As Daniel Greenberg prepares to take up his role as parliamentary commissioner for standards, he talks to Rosie Dawson about how his Jewish faith has shaped his life and work, and about the challenges he sees ahead.
When Daniel Greenberg walks into his parliamentary office on 3 January he will be keeping a rabbinic principle at the forefront of his mind: Derech eretz kadma, which can be translated as “decency before religion”.
The new standards commissioner, who begins his five-year term of office next week, is visibly Jewish — he wears the kippah. “It means I’m clearly holding myself out as being a visibly religious person … committed to a particular religious way of life,” he says. He expects that may lead some MPs to ask themselves whether he will be looking at standards from a religious fundamentalist rather than a neutral position.
“What I need to do is win people’s confidence by showing that [while] my religion is very important to who I am and does influence everything I do, it’s not going to spill over so that there’s some sort of religious flavour given to the role.
“Doing this job will satisfy the religious side of me,” he told me. “It’s not that I will push religion into politics. It’s that as a religious person I will find this a satisfying role.”
Greenberg, who succeeds Kathryn Stone in the role, is currently the counsel for domestic legislation in the Commons and was previously parliamentary counsel for 20 years. Two years ago, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath.
He grew up as part of an Orthodox Jewish community in Golders Green, northwest London. Religion lay at the heart of his family’s life.
“It was very profound and very much values-based,” he says. “As a household we felt that religion was not just about ritual but was a unifying force that brought values together and expressed them in our own religious activity.”
He inherited a healthy scepticism from his parents, he says, meaning that there were constant checks on religious observance to ensure that it remained true to the ethics underpinning it. While ritual has kept Judaism alive over the millennia, providing community for Jews wherever they find themselves, it is also “dangerous, because if it isn’t kept firmly linked with values it takes over and becomes an end in its own right”, he says. “The rabbis have warned about this over the centuries.” Derech eretz kadma.
Greenberg was drawn to the law at an early age. He couldn’t add up, he says, and at school test tubes broke if he as much as looked at them. But he was always good at arguing. His growing interest in the law of the land went hand in hand with study of the Talmud, the body of Jewish law and teaching compiled and edited between the third and sixth centuries. He sees considerable overlap between the concerns of the two, with Talmudic law focusing less on philosophy and more on the practical regulating of environment, family and business.
I asked him whether the law — religious or secular — could create moral beings. He answered with reference to the 1932 Donoghue v Stevenson court decision, otherwise known as the case of the snail in the ginger beer.
“Lord Atkin [the judge] famously said, ‘The Bible says you should love neighbour as yourself; the law turns that into you must not injure your neighbour’ … The law is a blunt instrument for thumping people around the head. It’s not primarily an instrument of influencing, changing and improving behaviour. On the whole, it fails at that.”
Which brings us on to the question of his new job as parliamentary standards commissioner and how he will approach it. Responsibility for managing the behaviour of MPs on the floor of the House of Commons belongs to the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. The commissioner’s role does not extend to the House of Lords and there is a separate code for ministers, Rishi Sunak finally appointed the former banker Sir Laurie Magnus as the government’s ethics adviser just before Christmas. Greenberg’s task is to investigate alleged breaches of the code of conduct for MPs, and to offer advice and guidance to the Commons. It’s a big enough job for one person.
The code of conduct is based on the seven principles set out in Lord Nolan’s 1995 report on standards in public life: selflessness, integrity, honesty, accountability, leadership, transparency, and objectivity.
Greenberg says the purpose of the code is to inform not only how MPs behave, but also how they are perceived. Not surprisingly then, he sees the biggest challenge facing him as tackling the “depths to which the reputation of politicians as a class has sunk”.
Lobbying, bullying and absenteeism are all very serious breaches of public trust, he says, and he will certainly not be soft on dealing with breaches of the code and improper behaviour that have been the legitimate focus of media scrutiny.
Nevertheless, he believes that reputation is largely undeserved. “The vast majority of MPs are strongly and deeply committed to doing their job in a way that meets and advances integrity in public life,” he says. “These are reasons why people go into politics and the vast majority commit and want to be seen as committing to those standards.
“I’ll be looking to increase contacts with the many, many, MPs who take standards seriously and want to be seen to take them seriously. I will be looking for opportunities to help to develop that kind of practice and spread it among MP offices and staff, and to help to spread an awareness of how Nolan principles can influence day to day life.
“And I hope to do outreach work where people from outside parliament and those inside come together and compare notes, and perhaps shift the narrative a little bit so that standards isn’t all about which MP is going to do something wrong next.”
After 35 years spent at Westminster, Greenberg says he sees his new role as a culmination of his parliamentary career, bringing together two enduring parts of his life — his interest in the rule of law and legislation on the one hand and in communal religion and the role of religion in society on the other.
“Although this is more about ethics than it is about strictly religion, I am finally, towards the end of my parliamentary career, taking on a role that involves thinking not just about the law but also about wider ethical principles and applying them within a parliamentary context.”
And he will always be keeping in mind the principle derech eretz kadma. Decency before religion. Decency before politics, he might add.
