20 MAY 2004

RT HON JOHN MAJOR CH

  Q827 Chairman: Could I welcome our witness this morning, the final witness for our inquiry into the honours system. It is appropriate that we should have the Right Honourable John Major to help us with this because you initiated the last serious review of the honours system and I am sure we will want to ask you some questions about that. In fact, it occurred to me—which is why we have seen you before, I think, on these occasions—that you were quite an institutional reformer in things in which this Committee is interested. I was just remembering that you set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life, you set up the code on Access to Government Information, you published the Ministerial Code for the first time, and that is before we get to the Citizen's Charter. So you have kept us busy over the years and I think not often remembered for all those things together. But it is the honours bit we want to talk to you about today. Thank you for doing a very helpful memorandum to us. Do you want to add anything to that before we ask some questions?

  Mr Major: No, I do not think so. I do not think I need take time. I sent in a fairly comprehensive memorandum because I think it is time to review the honours system again. We had made some changes, I think most of those have been successful, and I think it is time to look at them and see if they need refreshing and changing. We have moved on in the last decade. I set out, I hope clearly, a number of areas that I thought might be worth examining and tried to respond to some of your questions, but I think it is better now to respond to your questions. I do not wish to add anything to the memorandum.

  Q828 Chairman: Thank you very much. You will be aware of the internal review that was put in hand just three or four years ago.

  Mr Major: The Wilson Review.

  Q829 Chairman: The Wilson Review. Just looking at that—and it talks about your review back in 1993 as the only moment when anyone seriously wanted to look at this system—there is a nice little reference in these documents that says, "As the review proceeded and the case was made for keeping things broadly as they were, he"—which is you, then prime minister—"objected that he could not have a review which brought forth a mouse." Were you anxious that, having flagged up the fact that you wanted this system looked at, the outcome would confound expectation?

  Mr Major: I must say I do not recall any such exchanges. I was particularly concerned about some aspects of the honours system at the time. Some were covered by the review, some I think have been covered subsequently, but I did think there was a degree of class distinction in the honours system—that was the reason that underlay the abolition of the BEM—and I did think it was time for us to examine it. But I was not an all-out revolutionary. I was not seeking to tear up the honours system. I think the honours system has a lot of merit. I think it is entirely right that countries should offer a tangible indication that someone has performed outstanding service in one sphere or another. I was not particularly disappointed with the outcome of the review, no, most certainly not. I think it could have gone further in some ways, but, as is often the case on these occasions, a collective view prevails.

  Q830 Chairman: The Wilson Review suggests that forces of inertia and conservatism in this area are so strong, not least from state servants, that unless there is a real political push for change—which is why your review was identified as being quite different from the other five yearly reviews that go on—nothing much will happen. Is that your sense of how all this works?

  Mr Major: I do not think it is just bureaucratic inertia; I think also the tug of history argues quite strongly against premature change. I think you need to make the case for change before you tear up something that has worked. I think that is a significant reason for the fact that the change has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary at any stage. I do not particularly object to that. I think that is probably the right way to deal with it, but I think there are changes that were required to be made after the last review, I think very probably there are some more to be made after this review—and I rather welcome that.

  Q831 Chairman: But at the time you felt that the outcome of the review that you had put in hand was broadly of the scale and the kind that you had wanted, even though now 10 years on you would like to go further.

  Mr Major: I thought it was significant progress and I regarded it as progress in hand, and I intended to return to the matter and have another review, just as you are now doing, but I would have done that within government rather than necessarily through a select committee.

  Q832 Chairman: Your instinct would have been to do it privately, would it?

  Mr Major: No, no, my instinct would have been to examine it in government and then put forward proposals to the House of Commons. That would have been my instinct. Whether, when I came to it, I would have asked a select committee to advise is a point difficult to tell in retrospect.

  Q833 Chairman: Yes. When your former colleague Douglas Hurd, now Lord Hurd, came to see us to talk about these matters, he said in passing, as you may have seen from the record, that Ted Heath, when he was prime minister, had proposed getting rid of the system altogether and that this produced a riot in the whips' office. Do you remember any of this?

  Mr Major: No, I do not. I have not seen the transcript of Douglas's evidence but I certainly do not remember that. That was a little before my time in the House of Commons—in fact, rather a long time before. I certainly do not remember that and I certainly would not have agreed with that. I think the proposition of abolishing the honours system is not credible or sustainable.

  Q834 Chairman: Ted Heath, of course, is exceptional in not having acquired an honour for himself. Nor have you. Is that a matter of principle or of unripe time?

  Mr Major: In Ted's case? I think you must ask Ted.

  Q835 Chairman: No, I think we know in Ted's case; I was just asking in your case.

  Mr Major: I must tell you I always find it very difficult to answer for other prime ministers and I always find it is safer not to.

  Q836 Chairman: No, this was entirely a question directed at you.

  Mr Major: As far as I am concerned?

  Q837 Chairman: Yes.

  Mr Major: I am certainly not opposed to honours in any sense. I have a CH which was awarded for a quite specific process, the Northern Ireland Peace Process, and I thought it appropriate to accept that. Norma, as you may know, has a DBE for her work in charities. We are extremely proud of the fact that she has got that: she has worked extremely hard both nationally and locally for many years, before we were in politics, during and now we are after, so I am very happy that she has that and I am very happy to walk two paces behind her. I have no institutional hostility to the honours system, but I have no particular wish particularly to delve into it for myself.

  Q838 Chairman: Thank you for that. In your interesting memorandum to us, I noticed one thing particularly. You said: "In Government I was shocked at the extent to which a minority of people were prepared to lobby for honours and, in some cases, at the extent to which they became disaffected if their petition was ignored." I am not of course going to ask you to tell us who the people are, because you will not, but if you would give us a sense of what it is like sitting at the apex of honour and patronage that leads you to make a remark of that kind.

  Mr Major: There is a lot of frustrated ambition. Many people keep their frustrated ambitions to themselves; others, perhaps with greater expectations, tend not to. I think not only the prime minister but those close to him are often reminded, either directly or indirectly, of the virtues of x. Sometimes x will do it themselves—quite often. Sometimes they will do it tactfully, sometimes not so tactfully, almost always I think without a great degree of credit. I can think of one great public figure, known to everyone present—and, you are quite right, I am not going to name him or her—who, after an extremely enjoyable lunch with a large collection of people, gathered me grandly by the arm to walk round the garden to express to me his great love of this country and how he felt he could be of greater service to it. I was not in any real doubt as to where he thought that service should be and it did not enhance his prospect of getting there in terms of that sort of lobbying. That happened to me quite regularly and it happened in a number of ways. People would become hugely available to help beyond any reasonable expectation, and one suspected why that was, since they had not been available to help before one was in a position to look at the honours list. Others would arrange for intermediaries to approach you: "Have you seen the splendid work x has done? X is such a fantastic supporter, x has done wonderful things," and in my mind x rather retreated down the list of likely candidates when I heard that. Other people close to the prime minister will always have had approaches as well, whether they are politically close or close within the civil service. I did not find that attractive. I did not regard that as an exclusion; I regarded it as pretty tasteless, and it certainly did not encourage their chances. But of course there is a proper system for determining honours. There is a widespread misunderstanding that the prime minister sits there and decides, "I like x. He can be a peer"—a knight, a dame, or whatever—but it is not that way at all. That is not how the system works. So often people who lobbied did from one source or another go through the system. But it is tedious, this lobbying. It is tedious and it is extremely unattractive and it is quite prevalent.

  Q839 Chairman: And you found it a pressure which you could have done without.

  Mr Major: The pressure was less upon me, more often, than the people around me. I have to say, from memory—though memory fades with the years—that that pressure was relatively minute compared to some of the others that were about at the time!

  Chairman: Yes. I think we do remember some of those.