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Coalition Government

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness for giving us an opportunity to debate these matters. The other place has been despatching to us near-JCB quantities of earthmoving constitutional legislation, which naturally has been absorbing a great deal of the time, attention and nervous energy of your Lordships’ House. Relatively unnoticed among the rumble of these great Bills, however, the Cabinet Office sent us shortly before Christmas 148 pages of an entirely new constitutional document: the draft Cabinet manual, as minted by officials, defined by the Cabinet’s Home Affairs Committee and approved at full Cabinet level by the commission. It is, in my judgment, an artefact of considerable constitutional significance, although it is not, nor is it intended to be, the core of a written constitution. Essentially, it is the Executive’s operating manual, describing those moving parts of the constitution and associated procedures that the Executive, both Ministers and officials, believe impinge currently on their work. To their credit, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary wish to have our views on the Cabinet manual before it hardens into a first edition. As it does not, in my view, embrace certain constitutional questions central to the work of your Lordships’ House, it deserves serious attention, and I know that shortly the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House will give it just that. Before examining some of the detail, I must declare an interest. I, with other outsiders, helped the Cabinet Office a little with chapter 2 of the Cabinet manual, on elections and government formation, particularly its section on the hung Parliament contingency. I warmly welcome its publication, not merely because of the clarity that it adds to the delicate matter of the Sovereign’s remaining personal prerogative of appointing a Prime Minister, but generally as a substantial step towards greater transparency in the engine room of central government. On the appointment of a Prime Minister in hung circumstances, the draft manual refines the earlier version of chapter 2, which was given to the Justice Select Committee in the other place at the end of February 2010 and on which that committee reported before the election. With the experience in mind of the five days in May that led to the coalition’s eventual formation, paragraph 50 of the draft Cabinet manual now makes explicit what was only implicit in the February 2010 version: "““The incumbent Prime Minister is not expected to resign until it is clear that there is someone else who should be asked to form a government because they are better placed to command the confidence of the House of Commons and that information has been communicated to the Sovereign””." The overriding requirement here is that the Monarch is not drawn into the appearance, let alone the reality, of political partisanship, an impulse I profoundly share. The original unrevised draft was of critical use for those of us who sat in television and radio studios, for nigh on the whole five days in May, attempting to impersonate the British constitution and being asked constantly what should or should not be happening in constitutional terms. Chapter 2 of the manual generally will be of central use to all concerned if future general elections produce an inconclusive parliamentary arithmetic. I turn briefly to what is not captured in the 148 pages of the draft manual. There are two important omissions on the national security side: the placing of all the secret agencies on a statutory footing with the Intelligence Services Act 1994, and the associated parliamentary oversight arrangements, which are not covered. Also not covered are the conventions about how and when Parliament has a say in decisions of war and peace. However, the most striking gaps, on the work of your Lordships’ House in particular, are the lack of any interpretation of what constitutes a money Bill in the minds of the Executive and of any description of the current reach and vitality of the Salisbury/Addison convention of 1945. As a still recent arrival in your Lordships’ House, I respectfully suggest that, from what I have observed here so far, both those questions are of real and immediate concern to many of your Lordships. I do not think that we have had an executive view of the condition of Salisbury/Addison since Mr Jack Straw, as Leader of the Commons, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Conventions, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling, which reported in 2006. Both Houses debated that report and it was noted with approval in each case, but the Cunningham report’s recommendation that Salisbury/Addison should be the subject of a resolution in your Lordships’ House, subsequently communicated to the other place and renamed the ““government Bill convention””, was not acted on. Given that, until last May, Salisbury/Addison was never faced by the political ecology of coalition and the question of what trumps which manifestos or coalition agreements, the time is right for a serious re-examination of Salisbury/Addison and its replacement with a Strathclyde/Royall/McNally convention. The draft Cabinet manual lacks poetry. Not one of its phrases is likely to cling to the Velcro of memory. It is a very British document: a bundle of laws, conventions and procedures, just like the constitution itself. It is also, in parts, what these days we would call ““aspiration””, especially its chapter on the indispensability of proper collective Cabinet government. The Civil Service, being almost entirely herbivorous, to a man and woman, in its approach to government, must have purred with pleasure when Ministers endorsed this section. Whitehall’s herbivores never enjoy command premierships, where collective corners are cut. Cabinet government has enjoyed a revival since last May, possibly because coalitions require higher levels of collegiate spirit and practice. As a fully paid up herbivore myself, I can only welcome this recognition by the coalition of the importance of being collective.