James Forsyth James Forsyth

Backbench driver

Nick Herbert has left government to concentrate on politics

The burdens of office can wear a man down. When Nick Herbert was the minister for policing and criminal justice, he looked exhausted; as if he was carrying the troubles of two departments on his shoulders. But having quit the government in the September reshuffle, he is relishing his newfound freedom.

He says he can fit in an interview on Monday morning, between the bishop and his bank manager. Happy to come between God and Mammon, I stroll along to his office, which is still on the House of -Commons’s ministerial corridor. No longer limited by collective responsibility, he has much to say.

Herbert’s first major intervention as an ex-minister will be on the European Court of Human Rights. He is giving a lecture to a think-tank next week in which he will set out why he thinks the current Tory position is inadequate. Creating a British Bill of Rights but still leaving the Strasbourg Court as the ultimate arbiter will change little, he argues. ‘There’ll still be the individual right of appeal to the European court. We have to think more radically about whether it is actually appropriate to have this supra-national court. We’ve created a Supreme Court in this country, why can’t it be supreme?’

What Herbert proposes is leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. He remarks that ‘what people find offensive in this country is the idea of a supra-national court — you can level all sorts of criticisms over the way it can gainsay what our elected parliament has decided.’

When I put to him that Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General and the Court’s greatest Tory defender, will never agree to his solution, Herbert doesn’t demur. He repeats that ‘there needs to be this debate’, which is polite politician’s code for saying the other guy is wrong.

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