UK Constitution: Oversight and Responsibility (Report from the Constitution Committee)

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, whose wisdom on many subjects is welcome in this House and I hope may be welcome for much longer.

I was not a member of the Constitution Committee at the time of the writing of this important report, as I am now, but I would have endorsed its conclusions with pleasure—with one exception, and it is the same exception mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. I think that responsibility has to rest with the Prime Minister but that it is also the duty of all Ministers—more widely than simply the law officers or others—in charge of departments to ensure that they act constitutionally. I will say a little more about that in a moment.

I have spoken previously in this House of my admiration for the behaviour of the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, then Cabinet Secretary, and Helen MacNamara as Deputy Cabinet Secretary, on the occasion described in paragraph 17 of the report. Their behaviour in defence of the constitutional principle that the Government must obey the law was a fine example of the system working even at a moment of great stress, and when advocacy of potentially unconstitutional behaviour apparently emanated from the Prime Minister and those around him.

In the report, it is clear and—in my experience—accurate that attention is focused on the responsibility of the Cabinet Secretary and his or her vital role. I would add only that it is my belief, having observed various models in action, that it is best if the Cabinet Secretary is also head of the Civil Service: he or she then speaks not only for themselves but as the voice of the Civil Service as a profession.

There is one matter which leaves a residual anxiety from the famous story dealt with in paragraph 17. Helen MacNamara is alleged by various memoir writers to have stood her ground by saying to a political adviser, “We do not work for you. We work for the Queen”. That is exactly what I would have said in her place, if I had been brave enough. Of course, under our constitution, the monarch only acts on the advice of the Prime Minister, so the standing ground becomes a little shaky. It may need to be made clearer in law that a civil servant may refuse an illegal or unconstitutional order and that if the crisis persists, some procedure akin to the accounting officer’s report to the Public Accounts Committee should be available to put the dispute before Parliament.

My own belief is that the relationship between the Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary should be replicated in every department by means of an exactly parallel relationship between the Permanent Secretary and the departmental Secretary of State. The Permanent Secretary should have the right to challenge his or her Secretary of State on what is perceived as an unconstitutional action. In cases of dispute, the matter would obviously be elevated to the Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary to judge.

My final point takes me into very dangerous territory into which experts in the political trivia of the past will remember I once before stumbled, to the delight of the media. All action in politics is covered by ordinary morality. To my mind, there is no such thing as a separate ethical realm of “reason of state”. Any constitution depends on those working within it acting morally, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, said eloquently in his introductory speech. The dilemmas we find when moral imperatives clash with each other exist just as much in politics as in ordinary life. Is there always a categorial imperative in ordinary life to tell the truth, for example? I believe not; sometimes it is right not to tell the homicidal maniac that you know where the axe is hidden.

In this country we are extremely proud of our capacity to deceive our enemies in wartime. Massive and successful strategies were deployed to mislead the Germans as to where and when the D-Day landings were coming. No one doubts that those lies were necessary and admirable. On the other hand, truth-telling to Parliament is a constitutional principle in the United Kingdom, and rightly so. Deliberate deception of either House is a resigning matter: without true facts laid before them, proper constitutional democratic debate cannot take place. However, there are difficulties about constant candour in public, as in private. Well-established conventions allow Ministers to refuse to answer questions on, for example, secret security matters, but what if a clever questioner traps you on a matter when telling the truth is impossible? I irritated a former Prime Minister—whom I greatly admired—because I said long ago that of course he could not give a candid answer when asked whether he was contemplating devaluing the pound. He thought I was saying that he was dishonest, which was the last thing I intended. But he could not fulfil his duty as Chancellor of Exchequer at the same time as properly telling the whole truth on that matter.

But 99% of the time, my friend Peter Oborne is right to deprecate what he sees as a radical increase in political lying. Telling the truth is a vital condition for democratic debate. How on earth are we to decide when a lack of candour—or even a lie—is justified? Some good steps have been taken since the date of my media fracas; for example, the establishment of the Office for National Statistics, which calls out misuse of statistics by Ministers or anybody else. But what about straightforward factual lies? In retrospect, the lies told at the heart of government at the time of Suez surely crossed the line—I take that example because all the protagonists are safely dead. There have been other incidents since, the protagonists of which are not safely dead, so I will not specify them now, but others can do so to their own satisfaction.

I will make one modest suggestion that might help in certain situations—though not all—the seeds of which are already sown. I believe that in those past cases, it was a failing of the very top members of the Civil Service not to protest on ethical grounds. I also think that in a democracy, the elected Ministers, if backed by the Prime Minister, should prevail and answer in the end to the political process of Parliament and the electorate. However, the constitution would be well served if the Cabinet Secretary or Permanent Secretary had the right to record their objection publicly if they felt they had to surrender their professional ethics to the ultimate power of democracy, just as they do to the PAC when overruled on value for money. Like all good deterrents, such a procedure would most likely never be required. However, this, or something like it, more formal than we have now, would strengthen one vital part of the constitutional balance so well described in the report under debate.