Leading historian Peter Hennessy | Lord Speaker's Corner

U.K., Oct. 14 -- UK Parliament issued the following news:

Peter Hennessy, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, shares candid insights on power, public service and challenges facing modern politics.

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Lord Speaker: Welcome to the Lord Speakers podcast. The Lord Speaker's Corner is actually in North London because we have the great pleasure of being able to talk to Peter Hennessy, who just before the summer recess retired from the House of Lords. He is, as everyone will know, our leading contemporary historian by a mile. And he's the go-to person if you want to know about how the constitution works, how Whitehall works, what ministers do, and how various prime ministers have set about the task of trying to govern the country. He started off as a journalist and is now a professor of history, and he has been everywhere in broadcasting, expressing his views about the constitution, and was very, very well-loved in the House of Lords. And his leaving the House of Lords was a matter of great regret to everyone, including me. And the reason for that was because he was diagnosed five or six years ago with Parkinson's disease. Peter, when you got that diagnosis, it must have been a terrible shock, and you don't know how quickly it will progress. You know that it can be treated, but you know that it can't be cured. How do you cope with that? Lord Hennessy: I think Michael... Thank you so much- a wildly overgenerous introduction. I think it's an absorbing succession of shock waves. The first one, in a strange way, was a relief because it was the proper diagnosis, we knew what it was. I mean, proper in the sense that they could be pretty well sure what it was. The second shockwave was the cognitive clawback means that you can't think that well, and thoughts don't trigger the next thought in a way they used to. And also it began to affect my eyes, which affected the reading. But I have a wonderful group of friends, local friends who I call my WEA, my personal Workers' Education Association, who come in three days a week and read to me, and we chat about what's going on. One of them is a musicologist and very knowledgeable. We're going through Beethoven's late quartets at the moment. So, I have this WEA that keeps me going because I've had to adjust, which is not easy, to a pretty fast-paced existence in terms of thinking, reading, and writing to being really very slow. And the words, the mot juste has pushed off somewhere. On the bad days, the mot juste is not within reach. So, the difficulty of that is avoiding depression above all, but this is the main depression avoidance device I have. Lord Speaker: And welcome, Enid. Lord Hennessy: And the WEA, plus my dear wife. I'm not badly off, really. In fact, very well off for somebody who is not particularly well. Lord Speaker: Well, thank you for asking us into your home. Lady Hennessy: Oh, pleasure. Lord Speaker: It must have been a great shock for you. And of course, you have the responsibilities, which so many people around the country have, of being a carer. And Peter has talked about the symptoms, but the fear of how quickly this is going to develop, is that in your mind, or do you adopt Churchill's KBO? Lady Hennessy: Yes. Yes. Keep buggering on, and a certain amount of denial. It's quite a slow-developing disease. So, you realise after six months that something Peter could do, he can't do now. But for me, one of the striking aspects of it, and Parkinson's has an enormous number of symptoms, and everybody has different ones, is that he's much more anxious, not about the writing or the giving speeches, but going out on his own. So, we now have to, if Pete wants to go somewhere, we go together. And that's actually very nice. I get invited along, too, so I get to see a lot more things that I didn't before, which is very nice. Lord Speaker: And the rest of the family? I read this fantastic book that you've written together with your daughter, Polly, over the summer, which basically pulls together so many of the things that you've written about. Lady Hennessy: They're enormously supportive. Yes. We've already decided that if we go, one of us goes before the other, then I'm going to one daughter, and Pete is going to the other. Pete prefers Orkney to Sheffield, and I prefer Sheffield to Orkney. Lord Speaker: How can you prefer Sheffield to Orkney? [Laughter] Lady Hennessy: Orkney is lovely for two or three weeks, but I'm not sure I want to live there. But they're both very helpful, especially the elder one who has now not got childcare responsibilities. And so she sometimes takes Pete for a week, and I get a week off. Lord Speaker: Yeah. Peter, Orkney, you love Scotland. Lord Hennessy: I do deeply. Lord Speaker: You almost started campaigning during the referendum on Scottish independence. Lord Hennessy: I came very close, but I thought it would be wrong for a Crossbencher. Lord Speaker: You did write a letter with a group of other historians to The Times. Lord Hennessy: Yes. I can remember the moment I fell in love with Scotland. It was 1957, June, and we crossed the border at Carter Bar late afternoon, came down into Edinburgh as the light had gone and got the last ferry across, saw the bridges, and found a B&B. My dad, my mum, my younger sister, with the camping equipment all around us. And we drove on the road, which was about as wide as this table in those days, round from Dingwall to Kyle. You know all this beautiful area. And we had rented a place in the Sound of Sleat down Armadale way. Is it Armadale? Anyway, the Cuillins in the distance, the water, everything about it I fell for. It's very easy to deride people who've grown up in England and completely romantic about Scotland and the Scots. I am actually. I hope I'm not unrealistic about it, but you can fall in love with a patch of your country. And I've always regarded it as together. I'm a natural unionist. Lord Speaker: Why do you think it's important, the union? Lord Hennessy: Well, so many reasons, but the great utility of it all, the non-romantic bit is if you have six million very quirky, by and large, very well-educated people with special and different traditions in your normal mixture of the rolling conversation about how we govern ourselves and look after ourselves. It's a great, great asset that we're both together. We bring different things to the table. And I must admit that I sometimes wonder, going back a bit, the nature of the Scottish enlightenment, I wish I knew more about the Scottish enlightenment, but the way it panned out in Edinburgh and in Glasgow is very different from down here, and it's still reflected. I mean, you sit in your chamber, my old chamber, our chamber, and the Scottish element, I mean, we would be lost without them, wouldn't we? Lord Speaker: Well, how could I possibly disagree? [Laughter] Lord Hennessy: But we really would be. And there were certain Scots figures in the House of Lords. I mean, James Mackay, we were both devoted to James Mackay. And he was the talisman in our chamber. When on the crossbenches we weren't sure which way to go on a particular issue, James would get up without a note in a very quiet voice to steer a discussion like that. He was through and through Scots, but his influence reached every particle of the kingdom. Lord Hennessy: The fusion of the Scots and the English and the Welsh in the House of Lords is expressed in a different way than it is in the Commons. One of my great regrets about the SNP is that they wouldn't send people to the Lords. They lost out, the chamber lost out, the country lost out. There are some superb SNP Scottish politicians, many of whom you've had bloody fights with over the years, but people respect and admire, who would've been just tailor-made for our House. And because of some narrow partisanship of the worst kind. Lord Speaker : I was hugely amused because you described having spent so much time studying the constitution, and the way in which the government worked and the permanent secretaries. You described, when you went to the House of Lords, as joining your exhibits. Lord Hennessy: That's right. If you're a political historian of post-war Britain, to have lunch with your exhibits and it's a gift from the god of history. Clio was smiling upon me. [Laughter] I worked it out once, Michael. I think there are five political generations warehoused in the House of Lords. Lord Speaker: Go on... Lord Hennessy: And it means that you can catch up with people who didn't perhaps... Even when I was a journalist on the Times and on the Whitehall beat, as it were, I hadn't got to know. And quite a lot of them have become unofficial mentors to me. So, it's a great catch-up history for me. Also, it is the finest form of adult education in the world, the crossbenches in the Lords. But by and large, people know things in there. It was Richard Layard who said to me once, "You'll find that the way we operate is 300 to 400 will come in, but it's not the same all the time. We form coalitions of the willing and the knowledgeable, and that's how it works." So, the knowledge per square inch of the subjects we deal with is very high. And the House of Commons seems unable to elect research scientists or technologists in any number. We're brimming with them. We're dripping with FRSs and medics, and that's where, in our legislative process, we're indispensable in terms of knowledge. But also we're full of people who've cracked difficult professions, who've not been professional politicians, but to bring that knowledge, that feel of how things really operate and the shadowy bits of the future, I think what we are really is a kind of rolling thinktank for Westminster, but for the wider nation to build on the experience of the past and the needs of the present, and to shape the future as best we can. And the House of Lords is the kind of... What do I want to call it? Ballbearing in the middle of all that. Lord Speaker: Yeah. We had a Lord Speaker's lecture recently with General Petraeus, and in his speech he namechecked at least 20 members of the House of Lords whom he had worked with. And these were all former chiefs of defence staff or people whom he encountered when he was in charge of security, and all of that. But there are proposals for people to retire at age 80, and people like you who are leaving the Lords. Do you think that the appointment system and the way people are appointed to the Lords is giving the benefit that occurred from the previous ways in which that was dealt with, which has given us the generation you're describing, the scientists, the people who have great expertise in a whole range of different areas? Lord Hennessy: I don't want to be in any way derogative, the people I've left behind as it were, the people I've enjoyed working with for so long, but there are one or two appointments, and one does wonder what was it for? I'm not going to name any names. Lord Speaker: Sure. But do we need to reform that do you think the way- Lord Hennessy: It's quite hard unless you rejig HOLAC [House of Lords Appointments Commission] and it's hard to do it through legislation. You can't have a clause, 'would you kindly pick people who've read a book.' That would be a clause and a half, wouldn't it? Might rule out some of them. We need to recover the inherent bias we had that was moving us ever more in the direction of meritocracy. Lord Speaker: Yeah. Lord Hennessy: The good meritocracy, not the alarming one that Michael Young used to warn us about. Lord Speaker: Yeah. You talked about that in your latest book with Polly, you quote him. And that set me back a bit because I kind of thought the idea that wherever you've come from, if you work hard and you get on, that's meritocracy. Lord Hennessy: IQ plus effort equals merit. Lord Speaker: Exactly. Which I've always though that's right. But you in your book have made me think because what you say is what has happened is that people have got on, they forget where they've come from. They forget the people and the institutions- Lord Hennessy: What it took to get them there. Lord Speaker: That took them there, yes. And that creates an inequality, or it creates in the more extreme circumstances, people who've made a lot of money who then decide to leave the country because they don't want to pay the tax. Lord Hennessy: And then not the slightest trace of noblesse oblige, some of them. And they flaunt what they think is their special qualities instead of having the necessary humility. One of the many reasons I like the scientists so much is that they tend to concentrate and worry about what they don't know rather than flaunting what they do. And they're so good on select committees, which are the jewel in our crown, really. We can talk a bit more about that in a moment. I'd like that if we could. The committees, I think our committees are terrific. Lord Speaker: Because they're evidence-based. Lord Hennessy: Evidence-based. I knew they were good when I was a journalist and writing about them as a political historian. I hadn't realised quite how good until I sat with them and listened. And the quality of the reports is stunning. Think of the social care report, which you chaired. I think you were the 20th attempt to reform that since 1997, and the marvellous Louise Casey is on the task now. But you had all these old hard bitten permanent secretaries from the Treasury with you. You had people who knew every bit about the social care system, and you produced a consensus, and you were in the chair, a known free market man, but you acknowledged that on this question, something had to be done, and the state was crucial to the solution in a way that wasn't entirely pure Michael Forsyth, many people thought, but I was entirely with you. If only they just grabbed your report and run with it. And there are so many. So many examples of that. Lord Speaker: Yes. We had similar experience on HS2 where we said, "Slow it down. Don't do the link to Euston, otherwise you're going to end up cancelling it," which is what has happened, great tragedy. People do appreciate it, but it doesn't have the impact it should have. And also, we find with timetabling in the House of Commons, we do a huge amount, as you know, of tidying up, sorting out bills, and responding to outside pressure. But I mean, that is a function of the Commons no longer actually doing what the Commons did when I was... So, what can we do about that? Because the executive, of course, like the fact that they can just railroad stuff through. Lord Hennessy: It relies on the sense of decency, which we'll come back to, no doubt, on the part of the prime minister of the day. Because when we had a report, Terry Burns' report. He called upon prime ministers to exercise voluntary restraint in terms of appointment. And I think to her credit, Mrs. May did that for quite a long time. But when we have a prime minister given to incontinence in Boris Johnson, it was as if that never happened. One of my problems, Michael, is I don't want to be unkind to anybody because one of the virtues of retiring is you try to become benign about everything, and don't always succeed. But my greatest shock in recent years as a Brit and working with all the chums down at Westminster is just how vulnerable we were when we had a prime minister in number 10 who either didn't know about the niceties of the British constitution, the careful balances, or couldn't give a fig for them, and disdained what we were there for. And when the number one guarantor of constitutional decency, because that's what a prime minister is, they're the guardian of the ministerial code, cabinet manual, all these things. When they become the rogue figure, when they become the problem, we're in a terribly difficult position. Boris Johnson showed just how vulnerable we are to somebody who should have known better. The really depressing thing is how many people supported him in his own party? That was a shock to me. I acknowledge his brilliance, his wit, his charm, but the British constitution doesn't belong to him. It belongs to all of us. Lord Hennessy: The King owns it and we share it. It is not for him to hijack it. Lord Hennessy: And he'll go down badly in history, as long as I'm writing the history for that very reason. Lord Speaker: The vulnerabilities are still there, and some people argue we should have a written constitution, but as we've discovered in the United States, that isn't always a guarantee against rogue leadership. So, what would you do to try... I mean, it's hard to see how you can embed what you've described as constitutional decency in a world where there is such division, and where social media exaggerates that division and sets the agenda for the day. Lord Hennessy: It is very hard, but the Constitution Committee, I'm glad to say is on the case. I sort of begged them to do that in my valediction. Lord Speaker: You did. Lord Hennessy: To go across the whole of the terrain and look at the bits that are very vulnerable to hijack, because so much would go wrong if we had a government that came in, if it was a Reform government, and the first thing they did was sack the Cabinet Secretary, and got rid of the career officials who came in under the Northcote-Trevelyan merit, not partisanship rubric of selection, and had a go at the judges, too. It would be very easy if they had a big enough majority for them to take away the fundamentals, just take away the rocks, the stones, the stones which for you and me speak, bespeak of a past, which has served us so well as the first act that they were doing week one. And that we could have a major competitor for power now in this country who said what they 'd do. In effect, they would rip up the constitution, and the way we recruit and promote our senior civil servants, and indeed would interfere in the choice of judges, I fear. And so much would go in one... We'd crumble, and it would be very hard to get it back. Lord Speaker: You're talking about Reform, and they said in their conference that they would be prepared to appoint a hundred peers. But you are a great fan, as I am funnily enough, of Clem Attlee and the Attlee government. You would know the number better than I do, but you only had a handful of Labour peers. Lord Hennessy: It was very low. Lord Speaker: And yet he pushed through a pretty radical socialist programme without any difficulty at all. Lord Hennessy: It was a very British solution, the Salisbury-Addison Convention. Lord Speaker: Exactly. Lord Hennessy: Which Lord Salisbury was the Leader of the Opposition in the Lords, and Lord Addison was the Leader of the government in the Lords. And they worked out a convention whereby if you had a major part of your programme, enshrined in the manifesto, the criticism would be there, but in the end you'd let the legislation through and send it back, improved, you hoped. And that worked. The Lib Dems, of course, made a great thing about not signing up to Addison Salisbury. They were the two major parties. We had nothing to do with it because when we had the Clegg reform plan, which didn't appeal to me at all, the Lib Dems were slightly holier-than-thou. You might have signed up to this; we didn't sign up to it. And that was our way through them, which is a very British solution. The British constitution has been so successful because it accrues. It's a historical constitution, and it amends and modifies, but it doesn't usurp, and it doesn't overthrow. And if it's going to do something very serious on the constitution, it tries to do it's very utmost to do it on a consensual basis. And that's how we've proceeded in the past. And if we don't proceed like that in the future, we'll lose a great deal. Lord Speaker: Yes, exactly. Exactly. But how? How can we make that happen? Because most people, if you talk about the constitution, their eyes glaze over, and they don't realise that all these little conventions are our constitution. Lord Hennessy: They all add up. Lord Speaker: I read that you, I think, as a youngster, you wanted to be a monk, but you've ended up as a constitutional expert. Lord Hennessy: Puberty took care of that, Michael. We've not talked about puberty in this conversation. Lord Speaker: And a confidant of the late Queen who agreed with you that the British constitution was very difficult to understand, but you knew what it was. Lord Hennessy: I wasn't a confidant of the late Queen. She came to open our new building at Queen Mary University of London just after I had arrived, our new arts faculty. And she came into my seminar. I felt like one of those taxi drivers. "I had that Queen in the back of my seminar the other day." Anyway, we were looking at questions of procedure for ministers, which John Major, to my great joy, and Robin Butler declassified. As you remember, it was a cabinet paper, so we couldn't read it for 30 years. Only the Brits would classify for 30 years the rule book for ministers. Anyway, she knew we were reading this, and we talked a bit about it. She was very good, as you know, because you've been on trips with her, indicating when it's time to move on to the next piece of the programme. She said, "The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be." And I thought but didn't say, "But you're it, dear! [laughter] If you don't know, how can we expect to"... She was just wonderful. She had this little blue pill box hat on which I so craved. Anyway, I wasn't a confidant of the queen. Her private office wanted a bit of help. I would get on the phone. Lord Speaker: There was always a distance. She always kept a distance. Lord Hennessy: Oh, yeah. Lord Speaker: But you always knew what she was thinking. Lord Hennessy: Yeah. Well, I wasn't particularly good at it, but some people could decode her very well. And she did produce a manifesto, which is left with us, which is her address to the 75th anniversary of the Sandringham WI. Lord Speaker: Oh, yes. Lord Hennessy: Which, again, is a very British way of doing it. Lord Speaker: Can you remember what she said? Lord Hennessy: It was all to do with trying to find common ground and to think the best of people. Lord Speaker: And being kind to each other. Lord Hennessy: And being kind to each other. Lord Speaker: Yes. Yeah. Lord Hennessy: And it was six or seven paragraphs, and it was WI in Sandringham, one January day. Lord Speaker: Yes. Lord Hennessy: And my publishers managed to find a photograph of her taken from the kitchen where the WI meet in Sandringham, with ladies with handbags and the Queen, one of them, very naturally amongst her own. And that's where she produced her manifesto for the constitution and for the nation. Was it three years before she died? Lord Speaker: Yeah. So, if we look at what's happening now, I read in the newspapers that the government is thinking of giving the cabinet secretary powers to direct permanent secretaries in other departments. The cabinet secretary now, compared to the Robin Butlers of my day, is a completely different person. I mean, for me as a minister in the cabinet, Robin Butler was God. I mean, if he said, "You can't do this," you didn't do it because you knew that he was the guardian of our constitutional structure. Lord Hennessy: Robin looked and sounded like a head boy of Harrow, which indeed he was. Lord Speaker: Well, I went to a state school, so I don't know what that means. Lord Hennessy: Same here. I've read about these things. Billy Bunter and so on. Anyway, Robin is a great friend and I'm a huge admirer, but he has an authoritative bearing. He's very charming and warm, but you listen to R. Butler. I'm a friend and admirer of the current cabinet secretary, so I don't want to be unkind to her either. But if I was a permanent secretary, I wouldn't put up with it, nor would my Secretary of State, because George Jones of the LSE, who was a great mentor of mine, always used to point out that the statutes, with the exception of one or two, the Chequers Estate Act, for example, all the statutes prescribe that secretaries of state and departments will do this, that, or the other. And you can't throw that on one side. That's why we have a federal system in all but name in the way we run Whitehall. And it's really pushing it. And it's not good, I don't think, for the cabinet secretary because she's an impressive person. And at the Wednesday morning meetings for the fellow permanent secretaries, she doesn't need some fiat from number 10 saying, "You've got to do what Antonia says." She can persuade people. Lord Speaker: The other thing, the relationship with the civil service, when I was in government, the rule was when you screwed something up, they would rescue you, and when they screwed something up, you would take the blame. And you would never, ever criticise a civil servant in public. Lord Hennessy: That was the deal. Lord Speaker: And that has been broken many, many times, which I think is tragic. And the other thing is, I think you won't hear me often criticising Margaret Thatcher, but when she used to talk about "one of us" in terms of officials, I mean, the way it worked best for ministers was when officials felt free and able to argue and say, "This is not such a good idea, Minister." But if I say this to contemporary ministers, both parties, they say, "Oh, but the civil service has changed since then." I don't think the civil service has changed. I think the way people operate within it. Lord Hennessy: That's right. Yeah. Mrs. T, of course, loved an argument before she got her own way. Lord Speaker: But that's also how she found out what she thought about things. Lord Hennessy: She was so clever at this. I remember it being explained to me because I hadn't noticed that she would... PMQs, Prime Minister's Questions, she would take questions on everything. Jim Callaghan always said, "I refer the honourable woman to my friend the Secretary of State for X or Y." But Mrs. T showed her domination, her dominance, by taking questions on everything. But she then turned it into this great weapon of intrusion because, on a morning before PMQs, her private office was forever ringing up the departments where the question was thought it might emerge on their subject. But that's the way they found out and briefed her on what the department was thinking, and gave her time to think about what they should be thinking about. So, that was very cleverly done, but that extended the power of the prime minister in a perfectly constitutional way. And the weapon that she found for getting into the entrance of departmental policy was a very well-chosen one. And she did it brilliantly. Did it brilliantly. Lord Speaker: But she did have a respect for secretaries of state. She did believe in collective- Lord Hennessy: If they stood up to her. Lord Speaker: Yeah. We've moved from that to under both parties, where you have special advisors who've come straight from university and aren't particularly experienced outside the world of politics, ringing up secretaries of state and telling them what should happen. Lord Hennessy: That's all wrong. Lord Speaker: Well, it completely undermines the authority of the Secretary of State. Lord Hennessy: It was known as the 'Tony Wants Syndrome', where you have some special advisor who knew the square root of bugger all, some would say, ringing up saying "Tony wants..." And they were never sure if Tony did want, or if this was a special advisor wanting. And that was a big change. I mean, Tony Blair had many, many cardinal virtues. Very, very gifted man, but he was tone-deaf on all this. It was all guff. Margaret thought a lot of it was guff, too, but in a different way. And also, self-confident secretaries of state do not use the civil service as their scapegoat. It's a sign of weakness if you scapegoat on the civil service. And the model works best if you have self-confident secretaries of state, self-confident senior civil servants, and SpAds who've done something rather than believe something to come in as auxiliaries. And if you haven't got all of those three working at the same time, the system degrades. Lord Speaker: You have written about almost everything that affects government, but one area where you became very expert was on the nuclear deterrent and defence and the NATO alliance and our relationship with the Americans. The whole NATO thing depends on trust. How do you think this has been affected by the behaviour of Donald Trump, and how far is that trust being damaged in a way which may outlast his term of office, whenever that should be? Lord Hennessy: I remember asking Frank Cooper, who was a wonderful permanent secretary of defence. Tough, spitfire pilot, wouldn't take nonsense from anybody. We had one of our lunches that never took place when I was a journalist. It was one summer. Frank used to delay his taking his holidays to September, and he'd go off with his wife, Peggie, in the caravan to France and disappear for a while. And he had time to spare in August, which I had time to spare in August, too. So, we would have these lunches that never took place. And the children were young and I was worried; I think it was some particularly fraught moment in the Cold War in the early '80s. And I said, "Sometimes I worry, Frank, that it's all going to unravel." "As long as NATO holds, we're all right." And in that sentence, Frank conveyed my complete conviction that if NATO Article V doesn't hold, the mutual assistance guaranteed it was 12 countries, first of all, now it's 28. It's the most successful alliance we've ever had in the world and absolutely vital to our country. And if that goes, everything else is in danger. And President Trump seems to be tone-deaf. In fact, he seems to actively dislike it. And if somebody has got a conviction of that sort, it makes everything else so very difficult. NATO, the treaty of '49, put some security roof over the top of the Marshall Plan and all the social reforms that most of the Western European nations went in for. And it was the last brick in our remaking of our high policy that we associate with Beveridge and the welfare state, really. But Article V and the NATO treaty put the security roof over our heads, and it's indispensable. And every bit of it is relevant, but it does depend in the end on trust. And would they stand with us? We would stand with them always, we thought. And it came up, Michael, oddly enough, in the archive in November '64, when the new Wilson government had to decide whether to carry on with the building of Polaris, which was at a very early stage. And in one of the cabinet papers, I think it may have been one that Denis Healey as Defence Secretary presented, they looked at the contingency of America pulling out of the Polaris Sales Agreement, which Macmillan had concluded with Kennedy. And therefore, the output was that we would need four submarines at the very least to make it work, five preferably. But then, of course, we're completely dependent on the United States for the maintenance of the system. The warheads are ours, but the whole system is an American one with the warheads are ours. We could last for about a year if they let us go, they pulled the plug, which isn't very long. It's not time to lash up enough highly sophisticated equipment to do it. We could probably do something sensible in deterrent terms, useful if we had five years. I'm out of touch with that world now. For a while I was very close to it when I was writing the history with my former research student, James Jinks, called The Silent Deep. I was much more up to speed then than I am now. But thank heavens we didn't get rid of that deterrent, given the state we're in now. I mean, of all the nuclear powers, we've been the most reluctant and neurotic about it. I'm overawed by it. The first time I went into the missile compartment, of the Trident submarine, it's like going into a forest of grey trees. And when you go into the launch room, but of course, our sailors being wonderful people they humanise everything the sailors. They've got coat hangers on the tubes on which they hang their ironing boards. They domesticate this bloody... defiled the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen. They turn it into a little bit of Devonport. And I remember sitting in a dinner when I went over to witness a test launch with the American admiral who was our link person then. And I said how heartwarming it was to see the domestication. He said, "What are you doing with my tubes?" And he wasn't joking either. It was one of those special relationship moments that I shall always savour. Lord Speaker: Yeah. Well, of course, Article V has only been called in anger once, 25 years ago. Lord Hennessy: And rightly to help the Americans. Lord Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Lord Hennessy: But when one sees so many of the pillars on the assumption which has just grown up being questioned by the American president, it's really time to worry. Lord Hennessy: And our Trump card, no pun intended, was always the monarch as it's proving to be at least on occasion with Trump. I was having lunch with a former chief of the SIS who was interested in history, and he said, "Do you know the last weapon we've got, the last throw?" I said, "Tell me." "It's tea with the Queen. They have tea with the Queen. They can't resist her." Lord Speaker: The present King played an absolute binder, did he not? Lord Hennessy: That was worthy of an Oscar. Lord Speaker: Yeah. Lord Hennessy: It was beyond an Oscar. Every word carried power in that speech. It annoyed all the right people. Many of the people it was meant to influence didn't realise what was being done to them. Lord Speaker: So, having been in the House of Lords for more than a decade and having left it and being free to say what you really think about it, what do you think is good about the House of Lords, and what's bad about the House of Lords? And how would you describe how it works? Lord Hennessy: Well, above all, it's high public purpose. It's sustained through thick and thin. The sense of duty, a word which I've always believed in, but some people tend to ridicule these days, is very high per square inch in there, as it is in the Commons, but in a different way. Also, the deployment of knowledge in a non-partisan way, very impressive. But remember, a lot of us are getting out of it now, and we like treats when we can get them. And the definition of what makes the House of Lords run, I borrow from my great and much missed friend, Maurice Peston, Labour Peer. I was coming up the staircase from the cloakroom. I'd been in three weeks, I think, up to the principal floor, and two young naval officers coming in for a cup of coffee to talk about the book I was about to do. One of them said, "What makes the House of Lords run?" I said, "I'm too new. Ask Maurice." And Maurice said without hesitation, "The House of Lords runs on gossip and the exchange of symptoms." How very true. Lord Speaker: Yeah. Well, that's a good phrase, annoying all the right people, spent a career trying to do that. We're running out of time, and I could spend the whole day talking to you about this stuff. Your legacy is this fantastic account of how British government and the British constitution was. Lord Hennessy: You're too kind. Lord Speaker: And you've been awarded, you're a member of the Order of the Garter, which is the highest honour that any monarch can bestow. And it's so well deserved, and we're so proud to have had you in the House of Lords, and so sad to lose you. You are the living embodiment to me of what the House of Lords is all about. And it's so kind of you to give me the opportunity to talk to you in your own words. I can tell probably that your wife is probably like my wife who constantly tells me not to get above yourself, but I'm sure you would agree he has done a remarkable job for our country. Lady Hennessy: Oh, he's done a really good job. Yes. Yes, he has. Lord Speaker: And he's done it so quietly and modestly. Lady Hennessy: Oh, yes. He has done it with charm. Lord Speaker: And humour. Lady Hennessy: Oh, yes. Charm and humour are great weapons. Lord Hennessy: I'm missing everybody already. Lord Speaker: Well, we're missing you. Well, you're always welcome to come back. Lord Hennessy: I shall come and have tea with you all.

In this episode

'The British constitution belongs to all of us’

Lord Hennessy is an expert in the history of government and what he calls the ‘hidden wiring’ of the British constitution. He recently retired from the House of Lords after 16 years as a crossbencher.

In this episode he warns that Britain’s unwritten constitution is vulnerable to political hijack by a government exploiting its conventions. He explains that one of his 'greatest shocks' in recent years was seeing 'just how vulnerable we were when we had a prime minister in Number 10 who either didn't know about the niceties of the British constitution, the careful balances, or couldn't give a fig for them, and disdained what we were there for.’

'But you’re it dear!’

Lord Hennessy also shares the time he was discussing the constitution with Queen Elizabeth II in a seminar he was teaching. When the late Queen remarked ‘The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be,’ Lord Hennessy had to stop himself immediately responding ‘But you’re it dear!’

‘It's an absorbing succession of shock waves’

In an often deeply personal interview, Lord Hennessy also reflects on living with Parkinson’s disease, sharing that the condition comes in ‘shock waves.’ He explains the importance of the support from his wife and friends has helped him adjust from ‘a pretty fast paced existence.’

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Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.