Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
My earliest encounters with Mark Littlewood were not friendly. We were exact contemporaries as undergraduates. I was the founder of the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain, he of the Reform Club, established in conscious opposition to us and dedicated to European federalism (Olly Robbins was its chairman not long afterwards).
Littlewood and I clashed frequently in debates about EMU and Maastricht. He had a clever, wry, cheerful style that made him a formidable opponent.
He went on to work for the European Movement and then for the Liberal Democrats, before coming to accept that classical liberalism had little purchase in that party. In 2009, he became Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the oldest free-market think-tank in the country.
He was immensely successful, using new media to educate a younger audience. By the time of the 2016 referendum, he had accepted that libertarianism had no place in the EU, and was a moderate Leaver.
Last week, it was reported that Littlewood had been on Liz Truss’s admirably parsimonious resignation list of just four peerages, but had been blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC).
Her other three candidates – Jon Moynihan, who chaired Vote Leave magnificently, Matt Elliott, his talented Chief Executive, and Ruth Porter, Truss’s deputy chief of staff – were approved, provoking howls of outrage from the opposition parties, who secretly think Eurosceptics have no place in Parliament.
Why was Littlewood blocked? The answer is necessarily speculative, since HOLAC, whose job is to vet candidates on grounds of propriety, does not reveal its deliberations. In theory, even the fact of Littlewood having been nominated is unconfirmed. Reviewing what we know, though, I can think of two possible objections (beyond the general annoyance of the Lib Dems, whom he left acrimoniously in 2007).
One was a sting operation on the IEA by a Greenpeace team posing as a US pharma company. The other was a reprimand by the charity commission, later withdrawn, over an IEA paper on how to maximise the opportunities of Brexit.
There may, conceivably, be something else, something no one has heard of. But I doubt it. And before coming to the specifics of those two cases, let me explain why I doubt it and, in so doing, declare my own interest.
When I was first nominated for a peerage by Boris Johnson, I was also blocked by HOLAC. The grounds on which I was blocked were beyond bizarre. I was told it was because of a court case – which bewildered me, since I was not involved in any legal action.
It turned out that the case was one being brought by the European Conservatives, of whom I had been Secretary General when I was an MEP, which was pursuing the European Parliament over some promised co-financing for two conferences dating from my time in Brussels.
I won’t bore you with the details. Essentially, the European Parliament maintained that there had been too many speakers from outside the EU for the meetings to qualify as reimbursable, while the ECR argued that the Parliament had funded exactly equivalent conferences for Europhile parties. The point is that ECR was the plaintiff, not the accused. No one was alleging that it (or I) had behaved improperly.
Some time after being (as it turned out, temporarily) rejected, I spoke to one of the people involved. I was told:
“The committee tends to be influenced by what it finds in newspapers, and there was a Guardian headline, not actually borne out by the article, that made it sound as though you were being investigated for something. There was also a slight feeling that, because John Bercow had been blocked, a Tory needed to be blocked for balance.”
Obviously, I have no way of knowing whether this account was accurate. But it does chime with what seems to have happened to Littlewood. If you relied wholly on Guardian headlines, you might think there was something dodgy about him, for that newspaper starts from the premise that free-market think tanks are inherently disreputable. But when you look at the facts, the headlines fall apart.
I wrote about the Greenpeace/Guardian sting on this website at the time. Far from revealing any malpractice, it showed Littlewood insisting that the IEA would not deviate from its mission, namely to promote understanding of free markets. The only way the Greenpeace agents provocateurs could get him to accept their cash was by pretending to share those principles.
That’s pretty much the opposite of corruption, though a report aired anyway, complete with wobbly camera angles and scary music. None of the regulatory bodies thought there was any case to answer.
As for the second possible objection – an IEA publication called Plan A+: Creating a prosperous post-Brexit UK – yes, it was initially deemed too partisan by the Charities Commission, which issued a formal warning. However, on appeal, the warning was removed. (This was 2018, when the IEA was subject to a barrage of frivolous and vexatious complaints from angry Remainers.)
Neither case was a mark against Littlewood’s character. And, in any event, both were common knowledge. As always, unless HOLAC has unearthed some dreadful secret unknown to anyone else, it is overriding appointments made by prime ministers in full possession of the facts.
I mean no criticism of its members. Articles of this kind often contain a line to that effect, and it sometimes has a perfunctory ring. But believe me when I say that I know the current members well enough to attest that they are people of decency and integrity.
No, the problem is with the system itself. HOLAC was created by Tony Blair for two purposes: to identify non-party candidates for peerages, and to vet everyone else. The first function, for as long as we have an appointed chamber, is fair enough. The second is not.
I am no fan of how the House of Lords is composed. It has always struck me as odd to let the head of the executive branch appoint members of the legislature. But if we are going to have such a system, it must be discretionary. You can’t have a committee second-guessing the prime minister, whose electoral mandate is the sole democratic element in the process.
I realise that I am swimming against the current. It is always popular to say “Get the politicians out of the picture! Trust the experts!” But that has been the justification of every undemocratic regime in history, from Napoleon Bonaparte’s to Xi Jinping’s. If we learned anything during the pandemic, it is that our standing bureaucracies should never be allowed to run the show.
When, as it hints it will, Labour gives HOLAC statutory powers rather than its current, notionally advisory, role, grandees will nod approvingly. Similarly, when it strengthens equivalent quangos covering human rights, education, healthcare, monetary policy, and the rest, the same people call it “mature” and “sensible”.
They can hardly be blamed for wanting Britain to be run by people like themselves. But every such step will serve to make this country less democratic, less accountable and, in the end, less well governed.
In the mean time, rather than making HOLAC more powerful, we should make it more transparent. If there is an objection to a nominee, let them hear it and put their side of the story. Starting with Littlewood.