Retirement of the Clerk of the House

Baroness Harman Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I associate myself with everything you said about Sir John, and also what the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell)—who I welcome to her position—said. I do not intend to repeat everything that everybody has already said, but to warmly and very personally thank Sir John and pay tribute to him.

When somebody has been working in the same field for four decades, they accumulate a huge amount of experience and wisdom, but it can sometimes be the case that they get stuck in the old ways and think things should not change. The great thing about Sir John is that he accumulated all that wisdom and experience, but he was never stuck in the past; he fiercely protected the enduring values of this House, but also showed himself to be an ally of progress and modernisation. I think we all recognise that there is further to go, but he had that remarkable duality of characteristics. He led an absolutely extraordinary team of Clerks; we always need to take the opportunity to say how lucky we know we are to have the Clerks’ advice. It is quite easy to take it for granted, because it is always like that and it has always been like that, but we depend on it so much. I pay tribute to Sir John for his leadership of that Clerks team.

Clearly, Sir John had a brain the size of a planet, but he was never condescending with it: he was always very pleasant, and never pompous. Many people who are that clever cannot resist looking down on those who are not, but he never did that—he was always a pleasure to deal with. I wish him well in his new role at St Catharine’s, and I also hope that he will write his memoirs. As colleagues have said, he has been through an enormous swathe of history from a bird’s-eye point of view, so if he does, I for one will certainly be reading them. Once again, I thank him for his extraordinary service and wish him all the best for the future, and I also wish all the best to his successor.