House of Lords Appointments Commission

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, attacks on the alleged metropolitan elite entrenched on the Cross-Benches and on these Benches by wealthy Conservatives who grew up in the Home Counties and made their careers in the City of London are absurd. For the record, I spent the Recess on the outskirts of Bradford, not in Islington or Surrey.

Fundamentally, as the Minister will recognise, this is about the power of the Prime Minister to exercise prerogative powers without restraint. As the ability of the monarch to constrain her Prime Minister shrunk, the exercise of Crown prerogative powers by the Prime Minister was moderated by the willingness of successive political leaders to behave within the limits of what was regarded as acceptable behaviour. Eton educated political leaders were assumed to be the most trustworthy in this respect. They had been taught the importance of conventions and constraints on power, and the sense of shame for those who broke them.

Now we have an Etonian Prime Minister who does not accept the importance of constraints or of advisory bodies in ensuring that conventions are observed and who appears to have no sense of shame. Today we are discussing the Lords Appointments Commission, but this also applies to observance of the Ministerial Code, the appointment of non-executive directors to Whitehall departments and to many other aspects of the standards of our public life.

When politicians refuse to observe established conventions of appropriate behaviour, it becomes necessary to strengthen those rules by statute. Decisions on the size of our second Chamber and the qualifications for membership of it have constitutional implications. I accept that David Lloyd George in his time abused prime ministerial power in Lords appointments. That was corrupt. Boris Johnson is abusing prerogative power in the same way. To paraphrase Lord Acton, all power corrupts; unconstrained power corrupts without constraints.