Lawyers, Damn Lawyers

"What good is the House of Commons? It's full of lawyers," somebody asks in David Hare's play about the state of the privatised railway, The Permanent Way. Audiences at the National Theatre, it's said, have been cheering this sentiment.

It certainly squares with the widespread man-in-the-street assumption that the place is awash with these pesky creatures. Assaults in the press on Geoff Hoon often point out that he is a lawyer, as if this were some form of disease. Some of the parliamentary sketchwriters have recently been complaining that since Michael Howard (a barrister) began to do battle with Tony Blair (a barrister) at prime minister's questions, these sessions, though improved in the sense that they don't always end in a 5-0 home win as they did when IDS was the leader, have too much of the courtroom about them. And statistics confirm that, given the proportion of the population at large who are lawyers, there is really quite a profusion at Westminster.

In the Nuffield study of the 2001 election, Byron Criddle counts 31 lawyers among the 412 Labour MPs, 31 among the 166 Conservatives, and six among the 52 Liberal Democrats. To that we can add two Scottish Nationalists, one man from Plaid Cymru, and one (David Trimble) among Northern Ireland MPs, making 72 out of 659. Not all of them are still practising but, as is so often observed in court waiting rooms, once a lawyer, always a lawyer. Fair-minded people would have to admit that lawyers are greatly outnumbered on the Labour side by school, college and university teachers (98), though the Tories have only eight of these and the Lib Dems 12; but somehow they don't get so pilloried as do the lawyers.

Fair-minded people, too, would have to admit that the figures used to be even worse (or, if you're a lawyer, still better). In Elections and Electors, by JFS Ross, published in 1955, there's a table showing the strength of the lawyer contingent in the immediate postwar years, excluding in this case those who though qualified had never actually practised. The 1945 parliament had 67 barristers and 16 solicitors; that of 1950 had 84 of the former and 24 of the latter. Again, the ranks of barristry were most richly represented on the Conservative side. Ross estimates that nearly one in four of Conservative members in the House of Commons after the 1945 election, and again in 1950 and 1951, was some kind of lawyer. Today that figure is close to 19%.

One can see the attraction: some of the skills that make a successful lawyer, including the art of making a good case seem irresistible and a poor case look meaty, are essential to politics too. It seems curious in the circumstances, and some comfort perhaps to those who cheer at David Hare's sally at lawyers, that so few of them have got to the very top. Of the 13 Conservative leaders during the 20th century, only one was a lawyer - and she (Margaret Thatcher) had hardly been a Marshall Hall or George Carman, having specialised in the law on patents. Labour over the century mustered just three lawyer-leaders: Clement Attlee and John Smith, plus the aforementioned Blair. The real lawyer-fans were the Liberals, with Asquith (barrister) followed by Lloyd George (solicitor), and later in succession Clement Davies, Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe. David Steel, Thorpe's successor, though not a lawyer, had read law at university.

It was ex-soldier Paddy Ashdown who broke the mould when he beat Alan Beith (an academic) in a lawyer-free contest to take the leadership of the newly reformed Liberal Democrats in 1988. Charles Kennedy, who came into parliament more or less straight from university, had read PPE rather than law; but the man he beat in 1999, Simon Hughes, is a lawyer, as is the man who ought to have won, Menzies Campbell.

But the history of the complaint that has so delighted David Hare's audiences goes back even further. It's well known that in Henry VI part 2 Shakespeare has a character say: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (I bet that used to be cheered at the Globe.) But in Edward Pearce's new book on the 1832 Reform Act, I discover a speech by Robert Inglis, the ultra-reactionary member for Oxford University, who, anxious to counter the claim that the unreformed Commons had too little authority, said that things had been very much worse. Why, Henry IV, he said, had banned lawyers from sitting in parliament. I haven't been able to verify this contention, but no doubt there are those in the stalls of the National who would like to see that ban reinstated.

Next week in this space, perhaps: does the House of Commons contain too many journalists?