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Andrew Tyrie: 'There is an accountability vacuum in so many areas'

The Business Interview: The Treasury Select Committee chairman is an unconventional man, which is just as well, says Sean O'Grady

Thursday 29 July 2010 00:00 BST
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He's a clever man, is Andrew Tyrie. Slight, slim to the point of concern, but intellectually heavyweight. You have to be if you're going to be the chair of the Treasury Select Committee. When you have to take on Mervyn "Merve the Swerve" King, Governor of the Bank of England, in hand-to-hand combat, you need to have your wits about you. When you have to pin down the likes of George Osborne (no fool, despite what some say), you need think on your feet. To get your mind round everything from macro prudential regulation to, say, the causes of our jobless recovery requires a certain cerebral self-assurance.

Mr Tyrie does not lack such qualities, nor a certain eccentric charm. This, though, can shade into being patronising to honourable members possibly less well endowed with the old grey matter. Still, he doesn't seem to mind journalists too much, so he must be tolerant.

Brains alone, though, have not been enough to propel him into the chairmanship of one of the most powerful select committees and one that is gaining weight seemingly every week. It may even surpass in power the older and traditionally more prestigious Public Accounts Committee. There's a certain amount of Roundheaded zeal, too, in Tyrie's mission to restore representative democracy to health. Before our interview I had wanted to ask why someone as bright as him wasn't in the Government, before I realised that this would be a bit of an insult, betraying a certain jaundiced hack's view of what Parliamentary work is worth. He is a natural watchdog rather than a minister, but he has seen government from the inside. He was special adviser to Chancellors John Major and Nigel Lawson and worked for Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 election. He has some practical money experience, too, working for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

But Parliament seems to be where he is most content and he is enjoying his new committee chairmanship like others do their iPhones. In the first few weeks of its latest iteration, the Treasury Select Committee has won the right to veto the appointment of the permanent head of the office for Budget Responsibility and then extended that veto to the chair's dismissal. It is a move that Mr Tyrie sees as hugely significant, something that could prove a "beacon" for appointments to other public bodies.

"It sets a precedent that Parliament and select committees can take advantage of in the years ahead," he says. "Many of these arms-length public bodies are scarcely accountable. There is an accountability vacuum in so many areas that its small wonder Parliament is held in a lower regard."

His ambition – ultimate and cautiously stated, but there unmistakeably – is to help build something closer to the American system of Congressional Committees. "It's a different country with a different constitution. But we do have something to learn from the Congressional Committees, who have taken over the primary role of scrutiny in the United States and have the power to call for papers, to subpoena witnesses and enjoy far greater resources," he says. That approach, he adds, is preferable to trying to grill ministers in a "noisy converted chapel which is unlikely to impress a highly-educated 21st century electorate." A veto over the appointment of a Governor of the Bank? It is a logical step, one would have thought. Successor?

I meet this parliamentary iconoclast in his office in the original Scotland Yard building, a Victorian pile across the road from the palace itself and behind the shiny new Portcullis House. Mr Tyrie occupies a spacious perch at the top of the building and someone tells me it was once the home of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Tyrie in his eyrie, you might say. Anyway, he is ready for Parliament to soar like an eagle.

"The fight back by Parliament is beginning now, after decades of it shedding its moral authority and losing opportunities for parliamentary scrutiny of executive decisions," he says. Recent developments, he thinks, could be a turning point. "Looking back it could be that the recent election and the removal of the whips from the appointment of select committee chairs will come to be seen as a decisive moment in stemming what has come to be perceived as the inexorable decline of Parliament".

A man of traditional tastes – he seems especially keen apple and blackberry crumble with crème anglais – his contempt for Westminster tradition is a little startling. He has no time for the "stylised language" of the place, and what passes for Parliamentary wit. He makes no effort to disguise his distaste at the "Victorian pantomime" of Prime Minster's questions. He is described in Roth's Parliamentary Profiles, the bible for political writers, as a "minor Machiavelli". He probably had to be a bit of one to win the chairmanship – elected by the House for the first time. Replacing the affable and well-regarded John McFall, he was up against Michael Fallon, who has been on the committee since 1999, chaired the banking sub-committee and was a junior minister under John Major.

Mr Fallon it was who led much of the Committee's widely-praised work on the banking crisis. Mr Tyrie managed to win the vote by the surprisingly wide margin of 352 votes to 219, propelling last year's Spectator backbencher of the year into a crucial role.

He is conscious, though, that he is leading a team unusually strong in experience and, for want of a better word, creativity. In yesterday's session with the Bank of England, for example, one of the new Committee members, Andrea Leadsom, was able to share with King her experience of working with his predecessor Eddie George on the collapse of Barings in 1995 when she was at Barclays, Barings' bankers.

One way or another Mr Tyrie seems to have found himself with two other very promising members of the class of 2010 – Chuka Umunna, Labour MP for Streatham, who carries authority and audacity way in excess of his years, and Jesse Norman, the Tory now representing Hereford. The old committee had the misfortune to have had Sir Peter Viggers on it, who became famous for the duck house he bought on expenses. Mr Tyrie's larger than average committee of 13 were all there for their hearings with the Bank yesterday, in what was technically the Parliamentary recess – and have taken on a heavy workload. The report on the Budget is already done and we await the fruits of their enquires into the Office for Budget Responsibility, Financial Regulation and Competition and Choice in the Banking Sector. The comprehensive spending review in the Autumn would seem an obvious target. Plus the usual round of confirmation hearings.

The truth is that the Bank of England is accruing to itself unprecedented power. Forty or fifty years ago dimly remembered Chancellors such as Selwyn Lloyd or James Callaghan would get up in the Commons and announce that they had raised the Bank Rate or restricted the supply of mortgages by the banks and building societies. Now those powers are housed in Threadneedle Street, or will be shortly. In the coalition agreement there was even a clause whereby the new Government's fiscal measures would be taken after consultations with the Bank.

The Treasury Committee is all there is in the way of democratic accountability of the Bank. Mr Tyrie and his 12 disciples have a big job to do. It's lucky they're all so brainy.

The intelligent path to power: Andrew Tyrie – CV

1981-83 After Oxford, Cambridge and Bruges, joins BP

1990-91 Special Adviser to Tory ministers

1992-1997 Senior economist, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

1997 Elected MP for Chichester

2010 Chairman, Treasury Select Committee

Apart from parliamentary scrutiny Mr Tyrie enjoys running and golf.

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