Robert Buckland

Now I’m a backbencher, I’m free to speak my mind

Politicians are supposed to have a survival instinct. Mine didn’t kick in last week, so I had no idea that my evidence session to a House of Lords committee on Wednesday would be my swan song. I was speaking about the work of the Ministry of Justice, where I had been lord chancellor for two years. The work, I said, is more than a series of desiccated processes. It is, and should always be, rooted in the rule of law, fairness and equality. With that off my chest, I rushed to Prime Minister’s Questions. In the middle of it, I received a text message saying that the Prime Minister wished to see me. By 2 p.m., my time in the cabinet was over and I was leaving government.

In my meeting with the PM, I didn’t follow the example of my predecessor Lord Kilmuir, who when dismissed told Harold Macmillan that a cook wouldn’t be treated in that way. Macmillan replied that it was easier to find lord chancellors than cooks. It might have been true then. It was the pre-Delia age and parliament was full of lawyers. Today, MasterChef and The Great British Bake Off have turned everyone into decent chefs: I’d suggest that cooks might now be easier to find than decent lord chancellors. But for the few of us lawyer-politicians left, there can be no better job than lord high chancellor of Great Britain. To walk in the footsteps of Becket, Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon is an incredible honour. What other title would a person need?

One of my favourite films is In Which We Serve, in which Noël Coward (modelling his ship’s captain role on Mountbatten) says to his crewthat ‘a ship can’t be happy unless she is efficient and she certainly won’t be efficient unless she’s happy’.

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