ConservativeHome's Interviews

Paul Goodman interviews Nick Herbert

In the third of a series of interviews - Jeremy Hunt and Theresa Villiers have already been quizzed - Paul Goodman interviews the Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Nick Herbert MP. Greg Clark will be next in the series.

I make a few enquiries before seeing Nick Herbert.  There's a feeling in some quarters that this glittering star of the right - former Director of Reform, Chief Executive of Business for Sterling  - has vanished as though behind a thick cloud.  There was a dogfight on this site recently here and here between Herbert and Matt Sinclair of the Taxpayers' Alliance about the former's proposal for a Supermarkets Ombudsman.  To Sinclair, Herbert's argument was "pretty spurious" and the Shadow Environment Secretary was in one respect "patronising".  As a committed free marketeer, Herbert should know better than to want to set up yet another quango.  To Herbert, the Taxpayers' Alliance was "ludicruously" suggesting that he wants to fix prices, but although he believes in the free economy "there’s such a thing as market failure, and where the public interest is threatened, government has a responsibility to act".

"I confess to being a bit disappointed in Nick," one figure from the world of Conservative think-tankery told me.  "He seems to have been captured by the farming producer interest."  Another disagreed.  "I think he's doing fine.  And it's impossible in this day and age, if you're a Shadow Cabinet member, to think aloud off your brief at any time - let alone during the run-up to an election.  First thing you know you've generated some "split" story.  Next thing you know you're off the Leader's Christmas card list.  Next thing you're not in a Conservative Cabinet."

Herbert is "mettlesome, high-energy, restless" in taking on his critics

Perhaps.  What struck me about the Herbert/Sinclair exchanges was how Herbert refused to cower behind a wall of vanilla prose.  In the mettlesome, high-energy, restless way that I remember from his Reform days, he set about his critics by name, raising rather than lowering the temperature: "As the co-founder of the Reform think-tank, I confess that being lectured on economic liberalism is a new experience."  But if Herbert's style hasn't changed, has the substance?

"Firstly, I don't think that I've gone quiet at all," says Herbert.  Tieless and blue-shirted, he's grabbed a corner table in the Commons Portcullis House cafe, and alternates between gazing off into the middle distance and staring at me directly.   "I'm in a brief that's not so much in the front line for the last year as the economy's come to the fore.  I think it's harder to get profile and coverage and I think that's just objectively the fact... funnily enough a lot of the green organisations are saying the same thing.  They can't get a look-in at the moment, not suprisingly the downturn is kind of all-consuming."

"I've been making a lot of noise in rural communities"

He goes on to argue that there's a big difference between what obsesses the Westminster village and what interests real villages, so to speak.  "Secondly, I spend a lot of my time out in the rural areas and the rural communities where I've been making a lot of noise.  I don't think you'd find that people out there think that I've gone silent."

He reels off an action list.  "Rather than going quiet the first thing I did was set up the honest food campaign which had a big reach-out.  Then I launched rural action, an agenda to return power to people and communities, to find a way of recognising social value in rural services.  I set up a website called future countryside which has been debating radical new ideas for how we would secure investment in conservation in the future, and reverse the countryside's decline - not through traditional state mechanisms of regulation and public spending, but by using market mechanisms such as conservation credits...looking at things like payment for eco-system services.  Ideas very much at the radical end of thinking in terms of how we might value wildlife in the future."

"Conservatives do not believe in unfettered free markets"

And he sticks to his guns on the Supermarket Ombudsman.  "I'm a Conservative and a believer in free markets and I guess it was an unusual experience for me to be lectured by some of my friends.  If you believe in free markets you have to understand the concept of market failure.  The supermarkets run close to being an oligopsony and exercise very considerable market dominance, and where that happens it can be against the interests of the consumer."  But isn't there a danger that future Labour Governments will turn an Ombudsman into a price-fixing regulator - the very policy Herbert criticises the Liberal Democrats for supporting?  He won't concede the point.  "I think we've reached a sensible balance."  Did he ever say at Reform that "Conservatives do not believe in unfettered free markets"?  "I certainly did, yes."

Herbert's language is just as radical as I remember.  (Some years ago, I remember him trying a line for a speech on me.  It was something like: "I want to see a revolution sweep away the whole Westminster establishment".  "Am I understating the case?" he asked.)  My tape of the interview is studded with Herbertisms - "there's a need to turn politics inside out", he declares at one point - but I want to probe about specifics.

What about Reform's radical, market ideas on healthcare?  "I don't think that we can agree with all the radical prescriptions that Reform are recommending on healthcare at the moment."  At the moment?  "No, I don't think we can agree with them...and they'd probably be dismayed if we did."  What about early action on a British Bill of Rights?  (Herbert was a vociferous critic on the Human Rights Act when Shadow Justice Secretary.)  "I inherited an existing position - that we would scrap the Human Rights Act and bring in a British Bill of Rights, and I mounted a very strong critique of the Act when I was Shadow Justice Secretary."  I'm intrigued by his form of words on inheriting a position - would he have wanted to go further by simply scrapping the Act?  But he's not being drawn.  "It's not my responsibility now.  I think that if you move on in any form of life you really have to vacate that space for the person or organisation that takes over from you."  Does he regret voting for David Davis in the last leadership election?  Herbert barks a laugh.  "Well, I worked, as I think you did, on the first DD leadership campaign.  He's an old friend and if I hadn't supported him I'd have ended up with my nose broken, at least."  This sounds like an admission of error.  Is Herbert backing off?  "No, it was the right thing for me to do at the time."

I'm struck as ever by the way in which Herbert combines an ease in thinking aloud about ideas with a kind of personal reticence.  Ask him about conservatism and liberalism, and he's off: "If like me you're an economic liberal and have a prior attachment to personal freedom and liberty, what is it that makes you a Conservative rather than a Liberal?  I think it is a powerful belief in institutions - in what I'd call a social fabric."  He comes from a Conservative family.  His grandfather was Managing Director of Shell Oil.  His father worked for the company; his mother was a farmer's daughter.  "I think I voted Liberal in the first election I ever voted in, mainly to irritate my father."

Try him on abortion, and you get a well-rounded answer, not the usual politician's unease with the subject.  "I've always had a very strong resistance to the advance of utilitarian arguments when it comes to dealing with human life."  (He wants to lower the limit.)  Or on the Iraq War, where he makes the case that Kosovo and 9/11 changed Bush and Blair's view on intervention - "and I think that I would have shared that view."

But try him on an area where the political and the personal interact - such as gay rights - and he demonstrates a hesitancy about placing himself at the centre of the drama.  "I was originally rather reluctant about this kind of thing.  When I was first elected I thought that what I would like to be is someone who can get elected regardless of their sexuality - that nobody need bring it up, that it needn't be an issue...I still stand by that and it's the goal we want to achieve."  However, "I realised after a time that it mattered to demonstrate that the Party's changing, and that it's important to challenge the assumption on the left that it owns gay people."  Herbert stoutly maintains that he volunteered recently to go to America to showcase the Party's view.

There has been a sense among former friends that Nick Herbert has lost his reforming edge...

He sums up.  "Think-tanks have a really important role as ice-breakers of the revolution to advance ideas - to goad politicians to day things that are ahead of their time.  Thank God for them.  That's why I set up a think-tank.  But think tanks think and politicians decide."

Nick Herbert MP answers your questions

The new Shadow Secretary of State for Justice answers the questions that you posed here.

601: What do you think of giving judges "investigative" powers?

First of all, can I thank Conservative Home for giving me the opportunity to answer these questions?  Getting a read-out of activists' concerns is itself very useful as I begin this new job.

I'm willing to consider any serious proposal to improve our system of justice, and I think we need to be especially open-minded about reforms when it comes to ensuring national security.  Introducing investigatory magistrates along the French line would, though, be a pretty radical departure from the English legal system.  The Home Office admits that we could not simply incorporate elements of the investigatory procedure into our system: we would have to address our whole legal culture.  I'm told that in France there's increasing disquiet over the system, with people are starting to feel that it means prosecuting judges are too close to the judges who hear trials.

I'll look more carefully at this, and there may for instance be some limited application in relation to the use of intercept evidence, but generally my instinct is that the police should retain control over investigations.  It's obviously important to retain the independence of the judiciary, but it's also important that prosecutions are led by police officers and a Crown Prosecution system which are both publicly accountable.   I'm particularly interested in how effective that accountability is.

Simon: Why do our police force resemble that of Springfield's police force under the 'dynamic' leadership of Chief Wiggum? For example: my car was written off by a gormless driver- no fault of my own. Whilst having PC Plod at the scene, I had him come up to me and say 'the treads on your tyres are a little thin'!!! He was not joking. I'm surprised i kept me gob shut on THAT one. Could we have DCI Gene Hunt made Home Secretary please? Less 'softly, softly'- thank you.

I think David Davis would be a safer bet!  No-one should want to turn the clock back to the bad old days of cops like DCI Hunt framing suspects or beating them up in the cells.   But I do think we need to restore discretion to police officers, get them back out on the streets, and return some common sense to crime fighting.  I set out my proposals to enhance police accountability and drive up performance in "Policing for the People", which can be seen at www.policereform.com.  The Government immediately responded by launching its own review purporting to cover the same ground, but the new Home Secretary has already expressed opposition to one key element, directly elected police commissioners.   It'll be for David Davis and my successor as Shadow Minister for Police Reform, David Ruffley, to decide how our ideas are taken forward.

Any questions for Nick Herbert?

Nick has been the MP for Arundel & South Downs since May 2005. In December 2005 David Cameron appointed Nick as the Shadow Minister for Police Reform, and in July 2007 he was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice responsible for policy on prisons, constitutional issues, criminal law, courts and sentencing.

Prior to his election Nick was the Director of Reform, the independent think tank which he co-founded in 2002.  Reform aims to “set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity” and has been described by commentators as “the most important think tank to emerge for a decade”.

Before that, from 1998 to 2000, Nick was Chief Executive of Business for Sterling, where he launched the successful ‘no’ campaign against the euro.  He continues to believe that too much power has been transferred to the European Union and that the process not only needs to be halted but also now put in reverse so that powers are returned to national parliaments where they belong.

If you have any questions for Nick please leave them in the thread below.