Some six years after his ‘retirement’ from the frontline of politics, Labour’s Lord Falconer is still at it, still worming away, still trying to impose himself on the way we live — and die.
Tomorrow the House of Lords will consider his proposals for altering rules on assisted suicide. If he has his way, patients who have been told they have six months to live will be able to demand access to a doctor who will give them a fatal phial of drugs.
Lord Falconer, with his ever-lawyerly eye for paper-thin distinctions, claims this is not ‘assisted suicide’ but ‘assisted dying’. He insists that it is a humane and practical idea.
His critics call it immoral, ‘Orwellian’, and say frail patients may find themselves being hastened to their deaths by greedy relations and all-too-persuadable doctors.
A hard-pressed hospital clinician is offered a chance to sign away the life of dotty old Mrs Perkins and thus clear another bed in his ward: will he be able to resist this solution to his over-crowding problems?
Another doctor rushes in and says: ‘Good news, the test results got mixed up, Mrs Perkins’s tumour is benign after all.’ To which the death doctor replies: ‘You’re too late. She just swallowed her fatal dose.’
AmbitiousThe House of Lords has repeatedly refused to legalise euthanasia. Yet tomorrow, humanists and the solipsistic right-to-die brigade will again be lined up on one side of the House, syringes at the ready.
The cassocked bishops and more cautious legislators will wring their hands on the other side of the debate, along with some severely disabled campaigners who say life is too precious to be signed away with a doctor’s scrawl. Once again the arguments will be emotive and quite possibly inconclusive.
The pros and cons of this most difficult of issues, however, are not the sole aspect that should concern us, in my view. There is also the behaviour — the intensely political and hungrily ambitious personality — of the rotund, busy little figure who is pushing them so relentlessly on to the parliamentary agenda.
Lord Falconer is the creator behind the secretive Court of Protection, whereby a court can seize the assets of the gravely ill or incapacitated without them being able to do anything about itWhat drives Lord Falconer? What is his game? Is he doing this truly for the good of those who may be nearing the end of life? Or is it more about him and his desire — I almost said his beady-eyed, lifelong campaign — to push the legal profession to the very fore of British life, in this case by enshrining the right to die in law?
Must his juristic pontifications always trump time-honoured moderation. Can he leave nothing as it is?
Charles Leslie Falconer is the former public schoolboy who had the good fortune once to share a flat with his fellow ‘posh Scot’ Tony Blair. From room-mate to Minister of the Crown: abracadabra.
Falconer had the good fortune once to share a flat with his fellow 'posh Scot' Tony BlairHow easy things were if you had the right social connections in the Blair age. And they talk of David Cameron having a ‘chumocracy’!
Mr Falconer, as he then was, did try to gain the Labour Party nomination for a parliamentary seat in the Midlands, but his chances with the Comrades shrivelled when they learned that he was an enthusiast for private education. Next candidate, please.
Chubby, chatty Falconer was a lawyer, and how. He oozed lawyerly gossip. His moist face creased with delight as he mimicked top judges.
His head fizzed with all sorts of ideas for reform of a legal world in which the markedly less cerebral Blair had sometimes struggled as a barrister. Did Blair see his chance for revenge on the system?
Falconer was first in the queue for life peerages and in 1997 became Lord Falconer of Thoroton. He became Solicitor General, just like that, and he survived being ‘Dome Secretary’ (i.e. minister for the ill-fated Millennium Dome).
There were spells as Minister for Housing and later at the Home Office, looking after sentencing and law reform. Then, in 2003, he really hit the big time when Blair sacked boozy old Derry Irvine as Lord Chancellor (Derry, another intimate, had once been Blair’s tutor) and replaced him with Falconer, who now took the distinctly European title of Justice Secretary.
It was Falconer who scrapped the centuries-old Law Lords and gave us instead a Supreme Court.
Quite a word, ‘supreme’, is it not? Supreme to other courts or supreme to Parliament: which was intended?
What with the Human Rights Act having given lawyers a licence to print banknotes, and with European law eroding the foundations of our parliamentary democracy, this Supreme Court certainly soon started fancying its chances. Legal challenge to ministerial decisions became the fashion.
It was Falconer who scrapped the centuries-old Law Lords and gave us instead a Supreme Court (pictured)Falconer created the Supreme Court (with its fancy building directly opposite the Palace of Westminster) in the name of greater ‘separation of the powers’. He wanted to protect those sensitive lawyers from the muckiness of politics.
Was that all it achieved? Has it not also put the legal estate in the cockpit of our national affairs?
Have they not grabbed more power, topping the other ancient estates of the realm — the Church, the Monarchy, the Commons and the Press? In short, have we not been taken over by lawyers?
Consider the moves to regulate, some would say ‘neuter’, the newspapers. Who do we find involved in that campaign? Why, Lord Falconer.
He was there on the infamous night when Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and the Hacked Off pressure group allegedly monstered Oliver Letwin into legislating against the free Press.
Mr Miliband’s position on Press regulation has been largely ordained by Lord Falconer. And it was Falconer who, with useful idiot Lord Puttnam, threw a spanner into the Defamation Bill earlier this year to increase pressure on the Government to cave in to the newspaper industry’s enemies.
Powers Mr Miliband's position on Press regulation has been largely ordained by Lord FalconerIf that sounds like special pleading from a journalist, let us look at the secretive Court of Protection, whose powers are only just starting to cause widespread unease.
This court can seize the assets of the gravely ill or incapacitated without them being able to do anything about it. Its creator? Lord Falconer, back in 2005. Does this man have a problem with ill people?
And then there was Falconer’s egregious conduct in the House of Lords when he led the campaign by unelected peers (he himself being the Big Daddy of all Unelected Busybodies) to derail the Bill which would have made parliamentary constituency sizes more equal.
Being an unelected political insider, Lord Falconer may understandably have little time for the principles of democracy. But why should he be able to perpetuate a gerrymandered system which gives his Labour party a disgraceful electoral advantage?
Is this truly the behaviour of a devoted public servant? Or is it the mark of a low party fixer, a man who will do anything to please his political master (who for now happens to be Ed Miliband).
Former Lord Chancellors once behaved with magisterial grandeur when they left that great office of state. They would put aside much of their partisanship. This man is behaving more like a driven commissar than a dignitary of public life.
Assisted suicide is but his latest interest, some might say obsession. He even chaired something called the Commission on Assisted Dying, which may have sounded official but was self-selected and was co-financed by writer and Alzheimer’s sufferer Terry Pratchett, who is in favour of euthanasia.
BewitchingIt is odd, really. ‘Cheerful Charlie’ Falconer himself is such an effervescent bundle. It would be hard to match him for clubbish bonhomie. He gobbles his way through life, chuckling, burbling, bubbling away like an amateur inventor’s chemistry laboratory.
Yet here he is, proselytising for the Grim Reaper. His sparkling social front is simply a bewitching act. His lordship has played dirty, breaking parliamentary conventions and pushing the constitutional settlements at Westminster to breaking point.
He has flattered, cajoled, plotted, schemed and (how paradoxical this) kicked for survival against those who wanted to euthanase his political career.
Lord Falconer, with his ever-lawyerly eye for paper-thin distinctions, claims it is not 'assisted suicide' but 'assisted dying'. He insists that it is a humane and practical ideaSomehow — not easy in today’s Labour Party for a Blairite — he has kept himself in the swim, to the extent that the Shadow Justice Secretary leans on him frequently and, as we have seen, he has Mr Miliband chewing Good Boy drops from his palm.
Though he resigned in 2007 (before new PM Gordon Brown was able to sack him), the multi-millionaire Falconer — who also has a lucrative sideline with an American law firm — has seldom been busier.
One Labour MP observes: ‘In politics there is formal power and informal power, and Charlie is very much a wielder of the latter. He remains a considerable presence at the top of the party. He is still a player.’
Svengali lives, even if old Mrs Perkins and her ilk may not be so fortunate.
