Political commentary
The Knights purse their lips
Ferdinand Mount
At its last gasp, this Parliament has suddenly taken it into its head to reform itself. The audacity, the improbability of the exercise is hard to convey. And not the least strange part was that the Commons should devote two whole days to this arcane subject of Parliamentary procedure which brings out some of the great pettifoggers of our time. Bizarrer still the long queue of MPs of all wings and parties endorsing the main recommendation of the Procedure Committee — to set up twelve Select Committees, each to mark a specific Ministry or bunch of Ministries.
But all this could be expected to come to nothing without the support of Mr Enoch Powell and Mr Michael Foot. For as the failure of the Lords Reform Bill showed, between them these two great Parliamentarians have it within their power to obstruct virtually any reform of Parliament. Both have always looked with suspicion and contempt on those who wish to lure MPs away upstairs into these feeble imitations of American congressional committees. No doubt they have nightmares that the members' lobby will suddenly be infested with nubile blondes accosting senior backbenchers: 'Hi, I'm Gaye-Lou Rickenbacker and I've been assigned as your new research aide.' For Mr Powell, all that the self-respecting legislator requires is his intelligence and his pocket Herodotus. For Mr Foot, the case is the same except that for Herodotus you read Hazlitt.
True, Mr Powell was actually a member of the Procedure Committee, but the tenor of his questioning throughout was that little good was to be expected from Select Committees and that these upstart bodies could not pretend to scrutinise, let alone control government expenditure. Mr Foot, giving evidence, was more positive still that good government was best served by the parties fighting it out in the chamber and not by hobnobbing in cosy Select Committees.
But when it came to the debate, there was a miraculous transformation. Late on the second day, Mr Powell rose — not to recant, bless me no — but to concede that, 'on a lowered plane of expectation,' if there were to be more Select Committees, they ought to be rationally organised to cover the whole scope of government — and, what's more, that if this was to be done, it should be done now. And wonder of wonders, a couple of hours later, Mr Foot, without recanting a smidgeon either, agreed. If this House of Commons can only survive a month or two longer, it will vote on a set of reforms. And those reforms will be carried.
The sophisticated view is that these reforms will be allowed to go through only because Ministers and senior civil servants have twigged that Select Committees keep awkward MPs out of mischief and that they 'decrease rather than increase Parliamentary control,' to quote Mr Andrew Alexander. Ministers get away with murder in front of an empty House. Dangerous nonsense like the Scotland Act becomes law because breathless MPs have no idea what they have run two or three flights downstairs to vote for. Seduced by the pleasures of grilling atom scientists about the prospects for enriched uranium, they forget how to ask simple questions on the floor of the House like what will it cost and where's the money coming from? And, in any case, the bipartisan thrust developed in committee dissolves as soon as MPs are in the Chamber under the eyes of their party whips._ But is this really what happens? After all, for many MPs, the choice is between ignorance and abysmal ignorance. The knowledge gained in Select Committees does seem to help MPs to break through the first line of flannel with which the Minister has been issued by his Department and to secure a better understanding of what has gone wrong. Critics claim that the Select Committee's report on the huge losses incurred by the British Steel Corporation fizzled out because neither Sir Charles Villiers nor Mr Eric Varley, the Industry Secretary, were sacked as a result. But that is not what Select Committees are for. The measure of the Committee's success was that, instead of being dismissed as just another thumping loss by a nationalised industry, the affairs of BSC were concentrated upon by Parliament and the press in a much more sustained and informed manner than usual, and the government and the Corporation were compelled to enter rather more seriously upon their plans for streamlining the industry than they might have done otherwise.
But if you need convincing that Select Committees matter, just look at the faces of high officials giving evidence to them: defensive, prickly, frozen with terror. And look at the fight Ministers and senior civil servants put up to stop Dick Crossman setting up his handful of 'Specialist Committees' — the ancestors of the present proposals. Admittedly, much of the fuss was due to Crossman's haphazard, conspiratorial methods. What a glorious old muddler he was. Let us follow the story in the Diaries: November 7th, 1966: 'Suddenly in came Fred Peart furiously angry, threw a newspaper on the table and said, "How on earth did this leak occur?" . . . I was caught red-handed. Fred said he wouldn't do it, he wasn't going to be the test-tube for this experiment, whereupon other Ministers who'd been so keen last week —Tony Crosland at Education and Roy Jenkins from the Home Office —all politely opted out as well. I found myself with no volunteer ready to be the first Minister who would have a Specialist Committee attached to his Department.'
November 16th: 'I had to work hard with Fred. Finally I said to him: "Look, you'll be able to select all the subjects they look at. You'll be able to select your chairman and all the team on the Labour side."
Alas, poor Fred! The Select Committee on Agriculture soon became uppity.
February 13th, 1967: 'It's already clear that the assurances we gave poor old Fred Peart that the Committee would be handpicked and would eat out of his hand are , going to be falsified by facts. I must secretly whisper "a good thing too."' Others were just as angry. George Brown was furious when he heard that the Science and Technology Committee wanted to study Euratom and to visit New York. Even Fred Mulley 'blew his top' (sic) when he heard that the Agriculture Committee proposed to go to Brussels to collect evidence.
At this point a dread footfall was heard in the corridor. Sir Burke Trend, now Lord Trend of Greenwich, for ten years secretary of the Cabinet, took a hand.
March 23rd, 1967: 'I went to see Burke who was panicking about the Specialist Committees. He told me that the whole of Whitehall was alerted and shocked by the activities of the Agriculture Committee and I said I thought it was time Whitehall settled down to the existence of Select Committees. And he said, "Well, we must stop them travelling all over the world.'
The Brussels business rumbled on until November that year and the umbrage and mistrust lingered until the Agriculture Committee was finally abolished a year later. The episode had left a terrible mark on Sir Burke Trend.
September 6th, 1967: 'Back to No. 10 for a meeting with Harold about procedure . . The only point where he jibbed was when I mentioned the Foreign Secretary's personal willingness to consider a Foreign Policy Committee. I saw Burke purse his lips and Harold open his mouth and I realise that it's extremely unlikely that this will ever happen.' But it is going to happen now, with a bit of luck. And the members of this Foreign Policy Committee — as of the eleven other new Select Committees— will not be directly chosen by the whips and they will be able to go to Brussels or anywhere else. No longer will the scope of these committees be patchy, temporary or unsystematic as they have been in the past. Of course, the wiser mandarins pretend to welcome the prospect of continuous and comprehensive interrogation; to do otherwise would be 'illadvised'. But I think it not unlikely all the same that Sir John Hunt, Sir Michael Palliser and Sir Thomas Cobleigh are, albeit in the most well-advised fashion, pursing their lips, just a little.
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