Fresh insights from the master investigator: Lord Howell reviews Peter Hennessy’s 'On the Back of an Envelope'
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With his ringside seat in Parliament, Lord Hennessy’s timely collection of his thoughts on our constitution and democracy is written with his usual clarity
Peter Hennessy has been compared to AV Dicey, Walter Bagehot, Sidney Low, LS Amery and other constitutional authorities for his deep insights into the inner workings of Britain’s government and the constitution – the latter said by some not to exist but is in fact embedded all around us.
Yet the comparison is not quite apt. These were the great analysts of how the British constitutional monarchy had evolved to its present state under the rule of law, how it appeared to work and how, they believed, it really worked.
But Hennessy has become more than that. He is certainly a master investigator, peering into the engine room of central administration, or – if that is too mechanical a word – into the procedures, customs and contradictions. He looks into the very heart of cabinet government as it has evolved over the last 100 years or so, and now much in need of updating.
But since joining the House of Lords, as an actual legislator himself, he has also metamorphosed into a dedicated crusader for the actual change and repair required.
We need Peter Hennessy to keep us on the track to survival and freedom under the law
Now with a ringside seat of our parliamentary processes, he has become, in his own words, ”in love” with the whole institution of Parliament, with its centrality to our democracy, its long history, and the part it plays in the totally transformed world now with us and in our future destiny. As the digital age sweeps on, it up-ends almost every aspect of human affairs – some changed for the better, some for the very much worse.
His latest volume – amazingly his 30th, at the latest count – shows this shift with clarity. For the rest of us, it could not be a more fortunate and timely evolution of thinking. Why? Because it comes just at the moment when questioning of the old ways that have kept our nation together in the darkest times is at its most intense. When the forces of the ubiquitous information revolution – turning everyone into an author, questioner and ‘expert’, pulling open societies apart, deepening divisions and undermining trust – are at their most challenging. And when the absolutely central and filtering role of parliaments, in the maintenance of authority under the rule of law, are most in need of strengthening and repair.
That takes us to the innermost parts of government, where an over-powerful Treasury continues to distort longer-term national priorities. And it takes us to the corridors of both Houses of Parliament where underpowered committees struggle to illuminate the activities of a vastly expanded executive, larger than ever but less efficient and thereby dangerously failing to deliver its side of the basic national bargain with its citizens.
It takes us to the ultimate question of how parliaments come to be formed. And as issues become ever more complex, how they are sloughed off into a jungle of ‘independent’ agencies and enquiries. Who appoints those bodies? Who takes the names out of what hats? It is the oldest question of all in the art of governance: Quis custodiet custodes Ipsos?
We need Peter Hennessy to keep us on the track to survival and freedom under the law. This, surely, is the common ground to which politicians in a dangerous age should strive – ground where, as he reminds us in a dazzlingly sensible quote from the late Queen (“The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace”), our monarchy performs its wonderfully unifying function.
One hears there is another book from him on the way. Good.
Lord Howell is a Conservative peer
On the Back of an Envelope: A Life in Writing
By: Peter Hennessy
Publisher: Haus Publishing
