Speeches by Norman.

“Broadly, yes. It could be improved. This Committee could make recommendations that would improve it, but with those recommendations, it is a functional and important part of our constitutional machinery. I do not accept the point made by the Leader that, for example, the Government are under any obligation of balance, …”

“Thank you Chair, and thank you colleagues for inviting me to this Committee. Having been a member of the Treasury Committee for five years and now the Defence Committee for a couple of years, and having chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, as well as appearing in front of Committees as a Minister, I am extre…”

“Some of that comes down to the individuals concerned.”

“The point I made earlier about the civil service having broader shoulders does specifically bear on the status of the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary, historically, was a very weighty figure who might privately have had precisely this kind of role. Burke Trend, Robin Butler, Robert Armstrong—these were, in man…”

“I think he would need to make a response. I am just giving you an off-the-cuff view, but I had not considered this being a request and an answer which would be published. It could be that. I slightly disagree with that. I think that a lot of our constitution works best when it is uncodified, but the potential for publi…”

“I will look at the transcript and see if it makes any sense, and perhaps I will come back to you.”

“Perhaps I could say one thing. You will not understand how grateful I am to this Committee for holding this inquiry and for asking me to talk about this, because these are issues that never get debated and discussed in any structured or systematic way. It is very hard to exercise a decent understanding of the practical…”

“One final thing!”

“I hate giving answers that are in any sense predictable so, although I am going to say yes, I am going to elaborate a little bit on this. In 2015, I approached the Clerks and asked if it might be of interest for them to supply someone who had a lot of experience in the Chamber, because I thought it would be helpful to …”

“Oh, I think they absolutely should have been done. I do not think this issue was given anything like enough care, and I do not think Parliament in general was given enough attention. Let me give you an example: it was open to Governments after 2015, up until 2024, to pass sensible reforms to the House of Lords. They fa…”

“That is such a good question—thank you for asking it. I wish the Modernisation Committee would take up that question, because there is something very odd about talking about modernisation and not considering the core functions—which the Committee is not really doing at the moment—of holding Ministers to account, passin…”

“I am a bit leery about automated or semi-automatic processes, but I am very sympathetic to a general expectation. Actually, I think the ministerial code provides that general expectation; it could be potentially elaborated through this Committee and through a statement by the Leader of the House. Measures could be take…”

“I am a Conservative; I would never say never about anything. There may be contexts in which that would be appropriate. Of course, there can be statements that do not have a lot of public profile but are nevertheless immensely important. You could imagine that there. The key thing is whether the Minister is obviously de…”

“I think that is perfectly appropriate in the case of Opposition time, because otherwise it feels like you are oppressing Opposition parties, whoever those Opposition parties may be. If the Government worried that they were getting a bit too big for their boots with statements, they could provide scope to protect genera…”

“Thank you very much indeed, Mr Baker—Richard. I said at the beginning of my evidence that I thought the Leader’s response to the Committee had been pretty woeful and there had been quite a lot of equivocations. One of them was the suggestion that somehow the failure to do what the Committee was suggesting now was offse…”

“I actually did not use the word “blood”—advisedly, because I think that is quite an emotive word—but the idea that there is valuable work to be done in building cross-party consensus on these issues is immensely valuable and immensely important. The way to do it, I would suggest, is to do it now, and for all the partie…”

“I think that is a very interesting idea. Our constitution gives a special privilege to the official Opposition. At moments such as now, where you have a third party that is not a million miles away from having as many seats, it can feel like a relic of a two-party system that is somehow out of date. But it has a consti…”

“Well, that is true. Also, let’s not forget that when you have a Prime Minister who has himself sat around the table of the permanent secretaries, which this one has, they have seen how a lot of this mystery actually works, and that, to some extent, takes away the authority of the Cabinet Secretary. You really want a bi…”

“Will the Leader of the House give the House the forthcoming business?”

“I doubt if the Leader of the House has ever given a more popular statement to the House of Commons. More seriously, this is a welcome development as it will give guidance to colleagues and their families, and I am sure it will be widely welcomed across the House, so I thank her for that. I understand that Robert Gibbs,…”