Commonwealth

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord whom I follow on his choice of subject today and of course issue the same congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who comes from a long tradition of family service to the Crown and to the Commonwealth overseas. I think that he is himself the last member of the Overseas Civil Service to sit in Parliament—I notice him nodding—and he was exactly the right person to open this debate.

Four years ago, I closed my speech in a debate on the Commonwealth initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, with reference to the career of a Mancunian non-conformist missionary who had devoted his career to teaching the Admiralty Islanders the commandments of God and the laws of cricket. I do not propose to repeat that today, but his sporting avocation is a key to the Commonwealth. I offer a coincidence of a startling and anticipatory kind. Our Library’s well balanced brief tells us that Lord Rosebery, in 1884, made the first allusion to the Commonwealth of Nations. Simultaneously, at the Oval Test in 1884, the English wicket-keeper, Alfred Lyttelton, achieved what remains the greatest bowling feat by a wicket-keeper in Test cricket. With Australia at 532 for four, he took off his pads and took four for 19, bowling underarm. Lyttelton’s relevance does not end there. He was Secretary for the Colonies—note the portfolio—in Arthur Balfour’s Administration and remains the only British Cabinet Minister ever to have played in an Ashes Test. Cricket remains a good bond and omen. I shall return to cricket in my fourth minute.

This debate has been overshadowed by the dilemma of the location for CHOGM when the host country is still being investigated for the origins of past tragedies. I imagine that most of those taking part in this debate will want to declare where they stand on the dilemma. I ought, in that context, to declare an historical interest in that my brother is a former executive vice-president of the Commonwealth Magistrates’ and Judges’ Association. There is something Shakespearean, not to say Sophoclean, about the location dilemma, and my interest is in damage limitation, perhaps leading to the ground hills of a solution, the die seemingly having been cast as to the location. The Canadian leadership will still be metaphysically present because of its financial conditions, but how the Sri Lankans play their hand matters more than the views of the rest of the Commonwealth, although we have clues as to the sensible way that our hand will be played.

My personal particular hope is derived from my experience when the late, great Sir Keith Joseph delegated to me the responsibility of representing the United Kingdom Government at the Commonwealth Education Ministers’ Conference in Nicosia in 1984 and at the subsequent meeting in Sofia in 1985, which Sonny Ramphal sandwiched into the margins of the UNESCO meetings in Bulgaria that year. The agenda was dominated by the United Kingdom having imposed full cost charges on overseas students. It was effectively a rerun of the battle of Rorke’s Drift, with us cast as the garrison and everyone else except the Canadians and the New Zealanders playing the Zulus.

What was striking, and what I hope can be repeated in Colombo, was the astonishingly good humour with which the action was played out. The British ambassador in Sofia, who joined our delegation there, said that it was his first experience of a Commonwealth occasion and that it was unique in its friendliness. As to the verdict on the dilemma, I revert to the spirit of the time-honoured mantra of all cricket umpires that, at this stage, we should give the batsman at the wicket the benefit of the doubt and thus that, in that spirit, the match should go on.