King’s Speech

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, to be a Member of your House and to make my maiden speech today. I begin by thanking all the officers of the House, from Black Rod all the way through to the doorkeepers— I am told that one should never neglect the doorkeepers. I also thank my supporters, my noble friends Lord Howard of Lympne and Lord McLoughlin, who are here today, and other noble Lords for their courtesy, not least my noble friends Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, Lord Gascoigne and Lord King of Bridgwater.

I am told that in one’s maiden speech, it is customary to introduce oneself to the House, but I prefer instead to introduce my grandfather: Sam Goodman who, family legend has it, was the first Jewish private soldier in the Life Guards. He wrote to his family on 16 December 1916 from the Somme, where he had been dragged from the mud by French soldiers and hauled to safety. The horror and Holocaust of the last century has made a mark on my imagination in two particular ways. First, I believe that the institutions developed on these islands organically over time have helped to shield us from the worst of some of the suffering endured by our neighbours. Secondly, the crust of civilisation is thin, as we all know from looking across the channel towards Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s bloody war there.

My own path may have diverged from my family’s somewhat, but it was an interesting experience, given my background, to be for 10 years the representative—the right reverend Prelate has just alluded to this—of the largest number of Muslims in any seat represented by the Conservative Party. I am grateful to all my former constituents in Wycombe, the true home of one-nation Conservatism, for it is there that Hughenden Manor, where Disraeli lived during his political heyday, is to be found. During those 10 years I acquired a great love of the traditional, classical Islam, one of the world’s three great Abrahamic religions. However, those 10 years were not all plain sailing for any of us. I arrived a few months before 9/11, I left a few weeks after an Israeli incursion into Gaza and in between came the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and terror incidents carried on after I left the House of Commons. That was a very hard time for all of us.

I now turn to the King’s Speech. The Home Secretary, among her other responsibilities—in respect of which I wish her well—is responsible for countering extremism and, I suppose also, therefore, for building moderation, integration and cohesion, which are the opposites of that extremism. I recommend to the Government Front Bench and to the Minister, whose own maiden speech I look forward to hearing later today, the wise words not of Disraeli but of Bing Crosby, who, the House will remember, sang “Eliminate the negative, accentuate the positive”. On eliminating the negative, I hope to see a consensus between the two Front Benches on identifying, confronting and calling out extremist actors and ideologies. By the same token, we must strive to accentuate the positive. That may well mean being open to new and radical ways of living together and finding that cohesion and integration, perhaps in more contractual ways than the British political tradition has hitherto allowed.

I hope that that is a suitably one-nation flavoured way of ending my maiden speech today. As I take my seat, I am haunted by the great contrast in time, space and circumstance between the plushness of these red Benches, on which I am lucky enough to sit today, and that field in France on which my grandfather lay over a century ago.