Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
THURSDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2005
LORD WILSON
OF DINTON
GCB AND PROFESSOR
PETER HENNESSY
Q1 Chairman: I welcome our witnesses
this morning: Lord Wilson, a former Cabinet Secretary, and Professor
Peter Hennessy, man about town. It is good to have you both together.
Primarily, we asked you to come and talk about the issues of memoirs
that we are having a look at. We started looking at it before
the most recent controversy but it shows that it is sensible to
do it. Because we have got you, we would like to ask you about
the other inquiries that we are doing at the moment too: one is
broadly on the area of ethics and standards in government; and
one on the minister-civil servant relationship. I hope you do
not mind if we touch on a number of areas, even though we shall
start with memoirs. Do either of you want to say anything by way
of introduction, or shall we just fire off?
Professor Hennessy: Briefly, Chairman,
may I explain this piece of paper I brought from the National
Archives, which everybody has, because I think it illustrates
the kind of ecology of expectations in that generation, this is
1970, about when you should publish, who should publish, the rigmarole
you should go through before you publish, and the degree to which
it is a world we have lost since 1970. Ted Heath has just been
Prime Minister for less than a month; Mr Macmillan's memoirs arrive
rather late and there is not enough time to read them. This is
a volume Riding the Storm covering 1956-59—this is
Richard's predecessor but four, I think—Sir Burke Trend
apologising for bothering the new Prime Minister with this, but
he is very alarmed, you see. The bit I would draw your attention
to is in the middle of the big paragraph on the first page: "It
is—needless to say—a very attractive work; lively,
interesting and very informative. Nevertheless, it comes dangerously
near to being `contemporary history'. . . ." This only went
up to 1959 and it was 1970. He warns Ted that he might have to
be called in aid to calm Harold down. Macmillan, as ever, is hilarious.
He says he is due to see his publisher, and so can they get on
with it. He was the President of Macmillan Publishing. It was
an elaborate joke really. Five years after this, and I know Richard
is going to be the guide on this, the ecology changed dramatically
again with the Crossman Diaries, which the then Cabinet
Secretary had to go to court to try to suppress and failed. And
the Radcliffe guidelines, which everybody seems to have forgotten
about—emerged from those: the 15-year voluntary reticence
on both of the parties to the governing marriage, officials and
now ministers, and now it has completely changed. I think that
has to do mainly with the very scratchy relationships, scratchier
than I have ever known it, between the partners to the governing
marriage, officials and the ministers, and the third party in
that marriage, the special advisers, but no doubt we can come
to that later. I thought if we started with this, it would show
you the degree to which expectations change over 30 years, almost
completely.
Q2 Chairman: It is a fascinating
text. The Committee has just had circulated to it also the letter
from the present Cabinet Secretary, Gus O'Donnell, to the publishers
of Sir Christopher Meyer. It is very interesting to compare these
two texts, just to show us the time that has elapsed between these
two moments. Peter, I want to ask you this to start with. You
have lived on both sides of this divide, have you not? You have
been the person who has sniffed around Whitehall giving these
secrets out as a journalist that people did not want to tell you.
I often tease you that your main reference in your books is always
called "private conversation". You have been the great
sleuth digging all this stuff out, and then you have become this
very distinguished historian of these things. When this memoir,
this stuff, comes out, I want to know which side you are on really.
Professor Hennessy: It is fascinating
but of course I love it on one level; there is nothing better.
It brings harmless joy to the reading public, serialisers of Sunday
newspapers, my old friends sitting on that bench there, even humble
contemporary historians and their students. On the other side,
in another bit of me, I think you have to have a pretty high level
of trust between the partners of the governing marriage. If you
do not, you are going to have serious trouble across the whole
of the piece. I have one or two thoughts, which I can come to
in a minute, if you like, about what the new Radcliffe settlement
might be in today's circumstances, because you have to start where
reality is. Let me do something historians are not meant to do,
leap forward. I have a feeling that when this Prime Minister has
finally gone to the Valhalla of the failed—that is a bit
unkind, the Valhalla of the departed—his Press Secretary,
Alastair Campbell, will publish his diary, and that will be the
equivalent of an archduke being shot in Sarajevo in July 1914.
It will be the opening salvo of the most ghastly mobilisation
of most wonderful exchanges of competitive memoiring. People will
have touched the acid keyboard in anticipation of that. I have
a slight suspicion—my old friend on my left here may confirm
this or not—that in anticipation of that day, people have
got defensive bits of paper of their own ready to put out. Geoff
Mulgan, who is a very considerable figure, in a very good radio
programme on Number 10 and all that, recently said how corrosive
it was to have the knowledge that Alastair Campbell is in the
meeting with the diary going that night. I think there is a lot
of defensive preparation there, and it will be like 1914. Timetables
will be mobilised. There will be the most enormous clash and you
will have to reconvene. You have this glorious opportunity, I
know you get fed up when I tell you this, to save the British
Constitution, but you are all we have got left really. Parliament,
through you, has the opportunity to get to a new settlement before
the equivalent of the Great War that Alastair Campbell's diaries
will stimulate, so go for it.
Q3 Chairman: You are on the Mulgan
side of the argument, are you?
Professor Hennessy: The glory
of having a very, very tight Whitehall—the old citadel when
Peter Riddell and David Hencke and I still had our hair and teeth
and were young and promising, was a really tough target. It is
a pushover now. You have freedom of information, competitive leaking,
and all these memoirs. It was so much more fun when you had to
treat it like an intelligence target and go for it over decades
and run networks of informants. I am knocking my friend here who
was extremely resistant to my charms in his day. It was much more
fun all round if we had to work for it rather than getting it
on a plate.
Q4 Chairman: This is the bit I was
asking you at the beginning. This is destroying your trade, is
it not?
Professor Hennessy: Yes. We will
have to find other ways to take on the mighty. I am sure there
are some. We could think of some together, could we not?
Q5 Chairman: Richard, could we have
your view? Has there been a falling off and what can be done about
it?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: I think
the change is less sharp than Peter is suggesting. I worked in
the Department of Energy in the 1970s under Tony Benn. I worked
on nuclear power for four years, which was an area which, to say
the least, was extremely contentious with a lot of tension between
Tony Benn and the centre of government, a lot of tension between
him and some of his officials. We all knew he was keeping a diary.
He made no secret of it. He went home every night and dictated
in the shed at the bottom of the garden. I do not think it affected
us at all. I think we knew it was going on and we just braced
ourselves for publication when it came. At that time, Brian Sedgemore
who was his PPS published—I have checked my facts here—Brian
Sedgemore published a book in 1980 called The Secret Constitution
in which he wrote in enormously detailed account of discussions
between the Secretary of State and officials, including summaries
of advice that was given. He broke every rule in the book, far
more so than Christopher Meyer or Lance Price or any other recent
publications. He also wrote a novel called Mr Secretary of
State in 1978 when he probably was still a PPS, or only just
stopping as PPS, in which all sorts of people appear and settings
including a conference at Sunningdale which I organised. He has
a great account of how difficult it was to get people to organise
it. There is a sense in which at that time people were publishing
things I think in rather more detail than they are now. I do not
think anyone made a great fuss about it. We are more sensitised
now than we were then. In that sense, people have always written
books. I could go on at length. Civil servants have written books.
Robert Hall kept diaries, which have now been published; he kept
diaries for six years. Jock Colville kept diaries during the war
from 1939 to 1955, which have been published. Bernard Ingham,
15 years ago, if you read his biography, his memoir, sat down
the moment he had retired and wrote Kill the Messenger.
I do not remember there being an outcry, though I may be wrong
about that. There is a marvellous description of Peter Hennessy
as "lord high butterer up of top civil servants". From
time to time this breaks out. I do not think you should ever see
it as being a slow decline or a rapid decline. What is important
is that the Radcliffe Report, which I would like to commend to
you very warmly, in 1976 covered all of this with wisdom and subtlety
and a great deal of common sense. Radcliffe says that of course
there will be people who break the rules; what matters is that
nobody condones it. As long as people recognise what is done as
being wrong, and as long as the bulk of people observe the rules,
then that is still the best approach.
Q6 Chairman: Surely, that is what
has changed? When I re-read Radcliffe, and you have given your
take on it there, what they are saying is that we do not need
any new laws because basically the world is still full of honourable
people; there may be the occasional rogue but we should not change
the law because of the occasional rogue; honour is still intact.
I am sure what we are seeing now with everyone doing this is that
that world has changed, has it not?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: Has it?
I was Cabinet Secretary for nearly five years. By my recollection,
and this is simply from memory, I cleared 10 kinds of memoirs
and diaries: six of them were by politicians, four of them were
by permanent officials. Do you want me to list them?
Q7 Chairman: That would be helpful.
Lord Wilson of Dinton: John Major,
Norman Lamont, Michael Heseltine, Mo Mowlam, Richard Needham and
interestingly Paddy Ashdown, who, because he was a member of the
Joint Consultative Committee which was formerly a Cabinet committee,
very properly came to me and said he thought he should ask me
to clear the relevant passages, and I did that. Those are the
ministers. All of them went through the process in an absolutely
proper way, and I can describe the process to you if you want
that. Then the four officials were: Stella Rimington; Percy Cradock
who wrote that book Know Your Enemy; Peter Le Cheminant,
a book of memoirs; and Roy Denman, a book called The Mandarin's
Tale, and he had been a Deputy Secretary in the Board of Trade
(DTI). Only two books compared with that 10 were published which
broke the rules: one was Geoffrey Robinson, who wrote a book called
The Unconventional Minister that did not come to the Cabinet
Secretary; and the other was John Nott, who I think did it by
accident. He wrote me a charming letter the day the book came
out saying, "I was not meant to have cleared this with you,
was I?" and I wrote back and said, "You were really,
but it is a bit late now". As it was over 20 years since
some of the things he was describing, I think it had not occurred
to him. There were two other books which are in a rather curious
category. One was Janet Jones, Ivor Richards's wife, who wrote
The Labour of Love, which is a kind of Mrs Dale's Diary
of what was going on in government. Whether that comes under the
rules, I really do not know, but anyway it did not come near me.
I am not sure but I remember thinking that Giles Brandreth had
published some diaries, but whether he was actually covered or
not, I am not sure because he had only been, I think, a Lord Commissioner
of the Treasury, but I may have got that wrong.
Q8 Chairman: That was on the dirt
on the Tory Whip's Office.
Lord Wilson of Dinton: Was it?
I have never read it. The point I am making is that I think you
are wrong to say the rules do not hold. In my experience, which
I admit is now three years out of date, 10 people went through
the processes properly and only one person really broke the rules.
Q9 Chairman: This is fascinating.
When we reach a point where a departing ambassador can immediately
write a book, not caring really whether he is told this is okay
or not because it seems that he is going to do it, and when we
have routine diary keeping, instant memoirs from everybody engaged
in government, huge sums being paid out to them, it becomes an
industry. The argument is being made now that this is corrosive
of the good conduct of government. What I would like to know,
Richard, is: is that an argument that you take seriously?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: This is
an argument I take very seriously indeed. I think that permanent
civil servants have a duty of confidentiality to their ministers,
and it is crucially important that they should observe it because,
if they do not, trust breaks down; people start worrying about
whether what they are saying will be recorded and published in
a newspaper. More than that, you not only damage trust in yourself
if you publish but you also undermine things for other people
still in the service because ministers will start wondering who
else is going to publish memoirs like that. I think Christopher
Meyer was wrong to publish his memoirs in the way that he did.
I think Lance Price was wrong as well. I think it is also important,
though, to realise that what matters is the act of publication
and the timing of publication. If you read Radcliffe, he is very
clear. He is eminently quotable and I am going to bore you a bit
with quotes. He says: "At some point of time the secrets
of one period must become the common learning of another".
I think it is very important that people understand government,
how governments work and what actually goes on inside government.
I would not want there to be a sense that there is a complete
ban on people publishing ever at all.
Q10 Chairman: But publishers do not
want books 10 years on. Publishers want books today about what
happened yesterday.
Lord Wilson of Dinton: The interests
of publishers do not override the interests of good government.
It is very important that there is a system which people observe
and in which judgments are made as objectively as possible about
what is acceptable at any one given time. It does depend on the
context of every case.
Q11 Chairman: The system has broken
down?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: I am not
serving in government at the moment. It is over three years since
I left, so I do not know that. I do not accept that the system
has necessarily broken down. I just think it is very important
that if we can strengthen it, we should, and I am happy to offer
some thoughts about that. It is very important that everybody
asserts the rules. I would guess a lot of what Christopher Meyer
wrote is, frankly, rather dull. There is only a handful of pages
in his book, which I have skimmed, which seem to me to cause offence.
What is wrong about his book is that he is commenting on people
who are active in public life now and on events that are still
very hot politically, and I think that is disloyal and ill-judged.
I would guess he probably regrets it now, but I do not know that.
Professor Hennessy: I think we
need to hang around for the Meyer defence, which he outlined in
an interview with the Independent on Sunday, because he
implied that he thought that the ministers who had rushed into
print recently had broken the ministerial side of the bargain.
He cited Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam and Clare Short. The trouble is
that once one party to the governing marriage thinks the other
one is behaving out of order, you can treat it as an alibi for
following suit. But he also added, and we must not forget this,
and this really is a new world, "and out there somewhere
there is the public right to know". Since January, we are
a freedom of information nation. Radcliffe could not contemplate
freedom of information; it was a mere whisper in Labour manifestos,
which nobody read in 1974. Now it has arrived after all this time.
Former officials can use the Freedom of Information Act to ask
for stuff that is pretty well warm off the Whitehall word processors,
if it is not in the exempt areas. We have to blend into this inquiry
in a way Radcliffe did not have to the fact that we are a freedom
of information state and everybody has rights under that Act,
including former ambassadors. Where do you draw the line there?
Percy Cradock's one, for example, used the Waldegrave Initiative
by which a cornucopia of intelligence-related documents, Joint
Intelligence Committee stuff from the Cold War, was released,
and he built his book not around his own experience as Chairman
of the Joint Intelligence Committee but from the archive. So Percy,
in a way, was the forerunner of what we might see more of. The
Cabinet Secretary or the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office
being asked to vet memoirs or think pieces on the part of former
officials that are pretty largely based on documents that are
legitimately in the National Archives or are sought and found
under the Freedom of Information Act is quite a tricky one, is
it not? What do you do then? They bring to it an experience and
an insider knowledge that may in spirit break the conventions.
It is not just that the good chap theory of government has broken
down. You are quite right that in 1974 people said, "It is
just Crossman being Dick", and people did say that, and Radcliffe
quite rightly said that the main thing is that the standards have
always been restored. There have always been breakdowns, but it
has always been restored. I think we have gone through that. I
think duelling memoirs and duelling diaries are going to be a
permanent feature. You have always tried to think the best of
people. That is why you have been a civil servant. You have had
to pretend that the twerps that you have been dealing with were
in fact pillars of the constitution and bring some insight. You
cannot help yourself. You are still charitable about them. You
do not realise what rats most of them are. You never have done!
Chairman: Mea culpa.
Q12 Mr Prentice: Christopher Meyer
famously talked about "political pygmies", and he was
very dismissive of the qualities of some politicians. You talked
about his alibi that politicians were slagging each other off.
It is not just memoirs, is it; it is authorised biographies. The
Pollard authorised biography quotes David Blunkett directly saying
that Margaret Beckett is just really holding the ring. Margaret
Beckett came out alpha plus as far as Christopher Meyer is concerned.
Is there a case for asking biographers to submit authorised biographies
for clearance?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: I think
you would find that quite difficult to enforce because they have
no contract of employment in which you can incorporate a process.
I also think you would find yourself attracting all sorts of books
which in no way would you wish to attract. There is a limit to
what even the Cabinet Secretary can cope with in office in terms
of reading and processing things. I would not want to make it
an industry. If I possibly can, I would want to hang on to a system
which is voluntary. I think Peter is right that we live in a more
open world. What I am arguing for is a process where people wishing
to publish information go to the Cabinet Secretary and discuss
with him or her what is acceptable and what is not. A great deal
of what people write goes through without difficulty. I myself
when I looked at a book would say, "What is there in here
that really matters?" One has a bias towards letting things
go through. What you look at are the three very good criteria,
which Radcliffe lays down: national security, international relations
and the confidential relationship between ministers and ministers
and ministers and civil servants.
Professor Hennessy: That does
not leave much left.
Lord Wilson of Dinton: It leaves
a huge amount. If you read the biographies that I cited earlier,
there is a great deal in them that is perfectly all right and
does not fall into those categories. What you are trying to do
is avoid things that cause damage. Even within the most open age,
there is still an area of relationships you want to protect and
there is a national interest in protecting good government.
Q13 Mr Prentice: What about timing?
The tabloids are out there. Let us take the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail could pay a huge sum of money to serialise
memoirs in the run-up to a general election because it sees its
mission in life as destabilising the Labour Party. Would you offer
advice on the timing of publication?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: I think
that timing is of the essence. One of the things that I would
comment is that I would want manuscripts, or typescripts, to be
submitted before they go to a newspaper. I think what the Lance
Price case illustrated was the difficulty of the case where a
newspaper compares the final version with the version that was
submitted, because then you have this publicity based on what
was banned from the book, which only draws attention to it. I
think the timing of publication is also important because it must
not be, if it is the case of an official, an intervention in the
political process. That is really fundamentally what I think is
one of the things which Christopher Meyer did. I would also argue
that Peter, in his description of what the Cabinet Secretary does,
was underestimating the extent to which it is a negotiation. Of
course, in the end, as Radcliffe says, the person who wishes to
publish has the right to publish if it is about relationships,
but the case needs to be put to them and there must be sufficient
time for the negotiation to take place. What you should not do
is bounce, and again timing is important in that.
Q14 Mr Prentice: Lance Price left
Downing Street seven years ago. He is quite relaxed about his
book, I suppose, because of the passage of time. Would you say
seven years is just about right?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: It depends
again on the facts of the case. I think you ought to wait until
the main players are no longer active, as it were, until events
have moved on, until the world has moved on. I ask myself why
was Ingham's memoir all right coming so soon after he ceased to
be a civil servant. I think the answer must have been because
the then Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher, had retired, and a lot
of what he was writing about was to do with her time, and presumably
also she was not objecting. There is a world of difference between
what you are writing in that context and the position where people
are still in office and what you are writing is critical of them.
Q15 Mr Prentice: When Campbell publishes
his diary, presumably Blair will have gone?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: Yes. I
have no idea what the diary is like.
Professor Hennessy: You have a
pretty shrewd idea, have you not? There were extracts from it
in the Hutton Report.
Lord Wilson of Dinton: I am not
going to get into the business of editing something in advance
which I have not seen and is not my business. I am a private citizen.
Q16 Chairman: As Peter says, this
is the good-natured view of the world where everyone behaves decently;
they would come and show you these manuscripts and a decent time
elapses. We are in a world now where people do not give a toss
about that. They want the money now. You have got Meyer who says,
"I am going to publish this stuff anyway".
Lord Wilson of Dinton: You have
also got a world where there is reaction against the Pollard book,
which I think must have done David Blunkett's relationship—I
am guessing as a member of the public—with some of his colleagues
a lot of harm. I think you will find that Christopher Meyer will
find that he pays a price in his relationships with other people,
which he may come to regret. I do think the reaction to publication
of books is important in the signal it gives to future people
who are thinking of publishing. There is a price to be paid if
you go ahead with revealing confidences and breaking loyalties
very quickly in a way that causes offence and is a kind of entry
into the political arena which is unacceptable. People pay that
price and it is a hidden penalty with some significance.
Q17 Grant Shapps: Just in terms of
trying to dissect what can be done about this, it seems to me,
having read the Radcliffe Report which for its time, 1976, is
brilliant, it is so well written, that what we should really be
doing is separating out the Ministerial Code from the Civil Service
Code in our minds here. I think that it must be wrong that somebody
who has been a senior civil servant can immediately betray those
confidences. That is entirely different from a minister doing
it. I would have thought there is a good case here for separating
out the two a lot more. Can you reflect on that?
Lord Wilson of Dinton: Can I comment
on that? I agree with you that the position of ministers is different
from the position of civil servants in all sorts of ways. I think
that ministers are accountable publicly; they have to defend their
actions publicly and are subject to quite a lot of strong criticism
in public. Therefore, the case for allowing them to come out with
some kind of justification for their own actions is entirely defensible.
I think that is right and it has been going on for a long time.
Officials are protected still by ministers, though there is a
tendency to make us more public figures. I think officials do
owe a duty of loyalty that requires them not to rush into print.
The interesting thing about the list that I read out to you earlier
is that there are very few home civil servants over the years
who have ever published anything quickly. Try to think of how
many of them have done that over the last 30 or 40 years? In a
way, I think that is quite remarkable. If I may finish my point
very briefly, in the Civil Service you have an enormous corpus
of knowledge about what goes on inside government. The degree
to which that is not the subject of publication is, I think, impressive.
If you look at the list I gave you, you could count on the fingers
of one hand the home civil servants who have published anything
about what went on in government, say, within 10 years of their
leaving service.
Q18 Grant Shapps: The reason I am
trying to interject is that I think I am already closer to your
point of view on this. I am much more interested in Peter's more
excitable view on this matter. Even if you take the Meyer book,
really the revelations in there are not that remarkable. He called
Jack Straw a pygmy. We can all come to a conclusion as to whether
or not we think that is the case; it does not have much to do
with anything. The fact that Tony Blair walked along with his
hands in his pockets when he was with the President of the United
States again is really not a big revelation. There may be some
tidying up to do around the edges here but it is not really the
big problem that you think it is.
Professor Hennessy: It was in
the Jonathan Aitken trial in 1971, the official secrets trial
under the old Official Secrets Act, when I think it was a Foreign
Office witness who said that the highest classification in Whitehall
is not "top secret", or all those GCHQ ones; it is "politically
embarrassing". There is one above that which is "personally
embarrassing". I often have to remind myself that you lot
are human beings, but you are. There is nothing more offensive
to a certain Deputy Prime Minister than the fact that he cannot
entirely keep the foreign policy details of the world in his head
when he goes in for a session with the Vice President. It is extremely
wounding and he is bound to care more about that than an official
writing about the row over the directive on dried prunes from
Europe.
Q19 Grant Shapps: Yes, but this is
not something that we should move to legislate on, is it, because
Radcliffe already deals with these things?
Professor Hennessy: I think you
should think about recommending a revamping of Radcliffe under
the voluntary system. I would go for a five-year voluntary restraint
on both sides (officials, ministers and special advisers, the
two and a half governing tribes) providing for a shorter period
if the government changes—not a prime minister changes but
a government changes—because, as Richard said, when a government
changes, there is a change of party and it is different. I think
a five-year voluntary restraint, which some people will still
break, is quite reasonable these days.
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