Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

My Lords, again I feel that I am slightly swimming against the tide in opposing this amendment, which seems to me rooted in the outlook that I think of as “good chappery”— I am borrowing the nomenclature of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in introducing it. It is the idea that when you are appointed to a public body, in some presumably painful operation, your opinion glands are cauterised and you suddenly become a wise, disinterested, neutral person who is uniquely capable of raising your eyes above the partisan scrum and descrying the true national interest. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked, “What if the Prime Minister isn’t a good chap or a good chapess?”, the implication being that, if you are appointed to HOLAC, you must by definition have these virtues. But who appoints you to HOLAC? How is it that you suddenly, by virtue of getting there, drop all your assumptions and prejudices and become this kind of idealised platonic guardian? I have to say that it is a doctrine that has debilitated and delegitimised successive Governments, because it has widened the gap between government and governed. I called it “good chappery”, but actually a more accurate word would be oligarchy: it is a way of taking a group of people and putting them in a privileged position. It is an oligarchy based now not on birth so much as on outlook. How many HOLAC nominees, for example, would have voted with the majority in the 2016 referendum, just to take the one thing where we actually have an exact measure of how the country at large felt about one specific issue? The idea that we can, in making these changes to the composition of this House, in effect narrow the way of coming here, put in another filter, strain the nomination through some sort of handkerchief of good chappery, strikes me as utterly inconsistent with the times and almost certainly unacceptable to public opinion. It is also, by the way, very much at odds with the previous amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I was one of the small number who supported it. It is one of those funny things where everyone spoke in favour of it and then everyone voted against it. It was rather like the Holocaust education centre thing: all the speeches were one way; all the votes were the other way.