Anyone who wishes to be reminded of the significance the House of Lords once held in British politics need only visit its leader’s office. The furniture looks like it was pillaged from Versailles and I take it from the deep scarlet of the carpet and curtains that Lord Strathclyde, its then-occupant, uses the same interior designer as the Queen, with whom he is a close confidant.
When Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith tells me that the Tories aren’t posh – “it isn’t true and it never was true” – I raise my eyebrows. I’ve opened our interview, mischievously, with the suggestion that the public won’t elect the sort of rarefied gentry that the Rees-Moggs and, well, Strathclydes of this world come from.
Courtesy of primogeniture however – which our rather peculiar democracy accommodates – Strathclyde isn’t elected. After the death of both his father and grandfather he entered the Lords as a Tory peer at the terrifyingly young age of 25 in 1986. He was a minister in the governments of both Thatcher and Major and, escaping the cull of hereditary peers in 1998, then became Leader of the Opposition in the Lords. He entered David Cameron’s Cabinet as Leader of the Lords in 2010. Many people may not have heard of Strathclyde, but until he resigned on Monday, to be replaced by Lord Hill, he was probably the most powerful unelected politician in the land.
“In the 1980s they needed people in the House of Lords who were under 50 and could string two words together,” Strathclyde notes (he is now over 50 but can still string two words together). The Lords of course remains old and doddery, there being eight times the number of over-90s than there are under-40s. But Strathclyde is a good public face for the institution: in conversation, he has a jocular and somewhat lackadaisical temperament not dissimilar from Ken Clarke’s.
And one gets the impression that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is a healthy disposition to maintain, given that much of the general public doesn’t take the body he leads all that seriously either. But he is serious about the job, both in steering government legislation through the Lords and in serving as a Cabinet minister.
Turkeys famously don’t vote for Christmas, but Strathclyde was – and he insists, still is – in favour of reform. “People think that Lords reform is all about the House of Lords,” he explains. “It isn’t. It’s about the House of Commons.” This is an argument I’ve heard him make before, and it’s well rehearsed. “If you legitimise a second chamber…it will be granted an authority that will second-guess the decisions of the Commons.” Strathclyde thinks that a “more powerful second chamber, able to hold the government more to account, would be a good thing for politics” but he knows that a fat chunk of the Commons – from both sides of the aisle – vehemently disagrees. For them, the bifurcated US Congress serves as a enduring warning that an expansion of the political class is more likely to lead to an expensive and dysfunctional political system, rather than a better one. This is Strathclyde the tactician, voting with the government in the Lords (as he must) but fanning the flames of backbench revolt in the Commons by endorsing their arguments.
Consequently Strathclyde is one of the most liked ministers in the Cabinet. His status as a peer endears him to senior government colleagues. “It’s the great thing that divides me from the rest of the Cabinet,” he replies, when I move the conversation on to talk about David Cameron’s team. “I work more closely with them than any other person possibly can.” Why? “Because I’m not a rival, so sometimes when they are rivalries… they know I’m not going to be Chancellor or Foreign Secretary, even if I wished to be – and that’s quite stabilising. They can talk things over with me knowing that I’m not going to do anything else with it.” He is therefore Cameron’s eunuch, castrated of ambition to higher office, able to steady the boat in situations where his elected colleagues might be unable. It is, as he says, immensely stabilising. Unsurprisingly he doesn’t describe Coalition as especially turbulent. Tensions bubble away, but they rarely surface in the sort of colourful fashion shown on the most recent series of BBC Two’s The Thick Of It. Cameron, he says, “is a natural coalition-builder.” But he’s no less a conservative (big ‘c’ or small) for it. “We shouldn’t confuse being consensual with being wet about things,” he explains, adopting in his language the Thatcherite dichotomy of ‘wets’ (moderates) vs. ‘drys’ (ideo- logues).
He reels off a list of Coalition achievements, though a cynic would suggest that most of them (“dealing with the debt”, “kick-starting the economy”) remain fairly woolly platitudes, yet to be obtained. In any case, why aren’t the electorate thanking you for it? “Ah, it was ever thus” is his jokey reply. He embraces the government’s mid-term unpopularity as a badge of honour, “a mark of what this government wants to achieve, which is that we don’t concentrate on the headlines next week or next month.”
He thinks it’s important for a politician to “have a hinterland”. Those politicians who have done something else “in law” or, he ponders briefly, have been a “car mechanic”, are invariably the best sort. Is this a swipe at Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, who hopped from one political job to another before running the country at startlingly young ages? “No,” he backtracks, before praising the Prime Minister to the heavens for good measure. “Cameron did in fact work in the private sector”.
On Monday Strathclyde resigned as Leader of the Lords. I headed back to the Cherwell offices to redraft this interview, which I had written up several weeks previously. But really I needn’t have: my original closing remarks (below) proved unwittingly prescient. Accuse me of post-hoc revisionism, but I’m pleading innocent:
Having spent over half his life in the Lords, and even longer in politics, it would be surprising if Strathclyde didn’t occasionally suffer bouts of cabin fever. It helps that his office is rather bigger than the literal cabins that many MPs put up with as offices. But occasionally he seems just a bit weary of the whole game. For that brief period when Lords reform was still hot earlier last year, it must have looked like his retirement (redundancy?) from politics was imminent. I don’t get the impression he’d have minded much.
