A 40-year love affair with Parliament has turned former clerk of the House of Commons Sir Robert Rogers into a kind of social anthropologist. Peter Hennessy meets him.
Sir Robert Rogers looks and sounds as a clerk of the House of Commons should look and sound. He is fluent, possesses an imposing bewhiskered presence and exudes an air of authority tempered by affability. He strikes one as a man more than a touch in love with Parliament, but his romance with it is toughened by a feel for its procedural and political realities that had been over 40 years in the honing by the time he retired last summer.
Given that Parliament and parliamentarians are not, of late, in receipt of the hosannas of a grateful, appreciative nation, how would he answer an intelligent sixth-former who asked him “what’s Parliament for?”
“Damn good question,” he replies.
“One of the things that Parliament does is make a nation feel good about itself because a nation knows it needs Parliament. A nation like ours knows that it needs parliamentary democracy…and, of course, you can quote all the classic things of legislation, authorising supply, calling the government to account, the grand inquest of the nation…But I think in a constitutional environment where there is no written constitution, Parliament in a sense draws all the threads together and it does so very literally in terms of executive and parliament, government and opposition, nation and constituency, backbencher and minister…Parliament draws the threads together in a way in which not only no institution but no other imaginable institution could do.”
“What part does the clerkly craft play in the House of Commons part of this drawing together of the threads?”
“It isn’t just about knowing about the standing orders or what the rules are,” Sir Robert replies. “I always summed it up to my colleagues, and latterly, to my more junior colleagues, as the woodcraft of Parliament…in the sense of tracking through the forest – the combination of the learnt, the known, the instinctive…If there is one sentence which sums up this process or this skill…it is helping members achieve most nearly in parliamentary terms what they want to achieve in political terms.”
In Sir Robert’s still relatively early days in 1979, the incoming government of Margaret Thatcher enabled the House of Commons to create a sheaf of department-shadowing all-party select committees. For a time he was clerk of the Defence Committee and adored it. This he sees as a crucially important sub-trade within the clerkly craft.
“The committee clerk’s job is to make the committee as effective as possible in doing what the House has given it to do. And that engages a multiplicity of types of work, of skills. There is a procedure – almost non-existent in select committees, but when it matters it matters a lot as, for example, with a recalcitrant or misbehaving witness. But you put all the other things together, it is keeping ahead of your panel of specialist advisers, maintaining your credibility with the committee and with the advisers, maintaining an excellent relationship with the chair of the committee and helping him or her keep the committee together politically. It is managing the press, managing the media, and the way in which they see the committee’s inquiry. It’s running a small but very often extremely hardworking team of people.”
I suggest to Sir Robert that clerking over four decades has turned him into a bit of a social anthropologist.
"I always say: never run away with the idea that the House of Commons is an organisation because it isn’t. It’s an organism and organisms are reactive, cussed, unpredictable."
“Oh, absolutely – because it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the woodcraft. You need to know what energises people, what motivates them…I’m always talking about the institution to people outside who may not be familiar with it. I always say: never run away with the idea that the House of Commons is an organisation because it isn’t. It’s an organism and organisms are reactive, cussed, unpredictable. And once you put all of that together in a highly contentious political environment, then, naturally, I think you get the sort of phenomena you are talking about.”
There was one specific patch of House of Commons social anthropology to which Sir Robert brought particular care during our conversation, which took place before the Commons Governance Committee reported in December (HC692) on how the clerk of the House and chief executive functions might best be configured following Sir Robert’s retirement and the “pausing” of the selection process begun by Mr Speaker Bercow in the pursuit of a successor. In replying to my question about the very special relationship between speaker and clerk, Sir Robert gave the impression of being a social anthropologist/explorer crossing a precarious rope bridge over a deep ravine:
“They have – any speaker, any clerk of the House – I think they have a shared goal which is the success and effectiveness of the House of Commons. They have really quite different pressures on each of them and I think that produces perhaps a different appreciation of what the route should be to get to that more effective and more successful House of Commons, simply because their perceptions are different. One is a long-term official; one is a long-term or maybe a member of less time in the House than the clerk, so those perceptions are always going to be a bit different I think!”
Delicately done.
Another area of current sensitivity is the constitutional impacts of last September’s Scottish referendum. All the parties involved in the Smith Commission have agreed that “the Scottish Parliament will be made permanent in UK legislation…” That implies entrenched legislation; something Westminster does not do as no UK parliament can bind a successor parliament. What does Sir Robert make of the extraordinary constitutional building site around which we are all currently living?
“One of the problems is that we’re not buying anything off plan on that building site…and nobody knows quite where we’re going. Now that will make the parliamentary and governmental experience over the next few years…a little more exciting than perhaps anybody would wish it to be. In terms of entrenching legislation, well, frankly, without a written constitution and a constitutional court, you cannot do it. You can entrench things in the political and public expectation, and that may be just as good in some ways…statements about entrenching constitutional terms just have to remain exhortations!”
What next for Sir Robert? He will shortly join the crossbenches in the House of Lords as Lord Lisvane, a prime ministerial appointment greeted with wide warmth and acclaim. He will produce a seventh edition of How Parliament Works with his co-author, Rhodri Walters, a retired senior clerk in the House of Lords. And it will be fascinating to see how he adapts to his new chamber.
“One thing I’m going to do is on-the-job-learning for some considerable time because it’s one of those things – I go back to the business of the organism – and you really do have to study the organism before you start prodding it and I certainly don’t intend to… it must follow, I think, an extended period of learning, understanding and just seeing!”