Lord Callanan (Con)

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, to the Dispatch Box and congratulate him on his maiden speech. Almost all of us have made a maiden speech in this House and some of us have also spoken from the Dispatch Box, but few of us have made our maiden speeches at the Dispatch Box. It is a nerve-wracking thing to do and those who have done it will have been impressed by the noble Lord’s coolness and humour—what we old Brussels hands would call his sang-froid. The noble Lord, Lord Vallance, was a reassuring presence on our television screens during the pandemic. He was calm, informed and, not least, neutral and impartial. Of course, he has now given up that neutrality and impartiality, becoming the latest in a long line of public officials to join Labour—what I believe is known in Whitehall as “doing a Sue Gray”. Let me say that over the seven years that I spent in government, covering three departments, I worked with many fantastic officials whose neutrality I never had cause to doubt. I know from talking to many of these officials that many senior civil servants are uneasy, to put it mildly, about how easily some of their ex-colleagues become party political the moment they leave the service—although, in fairness, not Sue Gray, who became party political before she left the Civil Service. I seem to remember the noble Lord, as Chief Scientific Adviser, recommending that Britain restore lockdown measures in December 2021, a call echoed at the time by the Labour Party. Luckily, those calls were ignored and in the event SAGE’s alarmist predictions of up to 6,000 more Covid deaths per day were shown to be utter nonsense. It was a moment that comes very rarely in politics, when two alternative policies can be tested against events. One of them was shown to be nonsense. There will doubtless be times when we revisit these moments across the Dispatch Box. For now, I welcome him and wish him well in the important job that he is undertaking on behalf of the Government.