Uncorrected oral evidence: The UK’s constitutional safeguards
Oral evidence, 28 October 2026.
The Chair
Welcome back to this meeting of the House of Lords Constitution Committee. We are continuing to take evidence for the committee’s inquiry into the UK’s constitutional safeguards. We are now joined by Danny Kruger MP. Mr Kruger, welcome to the committee. You are very welcome. Thank you for taking the time and trouble to be here. I will start with a very broad question. Answer what you feel is appropriate given the context of what you have fairly recently written about the constitution and some of the issues and problems that you see. What would you identify as the key constitutional safeguards, including the key postholders and institutions, within the UK system of governance? What do you perceive to be the chief weaknesses in the way that we are governed? How should these be addressed?
Danny Kruger
Thank you, Lord Strathclyde. Let me run through what I think of as the principal safeguards, and I will try to comment on how strong I think they are at the moment. I can also give you what are not the safeguards, if you like, but that might be a subsequent question. The immediate, most practical safeguard is a very informal one, and that is the process by which decisions are made in government. The friction induced around government decision-making can be frustrating, cause delay, watering down and some policy confusion. The combination of advice from officials, government lawyers, the Government Legal Service, the Attorney-General, the Parliamentary Business Liaison Committee, Cabinet committees and the rest of it, is an inherent informal safeguard that is very important, and probably the most practical one in terms of maintaining good government. Clearly, that can have problems as well. The value of advice is determined by the people who give it, and we could look at that. That is important. Secondly, and more formally, the most obvious constitutional safeguard we have in our country is the legislature, the Houses of Commons and Lords, which ultimately take the decision whether to recommend to the Crown if a Bill is passed. The oversight of the Budget is also important. Here, we see significant weakness potentially. Your last witnesses made the point about delegated legislation, Henry VIII powers and the growth of those. I want to pay tribute to the DL Committee of the House of Lords that has commented repeatedly in recent years about the growth of this use of secondary legislation. I also happen to think that some of the reforms introduced 20 years ago in the Blair era—the Robin Cook reforms—to the way the House of Commons is managed had the effect of undermining the important constitutional safeguard that the Commons represents: giving more power to the Government to timetable legislation. We saw, as mentioned by the previous witnesses, what happened in Canada. What happened to those truckers in Canada was an important moment for the West, the way the Executive stepped in to override what was a legitimate democratic protest. That is not our country, so let me not make too much of that. There were problems in the way the United Kingdom also acted in that crisis that suggested that Parliament did not have the strength that it thought it had. The fundamental constitutional safeguard that we have that is relevant to Parliament—it is the main one—is the fact that the Prime Minister depends on the majority of MPs to sustain his or her position, and ultimately MPs can decide who governs our country. Let us not lose sight of the principal, primary and foundational safeguard that that represents. The other one is the courts. Let us remember that the safeguard represented by the courts is rightly against the abuse of executive power when the Government break their own laws or break laws passed by Parliament. We get into trouble when the courts start to assume the responsibility of second-guessing or overinterpreting legislation, because the courts should not have that function. This is where judicial review is greatly empowered by international law and the creeping doctrine that international law has equivalent or even superior status to domestic legislation, which is obviously not constitutional. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly conventional. I worry about the courts, which should be a check on government, becoming a check on Parliament, which is not what they should be. Lastly, the ultimate constitutional safeguard is the role of the sovereign. I was struck by Lord Young’s evidence to you in which he made the very valid point that the principal power that the sovereign has is not to be embarrassed. My experience of politics—and you will all have had your own—is that Prime Ministers are genuinely reluctant to embarrass the monarch, and it was certainly a consideration that I was very alive to when I was in No. 10 in 2019 and there was the whole question around prorogation and the Brexit conflict that we were in. There was a real concern not to be seen to be dragging the monarch into political controversy. That feels to me like a very British, very powerful safeguard that we have. We all pray that the sovereign will never have to use his ultimate powers, but the threat of embarrassment is an important safeguard.
The Chair
Thank you very much. That is an extremely useful reply.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie
Good morning, Danny. Turning to a specific area that you addressed in your excellent article “Fixing the Centre”, which you published earlier this year, you said that the new Cabinet Secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, has “far-reaching ‘objectives’ for herself—in which she appointed herself ‘steward for the democratic system of government and guardian of the constitution’”. Was she wrong to do so?
Danny Kruger
Very much so. I take my hat off to the Cabinet Secretary. Maybe she thought she was just stating the obvious. To my knowledge, that is the first time a Cabinet Secretary, or any civil servant, has publicly stated that the role of the Cabinet Secretary and of the Civil Service more broadly is to steward our democracy and to be the safeguard of the constitution. My concern about that is not just that it is grandiose but that it might well reflect the reality as it currently operates, whereby the Cabinet Secretary has, I think, far too much power. That power is currently informal, and it is a consequence of the growth of the state more broadly, over which the Cabinet Secretary effectively and operationally presides over half a million people working for the Civil Service. It also reflects a doctrine that has developed in our time over the last 20 or 30 years by which it is now assumed that the Civil Service has an independent existence from the Government of the day, which is in direct contravention of the famous Armstrong memorandum, which I regard as the crispest, most accurate statement of the proper constitutional position of the Civil Service. Armstrong said that the Civil Service has no independent personality or constitutional position independent of the Government of the day. In our time, and particularly since the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, the Civil Service now operates as a quasi-independent body of its own. We could explore the reasons for what Dame Antonia is doing. She has legitimate excuses for it, namely the dysfunctions of politics. Ultimately, politicians are to blame for the problems that we are in. That is my point; they should be. The Cabinet Secretary has stepped into a vacuum or the turbulence caused by bad politics. What she seems to be doing, with the support first of Keir Starmer and now of Andy Burnham, is moving towards legislating for an independent Civil Service—not an impartial one, which is of course what we absolutely need; I will come on to the politicisation of the Civil Service, if you like. The principle is that the Civil Service has an independent existence, and that she herself will have powers that have not traditionally been accorded to her role, including that aspiration to be able to give direct orders or instructions to Permanent Secretaries in how they run their departments. We will see if that comes to pass, but that has been floated as a proposal. As I say, the review that she is doing has clearly been framed with a view to legislating for further entrenchment of the independence of the Civil Service. That is a very worrying step, and one that is essentially anti-constitutional.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie
Do you advocate that that independence would be better replaced by an open political appointment that is obviously political?
Danny Kruger
We need to maintain impartiality in the principle of public service. There is a distinction between serving a political party or politician, and serving the Government. We need to make real and more concrete—well, actually make practically possible—the principle, which is already implicit in the system, that Ministers can appoint the people who will advise them, and to do that more openly and with a greater focus on the abilities of people coming in, not with political bias but certainly with policy alignment with what the Government want to do. We think—when I say “we”, I am speaking for Reform UK now—that the Government of whichever party should be able to appoint senior civil servants who share their views, who support the policies, who will implement them willingly and eagerly, and do so on the basis of genuine domain expertise. That is the other great problem that we have with our Civil Service: the generalist Civil Service has senior people running large functions of government without genuine understanding or knowledge of the domain for which they are responsible. Domain expertise and policy alignment feel like appropriate qualifications for a senior civil servant.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie
How can you have policy alignment in a political way at the same time as having impartiality? That is a genuine question, to which I do not know the answer.
Danny Kruger
In the same way, Baroness Laing, as you did as a Minister, and as Ministers today are required to do, which is that they are there to serve the public. They have their own political views, and they openly proclaim what they want to do and why, but they serve the public. I am not suggesting that we should have politicians as civil servants, but the distinction between being a politician and being a public servant is one that we all have to manage. There is a way for public servants to manage that, and for civil servants to manage that. In our world, if we were to win and introduce the changes that we want, we would require civil servant appointees, people who come in as officials, to conform to all the expectations of impartiality in public service that civil servants apply now. We might want to change the Civil Service Code and so on, but the essential principles are the right ones. What we want to see, though, is greater ease of appointment. This is something that every other country does, which is that an incoming Government will bring in a large number of policy experts, politically aligned people, who will help to run the departments that they oversee. We do not think we are doing anything particularly radical here. We want to improve the quality of the Civil Service. To come out with the central diagnosis here, we do not accept that the Civil Service is genuinely impartial now. It is obvious from surveys and very obvious from everybody who has worked in government that the overwhelming consensus in the senior Civil Service is that it is on the progressive left of politics. There are very decent, capable people doing their best for whichever Government. I am not suggesting that many civil servants act to undermine a Government of the right. But it is not the case that civil servants are politically neutral; nor could it be or should it be. Thinking about Northcote-Trevelyan all those years ago, which was an attempt to bring merit into the Civil Service and break the cosy nepotism of the aristocratic model, it was assumed that people who would serve the state would be politically impartial, and maybe that was possible then. Let us not go into the history. I do not think that is the case now. We need to recognise the fact that people who advise Ministers and execute their decisions in the Civil Service will have political opinions of their own. We want people who are aligned with us, and we would expect a subsequent Government to bring in their people in the same way.
Lord Bichard
I am slightly confused from that contribution. I absolutely agree with you that the Civil Service should not be an independent safeguard of the constitution. I believe, and I think you do, that the Cabinet Secretary should confine her attention to protecting ethics, values and behaviour in the Civil Service, which is different from having a separate, independent role in defending the constitution against the views of her political leaders. I agree with that. I will try to bring this down to a very practical point. I find it difficult to see how you can have an impartial Civil Service if the ultimate power of appointment is with the political leadership. I am not convinced by your suggestion that the political leader can appoint someone, and that person then will be advised and told that they have to behave impartially. I was a civil servant. I would have found that quite a difficult task, knowing that my political leader had the ultimate say on whether I stayed or went.
Danny Kruger
You have to be accountable to somebody. My concern is that, if you are not properly accountable to your political leader, you will be accountable to somebody else in the system who might well have different political views. You have put your finger on the problem: senior officials in departments do not regard their Secretary of State as their boss. For me, that is a foundational problem. They should be accountable to their departmental chief, and that chief is the elected politician, the Minister appointed by the PM. I recognise the tension that is always going to be there in this model, whereby they are there to serve the public, not the political party of the Government. That is the importance of a Civil Service Code, proper accountability, standards and culture, to ensure that they act in that way. Just as politicians are required to act in the public interest, not in party interest, while being both a political person and a public servant, we can make that expectation of officials as well.
Lord Bichard
Could not most of the things that I think you want—and most of them I agree with—be achieved without stepping over this line of losing impartiality? That is what you lose if you have political appointments. I totally agree that the boss is the Secretary of State. I would not have survived if I had not seen that and worked with it. I agree with that. Most of the other things that you are complaining about are a question that should be resolved by better political leadership and better management and leadership within the Civil Service. To step over that line into what many people would see as a partial Civil Service seems to be an unnecessary risk and a constitutional risk that is not worth going for.
Danny Kruger
Thank you, Lord Bichard. We have already stepped over that line because it is already possible for Ministers and the Prime Minister to make political appointments into the system. Many people come from the private sector and work in government, and that is all that we are proposing. By the way, we have not discussed special advisers. I am not proposing to turn spads into officials. We still have a role for purely political people working in government. I want us to ensure that officials themselves are not political in the sense of pursuing the political advantage of their party or even of their boss, but that they are aligned and expert. We should be able to take people from the energy sector and bring them into government to ask them to lead big parts of the energy policy area, for instance. My point is that we have crossed that line already. In fact, we now have open appointment recruitment by default. A bit of a sleight of hand is going on, because it is just a means by which they can continue to appoint the people they want. The principle of external appointment in the Civil Service was already established. We just want to do more of it. You might well be right that we do not need to go all the way. Nobody is suggesting, on our side anyway, that there is some sort of total blood transfusion of the senior Civil Service, but we want the power to make the changes that are needed. The private office is a good example. I do not know what your view is there and your experience, but certainly it is something that I understand to be a real issue for Ministers. They do not control their own diary, access to themselves and what goes into their box in a way that they would want to. Why should they have to take, as a private office and the people most directly working with them, whoever the Perm Sec suggests?
Lord Bichard
You do not have to change the power of appointment of a private office to deal with the problem that you have just identified. If the private office of my Secretary of State had done that, I would have got rid of them before the Secretary of State asked me to get rid of them. All I am saying is that I would say you could have more spads, not less.
Danny Kruger
Me, too.
Lord Bichard
You can resolve the problems that you set out in “Storm and Sunshine” without getting involved in or being accused of taking away the impartiality of the Civil Service: better and stronger political leadership, better management and leadership in the Civil Service, and more spads. Do not get involved in political appointments of the most senior people in the department. That takes you into territory that you do not need to get into. I cannot understand this.
Danny Kruger
Thank you and I hear you when you say that you agree with what we are doing. This is not really aimed at you. The advice or the recommendations that you are giving is the standard advice for the senior Civil Service, which is to say to an incoming Government, “Don’t worry, Minister or Prime Minister, you’ve got a great set of plans here. You can trust us. We’ll deliver it for you. Certainly, don’t start moving around constitutional machinery or mucking around with the rules. We’ll deliver for you. We’re the Civil Service here for you now”. The challenge that we have, as I say, is that we have a Civil Service that is certainly not aligned to a Reform Government. We detect publicly and through lots of private contacts that there is great concern in Whitehall about what we might do, partly because we have been telling them all what we are going to do, and, more broadly, major policy disagreements with us. We cannot deliver the plans that we have with the Civil Service that we are going to inherit. We have to make changes. It might be that you are right and that the number of personnel who will need to change will be limited. It will be more limited if everybody in the senior Civil Service understands that their job is on the line if they do not deliver for the Government. I hope that you are right and that the number of people who will need to go will be limited, but I want us to have the power to appoint. As I keep coming back to, it is not really about politics; it is about expertise and about people with a genuine understanding of the sectors that they are going to be responsible for, rather than relying on the closed shop of generalist civil servants.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen
It is fascinating. I was a Secretary of State for eight years. I found that the party-political advice came obviously from my special advisers, and an extension of that would not be a problem. What I am troubled about, though, is how far this idea of appointing Permanent Secretaries downwards goes. You mentioned en passant a private office or even a diary secretary. A diary secretary has to be efficient, but a diary secretary does not have to be political in any sense.
Danny Kruger
No.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen
How far down the chain of command do you go to ensure that public appointments would be in the form that you have just described? Obviously, it is the Permanent Secretary, but is it the Under-Secretary, the assistant Under-Secretary, the directors of departments, the principal private secretary and so on? Is it everybody who is formally classified as senior Civil Service, or is it just the very top in these circumstances?
Danny Kruger
We want to make it easier to recruit into the entire senior Civil Service. We have no intention of replacing—and it would be mad to suggest that we are going to replace—everybody at the top of a department, but we need to have the ability to do so. We need to have the Secretaries of State genuinely in charge of the staff in their departments. Talking about private office, I just mentioned it because it is an important example of where at the moment Secretaries of State or Ministers of State will have to fight quite hard to get the team that they want right next to them in their outer office, and that feels wrong. They should be able to appoint who they want, and that includes bringing in people from outside who have worked with them before. You are absolutely right that, of course, they are not there to do a political job, which is why it is important to maintain the Civil Service Code and to emphasise that they are there to serve the public. But they are appointed and they serve at the pleasure of the boss. It is an interesting feature of recent years that officials in private offices have become more and more senior. You now have very well-paid deputy directors and so on serving in those roles. It might well be that we need to go into quite junior ranks to ensure that the Secretaries of State can have the private offices that they want. The main purpose of the reforms that we are proposing is not just to give the Secretary of State the administrative support that they need; it is to ensure that we can have genuine expertise at senior level. I would expect us to want to make a significant number of changes at Perm Sec level, and likewise at DG and director level. The proof will be in the pudding. To what extent Ministers get the service and the support that they need will determine the extent to which there needs to be change, but it is important that civil servants know that they are on the hook for delivery. I want to quickly take a moment to emphasise that we are very much in support of the Civil Service. We have done a lot of surveys and had a lot of conversations with former and serving civil servants who complain about the deep demoralisation that exists in Whitehall. It is a very depressing place to work. That is because of all the problems that we are discussing here: the growth in numbers, the bureaucratic process, the extreme hierarchies and the inability to get anything done. We want a much smaller, much leaner Civil Service in which people are genuinely there serving the public, they have genuine expertise, and people do not necessarily stay in a job for life but come and go in and out of Whitehall. That is an important principle that we do not do enough of in this country. We want to have a Civil Service that we can be proud of. I am very supportive of and grateful to people who want to serve their country in this impartial way. There will be brilliant people in the Civil Service now, probably more in the junior ranks than at the very top. We want to support and encourage them. We hope that our plans will make them want to stay. At the moment, you have so many people who are getting out of Whitehall as fast as they can. They join hopefully. I have colleagues working for me now, ex-civil servants, who were on the fast track, on the way up, and thought, “This is too depressing”, and they have come to work for us because they want to change the system.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill
As Lord Bichard said, there is a great deal here with which I find myself in agreement, particularly the last point. I have personal experience of good, young people leaving the Civil Service because they are given nothing to do at all. The thing that strikes me—it is perhaps a benefit or a disbenefit of being completely out of date—is that none of these problems existed when I was a Minister. A radical Government were elected in 1979. In relation to trade union reform and to economic policy, the civil servants in their own homes probably disagreed with all of it, but they did it. It is an abdication by politicians that has allowed the feebleness to creep in, is it not? If there was strong political leadership—perhaps this is what Lord Bichard is slightly implying—some of these problems would go away. I was in charge of reintroducing a policy now regarded with general execration by everybody, the poll tax, which we put before the electorate. We had Green Papers and White Papers, and it was passed into law. Most civil servants working loyally—I had a special unit to do it—probably thought it was wrong, but they did it, and they tried to make it work. The Treasury then sabotaged it, but that was a different matter; that was the Minister, not the civil servants. A lot of what you describe of the demoralisation, the lack of momentum and the growth of the wrong bits is real. I do not know how the Cabinet Office has grown this big. It is because there has not been tough political leadership. That is my first question. I want you to comment on that a bit. If there was tougher political leadership, I think a lot of the problems would go. I also think your point about the House of Commons timetabling everything is something that slipped past all the journalists and everybody else. It is far more important than people understand. I want to ask one other thing that scared me not in what you wrote but in what your leader said, but you are the boss of policy. He made some threatening noises about judicial independence in his speech, and that worried me: “We will do whatever it takes. We perhaps have to consider how judicial appointments work in the future”. I do not think it was for nothing that those two professors from whom we have just heard, both of them at different times, mentioned judicial independence as one of the real safeguards for democracy. You said it in your opening remarks. Those are two questions in very different directions, I am afraid.
Danny Kruger
Thank you, Lord Waldegrave. You are right: you being out of date is a great strength because you remind us of a time when a Government could get their will through, but a lot has changed since 1997. The principal changes have been the growth of—we will come on to the judiciary in a second—a judicial model in which the common law tradition of the primacy of statute and case law has been subsumed by what I call creeping monism whereby international law is seen to have effect in domestic statute. We now have the means by which it is very much easier for a lawyer to put before a judge a case for overturning a government decision because of the woolliness of the law and the abstractions of the international law code. Where, before, we had the powers of Parliament to have their effect and judges scrupulously respected that and were very respectful of precedent, we now have a much broader legal arrangement. Judicial review has grown. We have also seen, as I have said, the growth of the notion that the Civil Service has an independent role. Between Robert Armstrong in 1985 and the CRaG Act 2010, something changed in the political culture. That was due to politicians. I do not think it was Tony Blair’s particular will, but that is arguable. People argue he was not interested in all this constitutional stuff; it just happened. It was Charlie Falconer, your esteemed colleague, and others such as Derry Irvine pushing this agenda through. What they adopted was what I think is the very unconstitutional principle of the separation of powers—an American idea that is not in our British system—and separating out the judiciary from Parliament. I will come on to your second question. Under that guise, we also built in this idea of checks and balances as somehow constitutionally codified. That is what I think is trying to be done now, which is to codify the independence of the Civil Service as an independent entity. There has been a constitutional and structural change that did not occur in your time. I would completely agree with you that, particularly over the last 10 years, the upheavals post Brexit have caused a power vacuum, political dysfunction and, let us face it, Ministers not of the standard of your day have allowed officials to move in—understandably, in a sense, because they feel that something has to be done. I accept the point that we need stronger leadership, and I hope that is what my party is offering. We also need to recognise that changes will need to be made to the legislative architecture in which the Civil Service operates. Just to put on the record, our plan is to scrap the Cabinet Office altogether. In your day, it was about 300 people by 1997. It had grown to about 3,000 by 2010, and it is now 12,000. There is a blob at the centre of the blob, where nobody in it even knows what they are doing, so there is a problem. We would scrap that and create a proper department for the Civil Service that does all the corporate HQ functions of Whitehall, and then properly empowers the Prime Minister and the office of the Prime Minister to hold the reins for the Executive. On your point about judicial appointments, seeing as you are such a fan of the pre-1997 model, I hope you would agree that the system worked pretty well when the Lord Chancellor appointed the judges. Somebody has to appoint them. At the moment, they appoint themselves. It is rather like the bishops. Traditional sovereign functions have essentially been given to whichever body it is. Judges are now appointed through the Judicial Appointments Commission, in an attempt to separate powers and to take functions out of politics. I worry about things being taken out of politics because that is tantamount to taking them out of democracy. Politics means the management of our common life. What could be more important than the appointment of the people who will adjudicate in court? We want to restore some measure of oversight of the judiciary, whether it is a rejuvenated Lord Chancellor or a reimagined Judicial Appointments Commission. We will come forward with proposals in due course. Clearly, there is a problem when we have judges being appointed who, coming back to the point about the Civil Service, I am afraid to say, particularly in the lower courts, are of very poor quality with blatant political prejudice. The notion of impartiality is not being maintained by the system that we have at the moment. It would be better if somebody who is politically accountable—it was the Lord Chancellor in the old days—to the public through the Prime Minister took responsibility for appointing judges. Let me emphasise that they need to be genuinely independent judges, in the way that civil servants should not be. They should not be taking any orders from Ministers, as civil servants should. Once appointed, they should be absolutely independent, and any suggestion of government interference in judgments is very wrong. The appointment of judges feels like something that ultimately the state is responsible for. The state holds the monopoly on power, and therefore the accountable part of the state, the political class, should be responsible for who the judges are. Other countries elect them directly. That is not very British. We should do it ourselves in politics.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill
My experience of two distinguished Lord Chancellors, Lord Hailsham and Lord Mackay of Clashfern—in the old traditional hierarchy, they were regarded as senior to the Prime Minister—was that their job was to defend the independence of the judiciary against the politicians. I am an old-fashioned Conservative. I thought it worked very well. I would not have changed that.
Danny Kruger
They were themselves appointed by a politician.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill
Exactly, but their job was to defend the independence of the judiciary, and they did that. I had heard it done in Cabinet, and the Cabinet always backed off. It is the principle here, and more that your leader was saying in his speech, “We’re going to get everything out. We’re going to have a state of emergency. We’re even going to deal with the judges, who may try to stop us”. That is a bit scary, is it not?
Danny Kruger
Just to reflect on the model that you describe there, which is the right one, the head of the judiciary—in the old days, the Lord Chancellor—with the power to appoint the judges was himself a politician and accountable to Parliament through the political process. Somebody has to be in charge of the appointment of judges. Traditionally, it was somebody who was themselves effectively a politician and certainly appointed by and accountable to a politician. I do not think that was wrong. In fact, that is more constitutional than a model of self-appointment, which we have at the moment. That is what Nigel Farage is getting at, which is that we have a problem with the way judges are appointed at the moment and some of the decisions that they take. I stand by the policy that we are developing there. Even more useful will be ensuring that judges themselves are constrained by the old-fashioned model of the common law, which is that they follow statute and precedent. They are not encouraged to adjudicate on the basis of abstract civil law principles and under human rights law. Cleaning up our law itself, completing Brexit by extracting ourselves from the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and working to undo the case law that the convention has infected is our big job. That is the challenge that we will take on, on behalf of all future Governments, because it will restore the proper basis of the law.
Lord Bellamy
Can I come back on this point about judicial appointments? It is probably of crucial constitutional significance. The old system of a tap on the shoulder, as it was colloquially known, was open to a lot of criticism that it was not at all transparent. It was very secret. Those in power tended to appoint themselves. The judiciary was drawn from a very narrow, white male social class in those days. The Judicial Appointments Commission was, broadly speaking, set up to make the process more objective, more competitive, more open to minorities, more open to anybody who wanted to apply, and to get away from the idea that it was a closed shop controlled by the upper classes, essentially, to make judicial appointments. I am very troubled if you want to attack the Judicial Appointments Commission, which is making a real effort to not exactly democratise the judiciary but at least make it open to any member of society to aspire to a judicial appointment. Can we explore all this in a little more detail?
Danny Kruger
Thank you. Those are very proper principles to apply. Having a broad and deep pool of talent to draw on for judicial appointments is important. Obviously, there would be abuse of any informal system like the one that obtained before 1997. I am not proposing to turn the clock back to those days when the judges were appointed from a very narrow class. Let us be frank: we need particularly senior judges to be the most qualified people no matter their background. I would hope over time that we would see proper diversity on the Bench, but the decision about whom to appoint as a judge should be made purely on the merits of the individual concerned. Whether we have a very open process of application, which I would not object to, or it is through informal networks, the key consideration is who is best qualified to discharge the functions of a judge. The principal point needs to be that the individual or the body making that appointment must be properly accountable to the political nation, to the democratic state. Otherwise, we have a self-appointing cartel, a little oligarchy of highly empowered leaders—a sort of clerisy—who are not accountable to the nation in any sense at all. That would be undemocratic.
The Chair
We are getting to the end. We have taken a lot of evidence from former civil servants and people associated with the Civil Service. When we spoke to Dominic Cummings a few weeks ago, he outlined the problem very much in similar ways that you did. On the solution to this, he said that a lot of young people who come into the Civil Service are brilliant, energetic and enthusiastic, and then after five or 10 years they lose all that because of their own inability to cut through and do useful things. He felt the problem was lack of accountability and responsibility, and if you make them responsible they will form up. That is not a politicisation of the Civil Service, but it is finding different solutions to what we possibly agree is a common problem. If a Prime Minister was determined to undermine the constitution as we understand it, is there anything within the UK’s constitutional system that could or should stop them from doing so? In other words, do we just rely on some kind of notion of self-restraint, or should there be something more institutional in place?
Danny Kruger
Thank you. We have the safeguards we need, and the essential one is Parliament itself. It is unthinkable that a Prime Minister could exercise power in defiance of Parliament, because ultimately Parliament could pass laws. Despite the Robin Cook reforms, it can take over the standing orders and insist on certain measures. We saw that in 2019 when a Bill was passed in defiance of the Government by a Parliament acting, with the connivance of the Speaker, in my view, unconstitutionally. That is just my view; they thought they were defending the constitution. The point is that they won. They were able to pass a law that constrained the Prime Minister to write a letter to Brussels and not to do the deal that he was trying to do with it. We also then had the situation of the Supreme Court overturning a decision of Parliament—twice in fact. Actually, it was once; the other Miller case overturned a decision of the Government. We have seen in recent times parts of the state acting against the Prime Minister and winning. I do not think you need to worry, because the system in a sense works. I do not think it necessarily works in the public interest, because in both those cases what we saw was the establishment stitching up power against the elected Government and in defiance of what was the plain will of the people expressed in multiple general elections. The state has a lot of power even to withstand the public. The greater challenge that we have is how to restore meaningful democratic power to the Government to ensure that they can get their way, but always accountable to Parliament and to the people.
The Chair
Mr Kruger, thank you very much indeed. We have given you enough time to get to the House of Commons. Thank you for taking the time and trouble to talk to us and give us your views. You have heard the questions that we have had here. We look forward to seeing you again soon.