Lord Strathclyde retired after, I must say, a very distinguished period as Leader of this House. There was speculation on who would follow him. I harboured the hope that my old friend, my noble friend Lord Lawson, might make it—surely he would need a new spokesman on climate change. However, it was not to be. Instead, another old friend, my noble friend Lord Hill, took over. Now here really was an opportunity. In the 1992 election, he and I travelled virtually every day with the Prime Minister, John Major. Many people put down our surprising success in that election to our support and advice. When I say “many people”, that was certainly the firm view of myself, my noble friend Lord Hill and our close families.

However, even at that time my noble friend Lord Hill showed great skill in defending his leader. In one of the cities that we visited, John Major was pelted with eggs. It was not the headline that the spin doctors wanted. So my noble friend Lord Hill invented the line that it was quite untrue to say that the Prime Minister had been pelted with eggs—they were aiming at Fowler and missed.

For whatever reason, my claim has so far been overlooked, but I have not given up. I am still sitting by my phone, and at this point I should like to pay genuine and sincere tribute to the skill and extraordinary ability and wisdom of the Leader of the House and, of course, his excellent and efficient Chief Whip—much good though any of that will do me. So, for the time being, I have to revert to the jungle of the Privy Council Bench, where the competition is so fierce that former Cabinet Ministers squabble about who is to ask a supplementary question first. I suspect that there will be many opportunities for such scraps in the forthcoming Session—which actually is not a bad connecting sentence.

The trouble with any legislative programme is that a hundred editorials condemn you for too many Bills and, if you are more modest, a hundred editorials condemn you for too few. I have worked out that on the basis of my service in the House of Commons and in this House, and given that a Division takes about 15 minutes, I have spent more than one year of my life voting in the Division Lobbies of both Houses—I repeat, more than one year. I hope the Whips are listening to that. They can nod if they are. Just one nod: I did not get very far with that. I did not think that they would listen. Of course, my voting does not take into account the times when I have been brought in to take part in a make-or-break vote on which the future of the country depends, but the vote never takes place. I should make it clear that that happens only in the other place.

I am firmly of the view that the less legislation, the better. I also take the view that that enables us to have more general debates. I would not mind having a debate on the Chilcot report, why there has been such a delay and why we cannot have the full transcript. I also would not mind having more debates on the Floor of the House on the many excellent Select Committee reports that this House publishes. Taking all that into account, my view is that the programme for the next Session is well judged. I very much support the measures on deregulation and infrastructure. I also support the provisions on pension reform. Back in the 1980s, I introduced personal pensions and step by step the position has been reformed. It is entirely right that the public should have good advice but also more freedom to take decisions concerning their own money.

Running as a thread through all this is a strengthening economy, which is much to the credit of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. It has been a tough and, at times, unpopular struggle to recover. It also has been to the credit of our coalition partners on the Benches behind me who put the national interest before party advantage.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Fowler]

I might add that, although perhaps as a resident of the Isle of Wight, I could wish that the same sturdiness had enabled them to support the parliamentary boundary proposals. At the next election on the island, we will have a constituency electorate of 111,000.

As the gracious Speech makes clear, two major issues overhang the next 12 months. The first is our future position in Europe. When I was first elected in 1970, I advocated in my election address a referendum on entry into the Common Market, much to the displeasure of Central Office. It is at least arguable that had we done that at the outset, we would have spared ourselves some of the trouble which has scarred British politics ever since. You do not have to be a Eurosceptic to support the Prime Minister’s pledge to have a referendum after a period of negotiation on the powers of the European Union. Given the results of the European elections from around Europe, it would be a brave man who argues that the structure needs no reform at all.

Even more immediate is the referendum in Scotland. I sometimes think that those of us who support the union put the case in the wrong way. Of course, the financial issues are vital but the real argument is that together we have more influence and more power to defend our interests. As I said at the start, 2014 is a year of anniversaries. It is the anniversary of the start of the First World War and this Friday is the anniversary of D-day. In those wars we fought together to defend liberty and no country played a bigger part than Scotland and its men and women. My hope is that side by side we will continue to stand together in facing the problems that the world throws at us. The problems have not gone away, as the position in Ukraine graphically illustrates. It can hardly be doubted that together we are stronger. It is not just a financial argument: it is because we have shared so much over the years. I very much hope that those historic ties and the pure affection that exists between us will not be cast aside. I beg to move the Motion for an humble Address to Her Majesty.