Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
THURSDAY 15 DECEMBER 2005
MR LANCE
PRICE
Q240 Kelvin Hopkins: A much more
important question in my view is this distinction, which I am
certainly concerned about, between civil servantstechnically
you were a civil servant although I see you as a politicianand
the political world. Politicians and the Civil Service have been
fairly distinct and the image created by Sir Humphrey in the television
series was of a Civil Service which was almost hermetic, the politicians
could not really get into the world of the Civil Service, they
were guarded by permanent secretaries or whatever, and, equally,
civil servants knew their place and they did not venture into
the political world. With the alleged politicisation of the Civil
Servicepeople like you have caused the problem because
you were a civil servant but you became part of that overlap between
politics and the Civil Service and confused the issue to an extentthe
old Sir Humphrey image has gone. Isn't that a bad thing?
Mr Price: The whole role of special
advisers within government is something I know you, Chairman,
and your Committee have taken a keen interest in and will continue
to investigate in the future, I am sure. I do think that special
advisers are in a hybrid position. They are largely political
and some special advisers, certainly in my case, play a very political
role but they are also brought within the Civil Service for a
short period of time, and our careers are as fickle as those of
the ministers that we work for so we do not have all the benefits
of guaranteed employment, pensions and so on that others perhaps
do. Certainly special advisers in the past have published books
that have explained their role. I do not think it is any bad thing
that people understand the role of special advisers better than
they do at the moment because there are an awful lot of myths
around about them. There are two ways in which a special adviser
can get his or her view across about how government is conducted
and what is going on. We all know that throughout the time since
Tony Blair has been Prime Minister there has been an avalanche
of books published, largely by journalists, sometimes by contemporary
historians, purporting to know what goes on inside Downing Street
and often giving quite colourful descriptions of rows between
the Prime Minister and the Chancellor or whatever else may have
been going on. Insofar as they were based on fact at all, we know
where those facts came from. Those facts came from people working
inside Whitehall, working for government, either as special advisers,
perhaps the protagonists themselves, perhaps even, God forefend,
civil servants. It is one thing, in my view, to give information
to others to write, whether they are ghost biographies, actual
biographies or contemporary histories, under the cloak of anonymity,
but what I did was write my recollections with my name on the
cover. I took responsibility for it. I was not going round behind
closed doors giving information to journalists. I think journalists
found me a pretty lousy source when I was at Number 10 because
I did not do what the Chairman was describing as going out and
finding them straight after a conversation and revealing what
was going on. I think there is an argument to be made that it
is far more responsible to publish a book like this, with my name
on the cover, than to participate in some of the processes that
I have just been describing.
Q241 Kelvin Hopkins: Would it not
be healthier to have a much deeper separation between the Civil
Service, with their codes and their rules, and the political field,
with people like yourself strictly in the political field and
not in the Civil Service? You are fair game, you have to rely
on politics, you would not have rules like the Civil Service.
And it is not a career, you are either elected or appointed temporarily
to advise politicians who are elected. It is a much different
world from that of the Civil Service. If we had strict rules for
the Civil Service and a high Code of Ethics for them, we expect
politicians to behave badly, because that is what they are like,
you
Mr Price: You are lumping me in
the latter category?
Q242 Kelvin Hopkins: Yes, indeed.
We should separate the two very clearly.
Mr Price: There is this ambiguity
about the role of special advisers and I do have my views on that.
It falls slightly outside the remit of a discussion about memoirs
but I suppose it could be brought within it. Personally, I am
a supporter of the public funding of political parties and if
you want a good democracy you have to be prepared to pay for it
and if you were prepared to pay for it you might have a situation
in which political appointments within ministries could be paid
for by the public still but through the funding of political parties
rather than through the funding of government.
Kelvin Hopkins: I would like to pursue
this further but I fear I have had more than my fair share of
time. Thank you for that.
Q243 Grant Shapps: I am interested
in your statement and also your written statement where you describe
this process by which authorisation or changes in the book are
made. I wonder whether you agree it was perhaps the case that
the changeover in Cabinet Secretary caused this very odd, uneven
process as your book was essentially approved for publication
after changes?
Mr Price: It was not helpful,
I admit. I would have been much more comfortable working with
one Cabinet Secretary all the way through although, to be fair,
I think a lot of the initial decisions and advice given and so
on is given in the Cabinet Secretary's name but actually by officials
who are working for him.
Q244 Grant Shapps: This is a classic
organisational cock-up, is it not? Sir Andrew Turnbull told you
back in July it was completely unacceptable, it looked like a
closed door, you were amazed and ran for cover, got legal advice
and the rest of it. You then put in a pretty much unchanged manuscript
and were told it needed a few changes by the then Cabinet Secretary,
Sir Gus O'Donnell.
Mr Price: Sir Andrew, now Lord
Turnbull, made his decision, said what he said, and he must stand
over that. I think he was wrong to do that and I think some of
the problems that people have about the book flowed from that.
What I must take you up on is the suggestion that we barely made
any changes. There were very substantial changes made to the original
text that was submitted to the Cabinet Office, which I had done
my best not to self-censor because I did not see it as my job
to do the Cabinet Office's work of telling me what was and was
not acceptable, although even at that stage I had taken out everything
I considered to be at risk of damaging national security or being
anything to do with Official Secrets. I had also taken out any
reference to the advice of named civil servants because I recognised
that was something that was wrong to do because they cannot speak
for themselves. Then, as a result of the legal advice that we
took, which was mainly about libel and confidentiality and other
matters like that, copyright and so on and so forth, we took out
quite a substantial amount more. The Cabinet Office expressed
their gratitude for the amount of changes that we made and then
we discussed what was left. They had the opportunity to ask for
changes to the resubmitted text, they asked for a relatively small
number and we made some further changes.
Q245 Grant Shapps: What I am trying
to drive at here is that if you had submitted that then amended
text to Sir Andrew in the first place he would not have used words
like "completely unacceptable". In other words, you
think the process was more or less working here?
Mr Price: I am not sure.
Q246 Grant Shapps: I am confused
because in your written statement, and your opening evidence,
you suggest that the process is not working but what you are trying
to tell me now is that it was sort of working.
Mr Price: It did not work because
a complete barrier was put in our way. I regard the system, if
it is to work effectively, should be one that allows for some
give and take and applies fairly to all. If you choose to have
a system in which it is possible for the Cabinet Secretary to
say, "Absolutely not, no", then that is going to invite
challenge, and it is going to invite legal challenge if necessary.
I think we can all agree that these things are best not resolved
in the court. That is why I say the system as currently set up
did not work in my case. I am not saying it could not have worked,
it could have worked, because I did not set out to defy it and
I would have been happy to have worked within it. Even if it had
worked in my case I think there are improvements.
Q247 Grant Shapps: I would love to
pursue the extent to which it did or did not work a lot further
but, in the interests of time, what happened was there were then
the outtakes that were taken out of the final version and you
were paid £150,000 purportedly for the serialisation in the
Mail on Sunday. You must have been pretty annoyed about
this because the outtakes could have got you a great deal more
presumably and rather than taking legal action against them you
could have been paid for the juicy stuff that was taken out.
Mr Price: I am not quite sure
I follow your argument. I should have kept it in so I could have
earned more from the book?
Q248 Grant Shapps: If you come to
a deal with a newspaper, which you had done, and they are going
to publish the book and pay £150,000, presumably you could
have negotiated £175,000 or £200,000 if you had given
them the really juicy bits which, according to this version of
events, they took from somewhere, we do not know whereperhaps
you have some suspicionsand published. You must feel hard
done by. You could have had that extra cash surely.
Mr Price: I do not feel hard done
by in the way that you are describing but I was very surprised,
very disappointed and not a little bit angry to see in public
print material that I had come to the conclusion should not appear
in public print. It made a mockery of the process that we had
been through.
Q249 Grant Shapps: Just to get to
your motivation for the diary. I remember Newsnight covering
this and then apologising because they had enabled you to plug
the book rather more than editorially they meant you to do. Is
this whole thing not really just about book sales? In your particular
case there is no great desire to establish a public record. It
is all very grand but actually £150,000 from the Mail
on Sunday, goodness knows what for selling the book, Newsnight
with plenty of coverage, this Committee indeed, the whole thing
is just money driven, is it not?
Mr Price: I have not made any
grand statements about wanting to play some sort of role in setting
the record straight or having an historical record. I would disagree
with you that it is just about the money. Your figures are not
strictly accurate, the amount of money paid
Q250 Grant Shapps: Do you want to
correct them?
Mr Price: I will if you want me
to. The amount of money paid was more than I ever expected it
to be. When I first put this forward as a proposal at the suggestion
of Anthony Seldonthis may just reflect my naivetyI
thought people would say, "We have heard all this before.
So much of this is in the public domain, you are telling us stories
we have already read about in the newspapers, whether it is about
Peter Mandelson resigning from the government or BSE, foot and
mouth, the General Election that was so long ago now, people's
memories are very short". I was surprised at both the commercial
value the book attracted and the general interest that it attracted.
I would have gone ahead with the book had those figures been far,
far, far lower than they were because I find political memoirs,
and in particular political diaries, fascinating. I found that
when I read about previous administrations they had been the most
illuminating and interesting way of getting underneath what goes
on in politics and in government. I felt that I had a text which
would contribute to that and I wanted to see it published because
I thought it would be a good book.
Q251 Mr Prentice: Are there any areas,
things that you witnessed, that you did not put into your diary
because it was maybe just too personal, a no-go area?
Mr Price: Yes.
Q252 Mr Prentice: Would you like
to tell us what they were?
Mr Price: Tell you what they were.
Do you want me to tell you what they were?
Q253 Mr Prentice: Yes, please.
Mr Price: I will tell you what
areas they covered. The things that I excluded from the book,
apart from what I have already described which was, if you like,
national security and the advice of named career civil servants,
the principal stuff was about the Prime Minister and his family.
If it was legitimately private about the Prime Minister, his family,
his religious beliefs, that sort of thing, and some of the views
that he might have expressed on those matters, I think they were
absolutely legitimately private and they were never in any text
that was submitted to anybody.
Q254 Mr Prentice: So you kind of
self-censored then?
Mr Price: At the beginning of
the process I took out things for broadly those three reasons,
yes, but it certainly included matters that I considered personal
to the Prime Minister and his family.
Q255 Mr Prentice: You are gay, are
you not?
Mr Price: Yes.
Q256 Mr Prentice: What about your
reference when the Prime Minister famously asked you, "Lance,
does the sight of a beautiful woman ever do anything for you?".
You put that in because you thought people would find that interesting,
did you?
Mr Price: I am astonished that
people have made so much of that remark.
Q257 Mr Prentice: Are you?
Mr Price: I just found that amusing.
I did not think it said anything about his views on homosexuality
or anything else. It made me smile.
Q258 Mr Prentice: Did you have conversations
with your publisher where the publishers would want to extract
the maximum value from the text? You say you left stuff out but
was there any pressure to include stuff when you were just talking
about the text in order to increase its value?
Mr Price: Obviously in the process
of getting a book ready for publication there are discussions
between the publisher and the author and the publisher's general
view is always in favour of keeping as much in as possible, that
is a statement of the blindingly obvious I would have thought.
At no point did I come under what I regarded as unreasonable pressure
from my publisher to include something that I was not prepared
to stand by, no.
Q259 Mr Prentice: Why did you go
to the Mail? You spent your whole professional life taking
on the Daily Mail which is vitriolic, deeply hostile to
the Labour Party and everything that Labour stands for. Why did
you take your book to the Mail?
Mr Price: I think you ask a very
valid question, not least because of my political friends who
are less than pleased with what happened. The fact that it was
published in the Mail probably caused more offence than
the book itself actually. I took the view that I should stand
back and allow the publishers to do what they always do, which
was to conduct effectively an auction and to allow that to go
on through its normal process. I am not sure whether I would have
had a right to say, "We will have an auction but no newspaper
with the word `Mail' in its title need apply". If I did have
that right I did not exercise it. In the back of my mind was the
thought that journalists are journalists and if there are stories
in this book almost any newspaper is going to take up the same
stories. With hindsight, perhaps I was wrong.
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