Queen’s Speech

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

The exorbitant effulgence of the Prime Minister’s pomposity and waffle has served to conceal from many people the extent of his ignorance and carelessness. Doubts persist over whether his utterances are planned or simply haphazard.

A case in point concerns the future trading relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The recent Brexit agreement has proposed a customs barrier in the Irish Sea, requiring checks on goods, known as exit summary declarations. However, Boris Johnson has insisted that there will be

“no forms, no checks, no barriers”

for goods travelling from the Province to the mainland, and he has assured people that there will be “unfettered access”. Asked by one person whether he could tell staff to refuse to fill in the forms, Mr Johnson said:

“If somebody asks you to do that, you can tell them to ring up the prime minister and I will direct them to throw that form in the bin.”


It appears that the Prime Minister has failed to understand the terms of his own Brexit agreement but there is still doubt concerning the motives behind his declaration, and some people have given him credit for a conscious strategy. If his utterances have been more considered than they seem to have been, it is difficult to understand their underlying logic. They will certainly cause difficulties when the detailed trade negotiations with the European Union are under way.

The political activities of Boris Johnson have a quality of patrician amateurism. He exudes self-confidence and a disdain for fussy detail. His attitude appeals to many who find the details of public administration to be tedious and inessential. Amateurism is nothing new in British politics. It was satirised in a long-running television series that had a hapless Minister, James Hacker, confronted by a cunning and sagacious civil servant by the name of Sir Humphrey Appleby, who was adept at sidestepping the misguided initiatives of the Minister. The programme both satirised and celebrated the modus operandi of the British Civil Service, which has endured almost unchanged for 150 years, beginning with the Civil Service reforms of 1855. It depicted in a masterful way the Minister’s gracious if quietly resentful acknowledgement of his own incompetence.

What has changed since the days of Sir Humphrey Appleby is the deference of Ministers towards the Civil Service, which is greatly diminished. The Civil Service has been faced with the impossible task of turning the fantasies of Brexit into practical reality. The inevitable failures have roused the irritation of Ministers. That irritation and the helplessness of the officials have been palpable in many of the sessions of the Lords European Union Committee and its sub-committees. The Government have hardly welcomed the substantial guidance and wisdom that have been offered by the numerous reports of the committees. Michael Gove is famous for having declared that,

“people in this country have had enough of experts.”

Members of the Lords committees do not often profess to be experts. However, they do universally acknowledge the value of expertise and they have sought to tap into it by calling upon expert witnesses. In the process, they have irritated many Ministers, who have resented the manner in which the reports of those Lords committees have served to obscure the leitmotifs of the Brexit agenda and to transform a simple idea into a maze of complications.

During the period of the recent Conservative Governments, a new element has begun to dominate the formulation of policies and their expression in legislation. Increasingly, the policies have been hatched within think tanks that are affiliated to the Conservative Party. The policy of universal credit and housing policies, including such things as the bedroom tax, originated in think tanks, most notably one called Policy Exchange. The Civil Service has been sidelined. It has been inhibited from contributing its experience and its caution to such matters, and the consequences have been disastrous. One can imagine the circumstances in which a neophyte, perhaps a recent Oxbridge graduate who is eager to impress his political masters, is put in charge of policy formulation. The result is liable to be a proposal with a strong political coloration that is devoid of practicality and careless of the plight of the people on whom it might impinge.

Another feature of those Conservative Administrations has been the increasing role of special advisers drawn from outside the Civil Service. Some of them are contemptuous and resentful of the Civil Service and its personnel. There has been a well-publicised tirade by the Prime Minister’s principal special adviser, Dominic Cummings, against the Civil Service in which he seems intent on sidestepping the normal recruitment processes. In his blog he seeks to encourage scientists, mathematicians, computer programmers and, in his own words,

“weirdos and misfits with odd skills”

to join the service.

It is a widely acknowledged fact that there is a shortage in the Administration of people with technical skills. Any attempt to reduce this deficit should be more than welcome, but the proposal of Dominic Cummings is for the creation of a disruptive ginger group, seemingly intent on pursuing the tendentious policies of right-wing fanatics. That would be profoundly unwelcome.