Cabinet Manual: Revision (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Drake and the committee on this fantastic piece of work. It has also set alight a lot of wonderful comments from noble Lords in this debate, particularly about the need to move on from the era of “good chaps”. Nowadays many of us are not good and we are certainly not all chaps. We have to move on from that.

I want to give a small example of a failure of the Ministerial Code which reflects a complaint against the Prime Minister of the day. Maybe the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will have solved the problem when we hear more about his ideas, but it seems to me that we are ending up with the Prime Minister being judge, jury and defence. That does not help public trust.

I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary in July 2021, asking him to investigate allegations that Ministers had failed to comply with paragraph 1.3 of the Ministerial Code, by failing to give

“accurate and truthful information to Parliament”,

knowingly misleading Parliament and failing to be

“as open as possible with Parliament”.

I was complaining about the Department for Transport. It was very helpful, because the Cabinet Secretary passed the letter to the department for a reply, which was of course not very helpful, because it was a long letter of defence.

I thought I would have another go and asked the Cabinet Secretary what he was going to do about that. He said that he could not do anything because

“the decision to investigate matters, and on the appropriate action to be taken, lies with”

the Prime Minister. So I wrote to the Prime Minister, but of course I did not get a reply. I could try again a year later, but it comes back to the fact that, under the code, the Prime Minister is responsible for taking action, and he did nothing.

Other noble Lords have mentioned other failings and the allegations of Ministerial Code breaches within the last five years. I got rather a long list from the Library when I asked, which I found rather depressing. Noble Lords will know all about them: Michael Fallon, Priti Patel, Damian Green, Amber Rudd, Mark Field, Matt Hancock. I am not going to go into what each one of them was alleged to have done because it does not really matter—well, it does matter, but that is not the point of what I am trying to say now.

The worst examples were the allegations against the then Prime Minister about the cost of his wallpaper and things like that. Again, the subject does not matter particularly, but the question I have is about who deals with this. Who deals with the allegations of failure to comply, misleading Parliament, and so on? Is it the independent adviser or the ethics adviser? I do not think the present Prime Minister has either of those at the moment; maybe I am wrong about that, but if he has, we have not heard much about it. Who is responsible for making sure that these people’s advice is independent? Who enforces this?

When he comes to respond, my question for the noble Lord, Lord True, is this: who is actually in charge of deciding what the Prime Minister does and whether he or she responds, and of ensuring that action is taken? As my noble friend said in relation to the succession Bill a couple of weeks ago, it is all right if the Prime Minister is a good chap, or whatever the female equivalent might be, but some Prime Ministers, and some monarchs, have been seen to go mad, or something has gone wrong, and we need to have a way of solving this problem, even when the final decision is alleged to be at the top level. That is why I have great hope in the new ideas from the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy—maybe they will solve the problem.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Barker) (LD)]

My Lords, we will try to re-establish a connection with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport.