Irvine breaks silence over Blair

Former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine has broken his six-year silence about the events which led to him leaving his former protege Tony Blair's cabinet.

Lord Irvine says he warned Mr Blair that the plans to axe the post of Lord Chancellor in 2003 were "incoherent".

And he warned Mr Blair he should have consulted him, the judiciary, the House of Lords and the Queen about the plan.

Mr Blair, he tells a Lords committee, had "no appreciation" of some of the implications of his proposed change.

Lord Irvine puts his side of the June 2003 "botched" reshuffle in an 11 page submission to the House of Lords Constitution Committee, which is inquiring into the Cabinet Office and the Centre of Government.

He says he was prompted to put his side because the then cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull told the committee in June that the 2003 reshuffle had been a "complete mess up" partly because Lord Irvine "was strongly against it so you got no co-operation from him".

'High handed and insensitive'

In his paper, Lord Irvine - who first brought Tony Blair and his future wife Cherie together after giving them legal jobs - says: "When I ceased to be Lord Chancellor in June 2003 I decided to make no complaint, to maintain silence and to do nothing to embarrass the government.

"I have now decided that it is more important to ensure the accuracy of the public record."

Lord Irvine says he only found out about the proposed axing of the historic post of Lord Chancellor - the then head of the judiciary, a cabinet minister and Speaker of the House of Lords - after newspaper reports a week before the reshuffle happened.

"I personally am being cast aside. I am being ejected - and all this for no proven benefit arising out of the abolition of the office."

He says that when he asked Mr Blair about it the prime minister "hesitated and then said it was being considered but nothing had as yet been decided".

The proposed changes were to replace the Law Lords with a new Supreme Court and to transfer the powers of the Lord Chancellor to the new Department for Constitutional Affairs which, Lord Irvine says he was told, would have Peter Hain as its head.

Lord Irvine said he told Mr Blair that what was being proposed was a "botched job" and was missing the opportunity to transfer the Home Office's criminal law and procedure responsibilities into the new department and so at least create a Ministry of Justice.

"All that is happening is that the LCD (Lord Chancellor's Department) is being handed over to a Commons minister with the office of Lord Chancellor abolished," he says he told Mr Blair.

"The Lord Chancellor as head of the Judiciary is presently the central organising principle of the administration of justice in the country and that is being swept aside without any assessment of its value and without consultation with the judiciary," he said in a note given to Mr Blair at their meeting two days before the reshuffle.

"To proceed without any consultation with the judiciary, and without any consultation with the House authorities because of my role as Speaker is high handed and insensitive," he added.

'Ridicule' warning

He wrote: "I personally am being cast aside. I am being ejected - and all this for no proven benefit arising out of the abolition of the office. This should be done in a seemly, measured and balanced way, instead of the incoherent, unworked up and piecemeal approach."

In a last-minute attempt to halt the plan, Lord Irvine put forward his own alternative proposal to the one which he believed "would hold the government up to ridicule" and with which he said "I could not myself play any part".

This alternative would have seen Lord Irvine staying on to see through a series of initiatives already under way and piloting through the legislation to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and the creation of a new Supreme Court.

"We would announce that I would leave the government when Royal Assent was achieved," he suggested to Mr Blair.

But his "alternative proposition" was rejected after Cabinet on the day of the reshuffle.

The reshuffle itself was described by the Conservatives as the "most botched and shambolic reshuffle in living memory", and by England and Wales's then most senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf as a "cause for concern".

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