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Ministers Reflect Lord Mcnally

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Ministers Reflect Lord Mcnally Ministers reflect Lord McNally December 2015 2 Lord McNally Biographical details House of Lords 1995-present: Liberal Democrat Member Parliamentary Career 2010-2013: Minister of State for Justice 2010-2013: Deputy Leader of the House of Lords 3 Lord McNally Lord McNally was interviewed by Nicola Hughes and Peter Riddell on 21st July 2015 for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect Project Nicola Hughes (NH): Thinking back to when you first started as a minister, I know you’ve had a long career in politics, but particularly focusing on the 2010 period, what was your experience of coming into government like? Lord McNally: Um, chaotic. As you say, I had been in Whitehall as a special adviser in the Foreign Office and Number 10, and therefore I had, and still have, stories that start ‘When I...’ which caused great amusement to colleagues. But the outcome of the 2010 election, although we’d done more planning I think than any third party had done before about how you handle a hung Parliament, the idea that you’d actually end up in a working coalition was still quite surprising. I had two jobs on offer in 2010: one was the Ministry of Justice, and the other was Deputy Leader of the Lords. And just to give you an idea, after about 48 hours and no clear instructions or guidance from Nick Clegg about what we should be doing in the Lords, I contacted Nick to get a rather surprised, ‘But I thought you handled that all yourself in the Lords?’ I said, ‘Not government ministers. Not government. That’s your thing.’ It was all a bit confusing. I got a call from a young lady called Emma Douglas who said that she was my Private Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, and that there was a car coming – at the time I was in the House of Lords –to pick me up and she would be waiting for me on the steps of the Ministry of Justice. And that’s what I did, because government cars were still being used until September [when] they pulled the government car service from junior ministers. So I had a driver who drove me round to the Ministry of Justice. Emma was standing on the pavement, introduced herself, and in I went. And for the next three and a half years, every waking moment was controlled by the Ministry of Justice, or the House of Lords as a business manager there! Did I know what my title [would be]? Well, I knew I was going to be a Minister of State. Did any title or responsibilities go with the Deputy Leader of the House of Lords? Well that would be up to Tom Strathclyde [former Leader of the Lords] and myself to work out. What committees was I on? What areas of responsibility would I take with the MoJ [Ministry of Justice]? Well that would be the Secretary of State’s decision. Ken Clarke would talk to me about that. I didn’t get the walk up Downing Street, I got a phone call about ten minutes after it had been announced on Sky News! But I got a phone call from the Prime Minister and he said, ‘I’d like you to go to the Ministry of Justice with Ken Clarke’. And I said, ‘Prime Minister, if you lined your Cabinet up and asked me who I’d like to work with, it would be Ken Clarke!’ And indeed, Ken gave me a very interesting portfolio. He made me the minister for the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act; he made me the minister for the Human Rights Act; [and] I got the Crown dependencies, which turned out to be very interesting stuff. I was [also] going to deputise for him in Europe, which was no difficult thing to do either. So in that respect it was remarkably smooth in that it’s a kind of warm embrace where suddenly you’ve got private secretaries who think you’re wonderful and who start producing papers and agendas and making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. Peter Riddell (PR): Just looking back at the time you worked for Jim [James Callaghan] at the Foreign Office and Number 10; how had that influenced your expectations of becoming a minister? LM: Well my experience in the mid-‘70s had left me with a very high opinion of the Civil Service and its importance as a body selected on merit and politically neutral. And so I was not filled with any paranoia – [that] they were somehow going to run me, although they do, I mean there’s no doubt the Civil Service has its opinions and has its policies and sometimes changing those opinions or policies is very difficult. But I never saw the Civil Service as a kind of organised conspiracy against me, and I was genuinely impressed. Now whether this is because again, ministers are slightly cocooned in their private office… But what I found was I was working with some very bright young people, a lot more women, a lot more 4 Ministers reflect ethnic minorities – that was the main change from the ‘70s, that the Civil Service was much more diverse. For example, one of the first officials that came to brief me – it might have been on the Freedom of Information [Act] – was Sharon White [now Chief Executive of Ofcom] who has gone on to greater things since. So I was made to feel very welcome, and as I say, very reassured by what was put at my disposal. NH: And what were your priorities in those first few weeks and months? You mentioned FOI and human rights. LM: I was not on the criminal justice side of the MoJ so I didn’t have anything to do really with that, other than in broader discussions with prisons, or youth justice for that matter, or the courts, or legal aid, they were elsewhere. I did do legal aid later – I’ll show you the scars if you want. But I suppose the first thing was buying in to Ken’s big ideas which were the rehabilitation of offenders – and I think Ken would agree with this – but I think our original idea was to try and manage down the prison population. I think our first aim was about 80,000 – it was then about 85,000. Ken was outraged at the idea that the prison population had doubled since he was last Home Secretary. And the first big piece of legislation was what became the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. And you will not be surprised that the Punishment of Offenders bit was inserted by Number 10, as was the removal of any ambition to actually manage the number of prisoners down. But the main thrust of the Act I thought was small ‘l’ liberal. Where I think I probably missed a trick, because I was new and I didn’t see it in the way that it eventually emerged, was that Ken moved very quickly as an ex-Chancellor to do a deal with the Chancellor on the Spending Review. And he quickly agreed to a 23% cut in the MoJ budget. And I think that was partly because it was his judgement that that was the kind of scale of public expenditure cuts that was needed, and partly because if he did a quick deal with the Chancellor, the Chancellor would see him as an ally and likely to put him on any committee that would be looking at other departments’ expenditure. So it was a little bit of cunning by an old ex-Chancellor; I think the department felt he could have fought harder and saved more. But everybody used to say, ‘Oh, Ken’s really a closet Liberal’. Ken isn’t a closet Liberal, he’s an old-fashioned one-nation Tory, with some very liberal views, small-‘l’ liberal views on issues. I did not see cutting legal aid as being a major moral outrage. Labour had actually had in its manifesto that it was going to cut legal aid further; it had started to cut legal aid. And what we were talking about was over the lifetime of that Parliament and this, to manage legal aid down from about £2.2 billion to about £1.5 billion. And it’s one of the things that… the lesson is the delayed explosion. Because actually when we first announced and we said it on the tin of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishing of Offenders Bill, there was no great outcry from the criminal bar, partly because of course we were doing civil legal aid at the time. What I did find is that barristers don’t give a bugger about anybody except their own fees. So anyway that’s the bitterness coming out! But I should have spotted legal aid as a slow- burner, something that I should have been warned about. Interestingly, Jeremy Hutchinson, who’s now over 100, is a Liberal Democrat peer, and Jeremy was on the Bar Council committee that had sold the idea of legal aid to the Attlee government in ‘48 or ‘47. And he saw me and he said that he was passionate that I shouldn’t… He said that this was the National Health Service for the legal profession. This was our National Health Service, ‘a National Health Service of the law and you shouldn’t let them touch it’. But I didn’t think we were dismantling it.
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