King’s Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, speeches that follow maidens can sometimes have a formulaic quality. We say that it is a privilege, honour and pleasure, and the words issue from our vocal chords without our really stopping to ponder what they mean. Let me say with feeling that I feel very lucky and happy to be able to follow one of the most foremost historians of our generation, my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia, the author of 20 books and perhaps best known for his magisterial and monumental biography of Winston Churchill. There have been 1,012 such biographies and his was the 1,010th, but I think it is at or close to the top of almost every critic’s list, above even, dare I say, The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson, in which the great war leader is—oddly enough, who would have thought it?—reimagined as a witty after-dinner speaker and right-wing journalist who is cruelly excluded by the Tory leadership until the crisis hits, at which point, in desperation, they send for him.

However, as young people sometimes say of pop groups, I prefer some of my noble friend’s earlier work. Given the conversation we have just been having in this debate about the recent reshuffle, it is worth noting that he has written stonking biographies of two previous Tory Foreign Secretaries who spoke from these red Benches; namely, Lord Salisbury and Lord Halifax. Sometimes, my noble friend is portrayed as a TV historian or as not completely academic, and that is monstrously unfair. His books have been translated into 28 languages. They have won 13 literary prizes. Every one of them involves original research from primary sources, including the Churchill book. He was the first historian to get the late Queen to open the royal archives so that we know what her late father, in his dutiful, dim and decent way, thought about the events of that time.

My noble friend did, however, write one slightly more frivolous book. He authored a thriller in 1994 called The Aachen Memorandum. I mention it because I have a feeling that the fictional hero is modelled on someone currently on these Benches—I will leave noble Lords opposite to try to work out which of us. I mention this book because there is something oddly prophetic in it. It is set in the future, looking back to a Brexit referendum—and this is the uncanny thing. My noble friend imagines the in/out referendum having taken place in 2015—let us remember that this book was written in 1994—and records the vote to leave as 51.86%. In reality, it was 51.83%, so he was out by only one year and 0.03%.

I will say one other thing about my noble friend. Remarkably, he is already in Hansard, although this was his maiden speech. He is in Hansard, albeit unnamed, from a debate on the Australia trade deal that took place on 9 January. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, was making a speech in her usual, consistently anti-trade way about how terrible the Australia trade deal was. I quote her:

“Let us imagine that we export cheese to Australia all that distance away, and Australia exports cheese to us. What would be the point of that?”


Then it says, “Noble Lords: Better cheese!”. Then she says:

“I hear calls from the other side of the House saying, ‘Better cheese’”.—[Official Report, 9/1/23; col. 1258.]


Is it not an extraordinary thought that if, in any way, my noble friend had been incapacitated between January and now, he would have gone down as the Member whose sole contribution to the counsels of your Lordships’ Chamber were the two words “Better cheese”? I suggested to him that he should leave it at that and not make a maiden speech. I know that he is a very modest man and was tempted, but he overcame that because he has a great deal to contribute. He is, as Henry Kissinger described him,

“a great historian who is always relevant to contemporary thinking”.

I cannot imagine a better recommendation for a place in your Lordships’ counsels than that. I welcome my noble friend.

I turn to the substance and to another great historian. I think it was Samuel Huntington who said that, although we tend to forget it in the West, the rest of the world does not forget that our values were spread by force of arms rather than force of argument. We can very easily fall into the delusion of thinking that the rest of the world came to liberal democracy because of its obvious and intrinsic superiority—but, as a matter of historical record, that is not how it happened. It turns out that these values of ours—liberty under the law, open societies—have a much shallower hold on large swathes of our planet than we would have thought possible until very recently. We saw it first in the line-up over the Russia-Ukraine conflict. To us, it may have seemed perfectly obvious that a country had been attacked without provocation by a neighbour that had promised to defend it and that a democracy, however imperfect, was invaded by an autocracy. That is not how it looked in a number of other places.

We see that same division, perhaps even more starkly, in the reaction to the crisis in Israel and Gaza. Indeed, in a lot of the global South, people put the two things together and accuse us—by which I mean the West at its widest—of stunning double standards. Your Lordships will have heard this from colleagues in other countries. I certainly have. They will say things such as, “How would you feel if Putin had ordered Ukrainian civilians to clear out of half of Ukraine?”, “How would you feel if Russia had bombed two Polish airports in the way that Israel pre-emptively bombed two Syrian ones?”, or “How would you react if Russia cut off Ukrainian energy?”. Actually, they say, “We know how you reacted to that; you called it a war crime and called for trials”.

We may have what we think are good answers to those things. We might point out that in both cases a fundamentally open and law-based society is at war with a fundamentally terrorist state, a state that has no rule of law and is actuated only by force. We might point out that there is a huge difference between the unprovoked attack on Ukraine and Israel responding to the abominations of 7 October. But from the perspective of the rest of the world, that all looks like western realpolitik dressed up in the language of moralising.

I am afraid that we have been brutally reminded of how short the reach of our values is. We talk about universal rights. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, spoke very movingly of his uncle and his belief that by fighting in 1944 he was making the world safer for democracy. For the next 70 or so years it would have seemed reasonable to assume that had happened. We saw the rule of law and open society spreading, roughly until what the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, described as the significant year of 2011, when that process stalled and began to go into reverse.

We are reminded of Samuel Huntington’s truth that what we call “universal values” in reality became universal values because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples and their allies. Imagine that the Second World War had ended differently. Imagine that the Cold War had ended differently. There would have been nothing universal about them then. That is why it matters that we are still prepared to defend our values with proportionate force—above all, in Ukraine. There is a road to victory in Ukraine. You can imagine the Ukrainians breaking through to the Sea of Azov, kettling the Russian garrison in Crimea and having peace. But if Russia succeeds and can wait this out and maybe get a friendlier regime in Washington DC, the West collectively will have suffered a loss of prestige that makes Suez look like a picnic. In every other continent and archipelago people will recalibrate whom they need to listen to. That noise that noble Lords hear is the melancholy long withdrawing roar of western liberty.