Lord Falconer of Thoroton
Charles Falconer has been at the heart of politics, for the last decade, and commercial life for the twenty five years before that. He was a minister in Tony Blair’s government for all of its ten year life, Lord Chancellor for the last four years.
Before 1997 he was a commercial barrister, involved in many significant commercial issues of the day, for example: the legality of the first gulf war; the asbestosis litigation in the USA, and the UK, and its effect on the insurance market; the 84/5 Miners’ strike; the BCCI collapse; and the Maxwell frauds.
In 1997 he joined the Blair government as Solicitor-General, moving a year later to the Cabinet Office where he became part of the team around the Prime Minister. He was involved in all the critical issues which faced the government from 1998 until the 2001 election – for example relations with Europe, the Euro, the intervention in Kosovo, the petrol crisis, and employment law changes.
In 2001, after the general election, he became Housing, Planning and Regeneration Minister and in 2002 he became Criminal Justice Minister. In 2003 he became Lord Chancellor, with the remit of abolishing the office. He concluded, pretty quickly, that the aims of abolition could and should be achieved through reform not abolition. In conjunction with the then Lord Chief Justice he worked out a detailed new relationship between the judiciary and the executive, which was embodied in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005.
His reforms included the creation, for the first time of a Supreme Court, for the UK, the creation of a commission to appoint judges, making a full-time independent judge the Head of the Judiciary for England and Wales, and introducing an elected Speaker for the House of Lords. In 2007 he became the first Secretary of State for Justice, bringing together courts, prisons and justice policy for the first time.
Lord Falconer became Chairman of the John Smith Memorial Trust in 2008 following the retirement of Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.