THE LORD CHANCELLOR

HL Deb 17 July 1962 vol 242 cc527-37

2.34 p.m.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND MINISTER FOR SCIENCE (VISCOUNT HAILSHAM)

My Lords, I have to announce that Her Majesty has been pleased to create the Right Honourable Sir Reginald Edward Manningham - Buller, Baronet, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, a Peer of this Realm by the Title of Baron Dilhorne, of Towcester in the County of Northampton.

The Lord Chancellor, having retired to robe—Was (in the usual manner) introduced.

VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH

My Lords, it follows almost a rule that on such an occasion as this, important as it is to your Lordships' House and to the State, the Leader of the Opposition has the task of saying a word of welcome to the new Lord Chancellor. But I am rather inclined to follow a precedent that I find was set by my predecessor, the late Lord Jowitt, when he asked to be allowed to leave the Rules of procedure, to say a word or two about those who are leaving office in your Lordships' House, and especially the former Lord Chancellor, following that with a word of welcome to the new Lord Chancellor. If that is not controverting any ideas your Lordships have, I should be glad of your pleasure.

The occasion of the change which reaches its significance this afternoon is rather extraordinary. The Government have made a very considerable and wide change, in the course of which your Lordships' House has lost the services of the former Lord Chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir. Shortly, as has already been announced, he will be receiving from the Sovereign a very well-deserved honour. The new Lord Chancellor is called upon to follow a remarkable figure in the law and in the State. It seems to me, as I look back over the records, that there have not been many Lord Chancellors who, retiring after nearly eight years of service on the Woolsack, were still only 62 years of age.

I should like to say to the noble and learned Viscount that I hope very much that his surrendering of his high office in the State will not mean that he is going to surrender any future service to that great feature of British justice, the proper administration of the law. The noble and learned Viscount has been known to me for a great number of years. I knew him first as a Member of the House of Commons, when he seemed to me extraordinarily youthful, and in Liverpool, and, apart from the usual political scrimmages, we have always been good friends.

As regards his service to your Lordships' House, I find it to be remarkable for two or three special features. The first, of course, is his mastery of the law, probably never excelled, although maybe equalled by Lord Birkenhead's great knowledge of the law. To us he was the most extraordinary example of courtesy, of untold patience and of a thoroughness that was begotten entirely out of his conscientiousness towards his work in this House. That we shall always treasure in his memory. He will not expect me to agree with most of the things he said to us in the course of his service.

I would say a brief word, if I may, about the passing of two other workers in your Lordships' House. There is the former Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, the noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, who was doing another job for us here. He is a Somerset man and so am I, and I am sorry for his going from that point of view. In his case, he seems to me to be one of the sacrificial elements, who has been sacrificed for having done perhaps too well in Parliament in carrying out the policy ordered by his master. I feel much the same about the noble Earl, Lord Bathurst, who is also a West Countryman, and who has served us well in this House.

I want to say one other thing to the noble Viscount the Leader of the House before I pass to my last and more important task of welcoming the new Lord Chancellor. In these changes, the Opposition have noted that we now have only three Cabinet Ministers in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Mills, to whom we paid tribute yesterday, was actually our No. 1 speaker for four Departments. It really must be noted by the Government, unless some further announcements are to be made, that we are losing the services of Ministers that we ought rightly to expect to have in your Lordships' House, especially in view of the fact that of late years we have been responsible for the consideration and revision ab initio of great measures of State. There must be, and necessarily is, a large strain upon the actual Executive and responsible Ministers in the House. I hope that something may be done about this.

Now, my Lord Chancellor. I should like to say a word of welcome to you on behalf of the Opposition. You enter upon that very high office only two years older than the retiring Lord Chancellor was when he joined us in 1954. He was quite young; and you are apparently quite youthful in comparison to many other occupants of that high office. May I say at once that I have great recollections of the family of Manningham-Buller in political circumstances in Northamptonshire? I had a great respect for the former honourable and gallant Member for Kettering; and you have also been representing an important constituency in Northamptonshire. You have occupied high office in Government service, in Parliament and in the courts on behalf of the State. I know you a little in private life. I do not know so much about your wider aspect of service in the law, except that we have observed your work in another place. But I can assure you that we hold in the highest possible respect whoever is sitting on that Woolsack for the time being at the head of the great administration of law in this country, upon which must depend whether or not the reputation of British justice holds, and advising noble Lords upon all points of law which arise in the making of the legislation.

We very much hope not only that you will have a great and successful time as Lord Chancellor, but that you will find in this House, as others have done before, channels for the development of friendships which were perhaps previously unknown; and that, although in this House we speak always with the maximum amount of courtesy, possibly always as if we wore kid gloves, we still retain the capacity for being very persistent in controversy in those circumstances. May you also find friendship in all the various channels of the law in which you have to appear, and very often to lead in judgment and encouragement. That your career may be entirely happy and successful is our wish.

2.52 p.m.

LORD REA

My Lords, it is my privilege to add a few words to those of the noble Viscount the Leader of the official Opposition, whose words, indeed, I endorse in every detail. To change the pattern slightly, perhaps I might say first a few words about the noble and learned Lord, Lord Dilhorne, and pass later to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir.

We welcome our new Lord Chancellor, Lord Speaker, neither casually nor entirely formally. He presides over all our proceedings and is the supreme member of our Judiciary. For those two reasons alone we should respect him and be glad to serve under him. But there are personal qualities involved as well. We in this House have no first-hand experience of you, my Lord, but we have read of you, heard you, seen you, and we give you a warm welcome. In congratulation, may I say that anybody with a less strong heart than yourself might be daunted at the vista of very eminent people Who have sat on the Woolsack before you; and it would be an extraordinary man who did not quail. My Lord Chancellor, I feel sure that you are an extraordinary man, and you will not quail.

My Lords, I should like now to say a word or two about our old friend (if I may call him so) Lord Kilmuir. As a House collectively, we shall miss him immensely. As a House individually, our hearts are really sore that he is not in the position which he held. I think that every Member of your Lordships' House who puts in anything like a regular attendance in this Chamber has become, and been proud to become, a personal friend of Lord Kilmuir. We admire his learning, the immense grasp he had of his office, his courtesy, his sympathy, his clarity and his enormous conscientiousness.

But, my Lords, I am at a disadvantage: I find myself rather moved at this point, because he is a very old friend of mine. We were born in the same year—some people say that it was this century, and others say that it was last century; but, at least, we are Victorians, if only just Victorians. We served together in the Army. We were together at Oxford, where I, quite wrongly, thought that his political views (as I thought of them) were diabolic. My Lords, I was wrong: they ware not diabolic; they were merely mistaken. Later, as young men we found ourselves working our careers in a provincial city which was strange to both of us; and there he and his charming wife extended their friendship to us, and made of it, if I may say so, a very pleasant mixed double.

We discussed many things, and I remember that he revealed to me some of the hopes he had for his future, if all went well. So many years have passed that I hope he will forgive me if I no longer treat those words as confidential. He told me then, as a young man—we were both young men—that if things went well he would hope to take silk in his early thirties. My Lords, he did. He said that if things went well, he hoped to be a Minister of the Crown in his early forties. My Lords, he was. And he also said that he would like, if fortune should favour him, to be top of the legal or political profession, whichever it was, in his early fifties. My Lords, he was both. Therefore, it is with pride that I look on my friendship with the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir.

It is easy to criticise those who form Governments and break up Governments, but it is not easy to know all the motives that lie behind. We part with the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir, in his official capacity with regret, but we offer him our most warm wishes, from all quarters of the House, for his happiness, and the happiness of his family, in the new ease on laying down the great office which he has fulfilled with such honour and as such an ornament to your Lordships' House and to the Parliament of England.

VISCOUNT HAILSHAM

My Lords, I should like to thank both the noble Viscount who leads the Opposition and the noble Lord, Lord Rea, for the appropriate and generous words which they have used upon this occasion, and to add a few words of my own on both parts of the topics which they have handled. May I say to the noble Viscount who leads the Opposition that my noble friend Lord Waldegrave, whom, with him, we are very sorry indeed to have lost, had been intending for some time, and had told me so, to go before this Recess. It would not, therefore, be right to regard him in any sense as a sacrifice.

The first time that I saw the impressive ceremonial which we have all witnessed this afternoon was in 1928, when the principal figure was my father. It is therefore with a real sense of pleasure that I welcome my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack to the office which my father twice held with distinction. My Lords, one cannot but reflect the grandeur and history of this great position; the long line of churchmen, lawyers and statesmen who have occupied it, occupying so closely, as it does, the apex of the Judiciary, the Legislature and a very high pinnacle in the hierarchy of the Executive. Indeed, there is no other Cabinet office which has included amongst its distinguished predecessors two Saints of the Church—St. Swithin and Sir Thomas More. It was perhaps a happy augury that the announcement of my noble and learned friend's appointment should take place on the eve of St. Swithin's Day. There were, of course, a few showers outside, but not a drop of rain fell in your Lordships' Chamber. We may therefore look for many sunny hours from our new Lord Chancellor. As a matter of fact, St. Swithin has often provided an example to Lords Chancellors in the past. His best reputed miracle was when an old lady was going to market and upset a basket of eggs. By his great sanctity, St. Swithin was able to restore those eggs to their natural shells. This is a miracle which has frequently been performed by Lords Chancellors ever since, though, of course, with slightly different material, when they have come to answer for the Government after a particularly difficult debate.

Sir Thomas More, of course, came to grief over a very difficult point of the law of husband and wife, which was only finally set to rest by my noble friend Lord Mancroft when he succeeded in getting passed the Marriage (Enabling) Bill. But I view with some apprehension the fact that the new Lord Chancellor's first engagement will be to pass two little Bills to do with husband and wife. I hope this is not an unhappy augury, and that they will cause him no such trouble as they caused his predecessor.

My Lords, I said yesterday, when I was taking leave of Lord Mills, that he and I had sat next to each other in Cabinet. The first time I remember sitting near, if not actually next to, the new Lord Chancellor was in an arctic winter somewhere about 1923, in a 15th century schoolroom, which would have turned the hair of one of Her Majesty's inspectors of schools almost White. He was at that time already a very impressive figure, and he and I acquired, through these hardships, a considerable sense of rugged individuality. We have often met since. I can remember a particularly fierce encounter in. the Bow County Court in 1938, and once I actually appeared before him as a regimental officer when I was prisoner's friend, again in an arctic winter, in 1939–40. On that occasion, I seem to remember, he assumed a slightly more magisterial demeanour than will now be appropriate to him in your Lordships' House. On one occasion, I know, I enjoyed his nomination to take part in a civil case in the Chancery Division about the Winter Garden Theatre at Eastbourne. He left me to cross-examine Mr. Godfrey Winn, who had deposed to the somewhat bizarre proposition that Miss Grade Fields in the Winter Garden had reminded him of divine service in a cathedral.

For all these reasons it is not difficult for me to welcome my noble and learned friend. What the House will come to realise of him, if it does not already know it in his public reputation, is a fine sense of personal integrity and resolution, a deep conviction about things which matter in this world—and these are the things, after all, which make statesmen out of lawyers. Without them a. knowledge of the law is at best an ornament and at worst a frippery. But my noble and learned friend has this deep sincerity which we shall come, all of us, to know and to recognise.

I should also like to thank the two noble Lords for what they said about my noble and learned friend, Lord Kilmuir. I feel, probably more than anybody in this House, the great sense of loss at being deprived of his intimate counsel and talent with which I have been assisted ever since I was in the Government, and more particularly since I had the honour to lead your Lordships' House. I had written down, before they were uttered, on my own note the words "patience, conscientiousness, ability to deal with every point". I was delighted that those words were taken from my mouth by the noble Viscount, Lord Alexander of Hillsborough, in his own tribute.

Of course, as one Who has enjoyed Lord Kilmuir's counsel in the Government I can say there is a very great deal more than that. I do not claim my noble and learned friend's acquaintance for so long a time as did the noble Lord, Lord Rea. But he was an exact contemporary of a dearly loved brother of mine, and I came to know him well and to regard him with very great feelings of friendship early in my legal and from the first in my political career. I can only say that we shall miss him very much, but we hope that he will come often, in public and in private, to give us the benefit of the counsel which we have come to value so highly.

I end, as I began, with the reflection of the greatness of this office, and the great advantage which this House has, in whatever other offices in the Government may fall to be enjoyed or borne by its Members, in having the right to have the Lord Chancellor amongst us to assist our consultations. He is also, of course, the head of the legal profession, that body of men, always small, which has meant so much to the history of this country. The law is not simply something that you study: it is a Living body of doctrine built up by men and women who have had something more than a knowledge of the law to give to their fellow countrymen. In the two Lords Chancellors that we have, the immediately past Lord Chancellor and the new Lord Chancellor, among us this afternoon, we have very fine examples of this tradition which stretches right back into the mists of history and which has given to this country much that makes it itself.

3.7 p.m.

LORD SILKIN

My Lords, I hope that I may be forgiven for rising to say a few words, in particular about the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir. I suppose there is no one on the Opposition side who had more dealings with the noble and learned Viscount than I have during the time that he was Lord Chancellor. It is for that reason that I feel I should like to express my own feelings about his departure.

As my noble Leader has said, the last time we had a ceremony of this kind was in 1954. On that occasion the late Lord Jowitt, in welcoming the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir, made a speech which I should like to read to the House. If the House will forgive me, I will read it exactly as he spoke it. He said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 189, col. 428]: He brings to his office a great Parliamentary experience, but he brings, too, that modesty which will preserve him from ever falling into the error of thinking that he alone is wise and that anyone who differs from him is troubled with a doube dose of original sin. We know that he is a doughty fighter, but we know too that in all his bouts he is most scrupulously fair. He will listen to our criticisms and suggestions with the most perfect courtesy, and I feel sure will give way to them if, and only if, he is satisfied that they are well founded. We know, too, the thoroughness with which he tackles any job that he undertakes, and we realise that he brings an immense addition to the authority of our deliberations in this House. My Lords, that was a remarkably prophetic speech, and I think, we can all say that after eight years every one of Lord Jowitt's statements has been verified by our experience. I would not wish either to add to or subtract from this tribute which my late noble friend paid to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir, in advance; and every word of it would be true if he were saying it to-day.

May I address a word to the new Lord Chancellor? He comes to us as, to a certain extent, an unknown figure. I have personally had contact with him a long time ago, in the days of the Town and Country Planning Bill of 1947. We crossed swords then a good deal, and I should like to pay tribute to the fact that he was a courteous and able opponent. He was most helpful in improving that Bill and was always extremely courteous in the way he meted out his criticisms. I can only hope that now the shoe is on the other foot we shall be equally good friends, even though we may disagree.

On the occasion in 1954 when the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Kilmuir, was first introduced as Lord Chancellor I did not take part in his welcome but, almost immediately after, he introduced a highly contentious Bill, the Town and Country Planning Bill, 1954, in his maiden speech, and it was my duty to congratulate him on a most unorthodox maiden speech, which was neither short nor uncontroversial. But he was extremely fair and he started off in the spirit in which he continued right throughout his term of office as Lord Chancellor. We shall all miss him very much indeed. I say that with all sincerity, and I only hope that he and Lady Kilmuir will take advantage of the rest, which I imagine will be a short one only, and get away from the hurly-burly of life for a time and come back again to this House full of energy and vigour.

3.12 p.m.

VISCOUNT KILMUIR

My Lords, I assure your Lordships that I am not going to intrude on your time except to say three things which I think you will all agree could not be left unsaid. The first is to express my gratitude, inadequately it may be, for the far too kind things that have been said about me this afternoon. The noble Viscount who leads the Opposition is renowned for his generosity of mind and he has expended a great deal of it this afternoon in my direction, for which I am very grateful. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, has recalled that our memories go far over the arches of the years. I thank him, too. I thank my noble and learned Leader Lord Hailsham for what he added, and I am deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, for his words. The second thing which I wanted to say was this. I could never have believed that in the, after all, relatively short period of eight years any one man could make as many individual friends as I have had the great pleasure of doing; and friends in all quarters of the House. For that, again, I am very grateful.

The third matter is that I wanted to add my word of welcome to the Lord Chancellor, who is a very old friend of mine, personally and politically. I can assure your Lordships, from the years that I have known him, at the Bar, in the Army, and as a colleague in the Government, that your Lordships are fortunate indeed in having someone on the Woolsack who will be worthy of the great traditions which that office has accumulated in no less than 1,367 years. I want to wish the new Lord Chancellor well with all the sincerity I command; to ask him to accept my good wishes and to give them to my old colleagues, his new colleagues; and, once again, to wish him well.

3.15 p.m.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD DILHORNE)

My Lords, I should like to express my thanks to the noble Lords who have spoken for the very kind and, I think, unduly flattering observations that they have made towards me, and I should like to thank the whole House for receiving me so kindly. I shall do my best to follow the fine example set me by the noble Viscount, Lord Kilmuir, and I undertake to serve your Lordships to the best of my ability.