No one seems to have noticed, but next week the House of Lords will be abolished. I don’t mean the entire chamber, but the highest court of appeal in the land. Until now, this body has been a committee of the House of Lords, and has met in committee rooms of the House. When it resumes its work in the autumn, it will be known as the Supreme Court, and will have moved to new premises in the old Middlesex Guildhall across Parliament Square. We are always told by people like Mr New Speaker Bercow how marvellously unstuffy our institutions are these days, but in fact they are characterised by ever greater pomp and expense. Being a mere committee, the Law Lords do not wear any robes when hearing cases. As the Supreme Court, they will wear gowns. The refurbishment of their building has cost £60 million and will cost £12 million a year to run: at present, annual costs are about £2 million.
The change is a big one, symbolically. Until now, the British constitution has run on the opposite principle to the separation of powers. By institutionalising conflict of interest within itself, it has set up conventions of good behaviour. For example, the Lord Chancellor headed the judiciary from the Cabinet. In theory, this made the judges subject to politics. In practice, it meant that the voice of the judiciary at a high level gave politicians pause. Such a way of doing things always displeased anti-historical rationalists, and in 2003, Tony Blair, perhaps wanting to find a way to dress up his sacking of Derry Irvine, suddenly announced that he would abolish the post. He did not consult a single person — the Queen, the Law Lords, the Lord Chief Justice — who knew anything about it. He later discovered that abolition was impossible, but he succeeded in downgrading the post, and in creating the Supreme Court. What will be the effects? One will be to deprive the wider House of Lords of the expertise of the 12 Law Lords, who until now have been life peers but whose successors will not be. Another effect, apparently paradoxical, will be that the Supreme Court will become more political. No longer part of the legislature, the judges will be more likely, supported by European law, to overturn Acts of Parliament. Their political views will therefore become more contentious and so their appointments will be contested on political grounds. This is the American way. It works pretty well there, because it is part of a complete system. Here, all is confusion. If we are to separate powers, how much longer can we continue with the arrangement by which the Prime Minister, the head of the executive, sits in the legislature?
But at least we now have Lord Sugar of Clapton. He will bring much needed ‘real world’ (as seen on TV) experience to the Lords. What is not so clear is why Mr Brown needed to make him a peer. The convention is that ministers must be peers, if they are not MPs, because they must be answerable to parliament. But Lord Sugar will not be a minister: he will be an ‘enterprise czar’. Czars, as history shows, are not answerable to anyone. What is his peerage for?
In an interview in the latest Sunday Times, the Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw suddenly loses his composure. He meets the interviewer on the terrace of the House of Commons because he has not yet got a room in the Cabinet corridor of the House: ‘“I don’t just want a room, I want an office,” he barks at Lenny, his long-suffering special adviser. “I am a Cabinet minister, am I not?”’ Yes, he is, but the Cabinet, being an executive not a legislative body, has never had a formal status in the Commons. Cabinet ministers, including prime ministers — people even more important than Mr Bradshaw, such as Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher — have had rooms there, not ‘offices’. Have we ever had a government so arrogant about its perks, so ignorant of its limits?
Readers may remember (see Notes, 6 June) that the BBC decided, without consulting me, to apologise for something I said on its Question Time programme about the attitudes of some Muslim leaders to attacks on British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Threatened with a libel suit by Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, the BBC said sorry ‘unreservedly’ and gave him £45,000 plus costs. Obviously the BBC has much more expensive legal advice than I do, so I scarcely dare object. It can pay Dr Bari (whom I never mentioned on air) as much licence-fee-payers’ money as it likes, I suppose, just as it pays £18 million to Jonathan Ross. But it cannot be libellous, or lèse majesté, to quote an interview which the BBC itself broadcast with Dr Bari after the fighting in Fallujah in Iraq, on Remembrance Day 2004. At that time, the jihadists had recently released a video called ‘First martyr operations against British forces in Baghdad’. Three times, the interviewer asked Dr Bari whether he supported ‘the fighters who are ranged against British and American troops’. Dr Bari avoided condemning such fighters, and said, ‘…it’s for the people of Iraq to decide’. Some might interpret these words as failing to condemn attacks on British troops. I could not possibly comment.
What good ever came of British fighting in Afghanistan, people ask. By chance, I rediscovered one answer at the weekend. John Watson MD was wounded by a ‘Jezail bullet’ at the battle of Maiwand in 1880, and saved from the ‘murderous Ghazis’ by his orderly. He got enteric fever and returned home, ‘my health irretrievably ruined’. Lonely in London, Dr Watson looked for lodgings to share and was introduced by a friend to ‘a fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital’ called Sherlock Holmes. The rest is history, or rather, fiction.
Last week, we had to put down our dog. Jip (named after Dr Doolittle’s dog, who wears a medal saying ‘The cleverest dog in the world’ for rescuing a man by long-range smelling), was a 12-year-old labrador, and he had been declining because of arthritis. One morning, he walked out in the sun, lay down on the garden path and could not get up. His leg was gone. The vet came, sedated him and then put him down while my wife and children (I was on a train at the time) hugged him. It was as it should be: he was not distressed, he died at home, he had had a good life and delighted his owners. None of us felt we had done the wrong thing by him. But the euthanasia, however right, was terribly upsetting. And this was ‘only’ the life of an animal. How anyone could bear to take a human being on a one-way ticket to a sinister clinic in Switzerland is unimaginable.
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