Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Booth-Smith Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Booth-Smith (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is an immense privilege to be able to speak today. I am incredibly grateful to the many noble Lords who have shown me such great generosity of spirit since I was introduced. As this is my first spoken contribution in your Lordships’ House, I would like to put on the record how incredibly grateful I am to Black Rod and her team, the doorkeepers, the clerks and all the staff here in the House who have been incredibly kind to me since I was introduced.

I thank my supporters, the noble Lords, Lord Finkelstein and Lord Petitgas, and also my mentor, the most optimistic man in Parliament, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham. It would be remiss of me not to thank noble Lords in the Chamber today who have offered their welcome to me.

I must admit that it is quite humbling being here. If I could go back in time 30 years to the younger version of myself and tell him that one day he would be standing here, I feel pretty confident in saying that he would not believe me. In looking back on my life and experiences, I have come to realise how much I am going to be drawing on them as I forge my way in your Lordships’ House.

In particular, I think of my professional experiences, whether that has been working in the public or private sector, running a small organisation, being a writer, or being an adviser in multiple government departments, most recently based in the Treasury and lastly as the Downing Street chief of staff. This was a job in which I managed to survive the entire tenure of the Prime Minister I served, which, going by recent history, is sadly a much more impressive achievement than it should be.

On that point, I note that I owe a debt of gratitude to the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, for the faith he placed in me. I hope to meet the measure of the decency and calm competence which are ever-present in his character. Like him, I care deeply about the economic future of our country; it is an area on which I intend to focus in your Lordships’ House. Whether that is on the sustainability of our public finances through to the measures necessary to drive economic growth, I know that in this Chamber I am in esteemed and knowledgeable company. I very much look forward to learning from noble Lords here.

I have been told that the convention for a maiden speech is to remain uncontroversial, so I am happy to assure the Minister that, today, I will keep faith with the form. That means that I cannot answer the question of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, but that is probably more beneficial for me.

With that, one point I would like to make with regard to the Budget—which I think I am allowed to make—is simply to say that however a Government choose to dress it up, debt is debt and borrowing is borrowing, and it must always be paid back. This was a point made by my noble friends Lord Lamont and Lord Bridges. That is important not just because we want to manage short-term market sentiment and how it has a material impact on the way our debt is priced and it being affordable; it is more important in the longer term as part of a more fundamental strategy to ensure that, should a crisis ever emerge, the Government have both the fiscal flexibility and the market credibility to respond as appropriate. I experienced that first hand in the Treasury during Covid, and I know how absolutely critical it was, and it was the work of many previous Chancellors and Governments.

Perhaps more than the issues which I care so much about and on which I hope to make a meaningful contribution in your Lordships’ House, it is the greater virtues of the House which I sincerely hope to live up to: namely, compassion and wisdom. That is the compassion to see the world through the eyes of others, to hear their arguments and to understand them, and then the wisdom to know when those arguments are superior to my own and the graciousness to learn from them.