Westminster: Lacking business bite

Retiring Conservative MP Archie Norman has warned that the UK is on the rocky road to the "the professionalisation of parliament".

The former Asda chief, who stood down from the Commons on Monday, tells The Parliamentary Monitor magazine that more business people should be drafted into Westminster to run major government departments.

"People who serve in government are drawn entirely from the ranks of long-term professional politicians; the country will be poorer for it," he said.

"It should be a measure of the health of the system that men and women of achievement should come and serve for a decade in public life and then go back to private life."

While he accepts that businessmen do not necessarily make good politicians, he says their skills are vital within big spending government departments.

"Politics is a very different skill, and professional political leadership will always predominate," said Norman.

"But asking a former university lecturer to move from opposition politics to running the NHS, the largest enterprise in Europe, is a feat challenge. No disrespect, but think about it."

In the interview, the leading businessman turned Tory politician admits to the failure of his party in recent years.

And as he heads back to a business career, Norman concedes he entered politics during a "barren period" for the Conservatives.

"We need to encourage people to spend time in public life. I came into politics filled with hope, perhaps naïvely believing that the Conservative Party would regenerate itself to become electable again in 2001," he said.

"We made some progress but not nearly enough. In the political world, when the tide goes out, you go out with it.

"That's the way it was. I think few of us at the time realised just how long it was going to take, just how slow the journey was.

"So I ploughed on, confident in a bright new dawn, and the sun didn't come up."