Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. We are extremely fortunate that she is serving in this Grand Committee. On a wider front, we are extremely fortunate that she is the chairman of the HS Chapman Society, an organisation with which I am familiar not least also in Australia. It is an organisation of considerable value to the general body politic. I have to declare an unusual interest. My wife is the administrator of the fellowship of retired Conservative agents, whose membership is thrice the number of agents the Conservative Party could afford to field at the last general election. But it means that from time to time I am brought up sharp on election law. I want to make two comments. One relates to paragraph (a) and the other to paragraph (b) of the amendment. First, I was the first headhunter in the United Kingdom nearly 50 years ago. I planted an acorn and there is now a very substantial forest throughout the recruiting world. One of the areas in which you had to exercise considerable discipline was in ensuring that the client was quite clear what they wanted before we set out to look for the person. Periodically, we had to disagree with their specifications and had to persuade them to change. But it was absolutely essential to do that at the beginning of the process, which is why I find paragraph (a) a wholly worthwhile contribution to the debate. I have no reservations about it being in the Bill. However, I do have misgivings about paragraph (b). It seems to me that under American anti-trust law, you would have to be managing a cartel to know how your nominee would fit into the creative diversity of appointments by the other members of the team. If the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is contemplating that such meetings will occur to facilitate discussions on how parties could help the diversity by the choice of their person, that should be referred to in the Bill. It is difficult to imagine how you would do it otherwise. Frankly, without some degree of mutual conference, choosing your candidate against the terms of paragraph (b) would be like sticking the tail on the donkey at a village fete.