Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 339)
THURSDAY 19 JANUARY 2006
SIR JEREMY
GREENSTOCK GCMG
Q320 Julia Goldsworthy: A lot of
the focus this morning has been on the decision whether or not
to publish but you have made public statements about your time
at the UN and the situation in Iraq since then, and I wondered
what you saw the difference as being and if you had been contacted
by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office subsequent or prior to
that?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I have
sometimes wondered whether the Foreign Office has seen any difference.
Again, I did not jump out of one state into another, there is
a flow of events, you evolve in these things. An ambassador only
has limited public exposure in our times but sometimes an event
jumps up and is talked about the whole time or you get into a
crisis, you are asked by the government as part of your public
duties to give public explanations and you go on giving them.
I ended up after my period in the United Nations and then in Baghdad
with a higher public exposure than is usual, therefore I got lots
of requests from the media to go on commenting on what was happening,
and regularly, as the Foreign Office will confirm, I would ring
up the press department and ask what the line was on that day.
The person running the Iraq desk in the press office happened
to have been my private secretary in Baghdad so we had an easy
and natural relationship, so I was aware of the Government line.
I did not clear every request to go on radio or television with
the Foreign Office. At no time, not once, did anybody contact
me and say either, "You should have said something differently"
or "You should have consulted us" or "Would you
stop talking in public". So out of that flow, I assumed what
I was saying was regarded by the Foreign Office as within the
norm, within the rules, within what was acceptable for my department.
Q321 Julia Goldsworthy: Do you feel
what you had written in your book goes beyond that and that is
why there was a perceived problem, or is there almost a hang-up
with the way that memoirs are published?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: In submitting
my text to the Foreign Office I was submitting the draft text,
a draft which was for discussion and for changing if both sides
agreed there should changes. So I was not plonking a text down
and saying, "I am going to publish this but I am giving you
a chance to change anything", I wanted to judge what could
be said without a great fuss about breaking confidences, so that
the story in the book, the text in the book, could be taken at
its own value and not be distorted in its reception publicly by
a great fuss over revelations or the breaking of confidences.
Q322 Mr Prentice: Did you self-censor
when you were writing the book? Were there things you wanted to
say, perhaps about individuals, but drew back because it would
not have been appropriate?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Oh heavens
yes! Enormously. You are self-censoring all the time—I am
a diplomat, after all.
Q323 Mr Prentice: So there is nothing
in the book that would cause politicians any embarrassment?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: On the
whole, not. There may have been one or two phrases which imply
that I thought there might have been a different answer at some
point, but it is not embarrassing in the sense I am criticising
or I am saying something which is completely unacceptable. It
is up to other people to have their own idea of whether they are
going to be embarrassed.
Q324 Mr Prentice: Christopher Meyer
took a lot of flak because he, to give an example, referred to
Jack Straw as someone to be more liked than admired, and the late
Robin Cook someone to be admired rather than liked, and his book
is peppered with those kinds of observations. Do you think that
politicians are fair game in that way?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I did not
seek to make value judgments of that kind in my text.
Q325 Mr Prentice: Okay. Simon Jenkins
compared the Meyer book and your book in a piece he wrote in the
Sunday Times on 27 November and he talked about Meyer's
book revealing "copious embassy confidences" and so
on, but he says, "Greenstock's book was a different matter",
and Simon Jenkins went on to say, "It is a high-minded case
history of diplomacy in action, devoid of Meyer's dinner table
gossip, but its account of dealings between British and American
policymakers, notably during Paul Bremer's disastrous rule in
Baghdad, drew blood." I suppose the thing that that raises
is whether your book would damage or undermine the relationship
between this country and the Americans.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I think
not. Simon Jenkins was writing without having read the text of
my book. I think he was using a reference to my book more to comment
on the Meyer book than to say anything which might or might not
be true about mine because he does not know my book. Let me answer
your question about Anglo-American relations. On the whole not,
but even less so now that Paul Bremer has written his own book,
because that says far more about the tensions within the
American administration and the mistakes that the American administration
made than I did.
Q326 Mr Prentice: I have not read
the Bremer book but would you challenge the veracity of Bremer's
account of what happened in that period?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: No. I have
not read the whole book yet, I am just in the middle of it. Bremer
is a man of considerable integrity, I would not expect him to
be untruthful. I would expect him, like everybody else, to be
selective in what he says.
Q327 Mr Prentice: So your book would
not cause embarrassment to politicians, it would not undermine
our relations with the United States, why is it then that the
Government seemed to be so freaked out about its publication?
Was it just, as you said, that Jack Straw had this double-whammy
of the Meyer book and your book in the same week? Why block publication?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I do not
fully know because the conversation, the discussion with the Foreign
Office, stopped half way through, but let me make a comment. There
was a process with the system in the Foreign Office, going up
to the Permanent Under-Secretary, which was clearing my book,
and proposals were made for changes in the text which up to the
end of June on two-thirds of the text were quite light. From the
first week in July, which was the week in which I had my conversation
with the Foreign Secretary, up to the second week of October,
I did not hear a dickey-bird from the Foreign Office. So the process
seemed to have started in one way and to have stopped. In the
first week of October I got a much larger pile of comments on
my book and requests to change passages. By that time of course
I had taken the decision with my publishers not to go ahead, which
was taken before the middle of July. So I am not sure—I
had not gone through this with the Foreign Office or with Mr Straw—I
am not sure of the interaction between the system and the Secretary
of State.
Q328 Mr Prentice: And you did not
have a separate meeting or any correspondence or discussion with
Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: We exchanged
perfectly amicable letters. I wrote in July after my meeting with
the Foreign Secretary saying I would still like to complete the
process of clearing the text to see where we had come out, and
received no answer to that until late in September. I had to remind
them I had written. I received an answer saying, "Right,
we will complete the process but having sent you further comments
it will still be necessary for us to submit to the Secretary of
State."
Q329 Mr Prentice: We had this memorandum
submitted to us by Sir Christopher Meyer, who came before us a
few weeks ago, and he tells us that the rules are not applied
consistently. He tells us, "What is missing is consistency
and clarity in their application, and in the definition of the
duty of confidentiality." I wonder if you agree with that,
that the rules are there, we can read the Radcliffe rules and
so on, but they are employed, if that is the right word, in a
very haphazard way?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Obviously
I do not know precisely the circumstances of the clearance of
Sir Christopher's book, but it appears from what he has said and
what the Cabinet Office have said that no changes were suggested.
I find that quite surprising. In comparing his experience with
mine, particularly in the third area of the three which are set
out in Radcliffe and in the 1993 Cabinet Office note, the area
of confidential relationships was going to be affected by Christopher's
book. I have talked this over with Christopher and we both approached
the business of clearance with the intention of hearing what those
in the proper position had to say and making changes as necessary.
I do not think that I have said so much in my book that damages
confidential relationships that it makes his book seem absolutely
clean and clear by comparison.
Q330 Mr Prentice: Christopher Meyer
would understand all that. He would say, "What is sauce for
the goose is sauce for the gander" and there is a torrent
of memoirs by politicians who have just left the Cabinet or left
office recently disclosing all sorts of things, and he takes the
view that the same rules should apply between politicians and
diplomats and civil servants. In fact he says in this memorandum
which I have just been quoting from, "There should be a level
playing field for civil servants, special advisers and ministers
on leaving government." I wonder if you agree with that?
Why should retiring civil servants and diplomats be shackled when
politicians can tell all?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: That is
a different point from your earlier one, the comparison between
what our two books say in the area of confidential relationships.
I think the rules should be roughly the same for both. I would
only add that in my view elected representatives, elected officials,
are more in the public domain in their career and have to some
extent a greater right to defend themselves in public.
Q331 Paul Flynn: You chose the title,
The Cost of War and it can be argued those who have paid
and are still paying the greatest cost of this war are the families
of the 98 servicemen who have died, and part of the process of
coming to terms with their grief is searching for knowledge of
how their loved one died and discovering whether the war was legitimate
or not. Do you not think you owe a duty to those families to publish
this book and inform them of the causes of the war, because it
has been claimed that you have suggested the war was politically
illegitimate. There are families who are not very articulate who
are questioning the point of the war and believe their loved ones
died in vain. Are they not entitled to have that information?
You are probably the only person who can provide it. Do you not
think it places a burden on you to publish the truth? You did
argue what you had to say was too important to be left until a
future date, is that not still true?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I have
not said it is too important to be left. Obviously the world can
do without my book. What I was trying to do was make the debate
about the decisions which were taken, which have affected so many
people, better informed, and the reasons for those decisions more
intelligible. Within my idea of the public interest, in having
a better informed debate, yes, there is the sentiment—it
may not have been my prime reason for writing—that those
who have suffered from the decisions taken over Iraq might perhaps
have a better understanding of why it happened that way.
Q332 Paul Flynn: Your motivations
come across from what you have said and what you have said today
as entirely honourable, you were not seeking to make money out
of this book, all the money was going to charity, but I cannot
understand why you were dissuaded by a politician who had not
read the book, did not know what you had said, speaking entirely
in his own self-interests, from publishing the book when there
are other issues. Apart from the grieving relatives, there is
the interest of politicians, and those who are going to take decisions
on possibly the next war which might be politically illegitimate.
Do you not have a duty to publish on those grounds?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I clearly
do not have a duty to publish. It is a personal thing in one sense,
it is a public thing in another, in that I need to go through
the clearance process. I think there is a difficulty for me. I
found a difficulty in going ahead when the atmosphere had become
so sensationalist and feverish, that on the one hand the media
would have found, if and when they had read my book, that there
was not so very much there that was sensational or revelatory
or critical or headline-making, and they would have been disappointed,
because my book is quite a sober record of what happened to some
extent behind the scenes. On the other hand, Government or some
parts of Government would still have been annoyed with me. So
I was on a hiding-to-nothing in between those two considerations
in publishing a book ahead of the time which is considered to
be the norm. If it has become more difficult for me to affect
the public debate on a relevant timing, then what is left for
me is to leave something for the historical record, in which case
it does not really matter when I publish and I might as well do
it at a time which is less controversial.
Q333 Paul Flynn: Do you not feel
there is an obligation as far as decisions which will be taken,
possibly in the near future, on similar conflicts?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I have
been talking quite publicly about the Iraq war, the evolution
of events in Iraq, and I hope in that way I have helped to inform
public debate about what is actually going on. So the book on
its own is not necessarily the only contribution I can make.
Q334 Paul Flynn: If we cannot persuade
you to recharge your creative batteries, could you explain to
us why you think the war was politically illegitimate?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I think
that is another issue, Chairman, and another subject and I would
rather not start a complex discussion on events in Iraq.
Chairman: It was worth a try, was it
not?
Paul Flynn: Yes.
Q335 Jenny Willott: You mentioned
that you do not think Radcliffe worked with regard to Christopher
Meyer's book. What is your understanding of the worst that the
Foreign Office could have done to you if you had gone ahead and
published without clearance?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: There are
two considerations. I do not think I broke the Official Secrets
Act so I do not think I would have been prosecutable under the
Official Secrets Act, I was quite careful about that. I would
have taken advice from the Foreign Office immediately if they
felt I had strayed across that particular line. In terms of the
judgment by the Foreign Office or by politicians or by anybody
else as to whether I had strayed across lines of propriety which
had been laid down by Radcliffe and others, I would have assumed
that the Foreign Office would have left it at the tenor of public
comment that came out. Christopher Meyer I think has had that
experience. If he made misjudgments about things he put into his
book, they are misjudgments he will have to live with. I do not
think you can legislate against the fine print in that area. What
is sensible is to make sure with your department that you are
avoiding damage to the public interest.
Q336 Jenny Willott: That leads me
to my next question. Radcliffe is based on voluntary principles
that everybody is going to abide by the system, do you think it
could or should be made compulsory that conditions around the
publication of memoirs and diaries and so on would be included
in the contracts of civil servants and diplomats?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: No, I do
not.
Q337 Jenny Willott: Both could and
should?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I do not
think you can legislate every case in fine detail. Judgments in
the end have always got to be made. I think that Radcliffe, or
something like it, is an entirely acceptable basis for making
specific judgments from general principles. I think there is a
case for transparency. Standards rise with competition. If there
are more things out there explaining what has gone on then I think
people are likely to understand more. We are in an era that is
free with information, that has a lot of misleading information
floating around, where control of information channels is becoming
an art not just in government but elsewhere, where the media I
think are less inclined than in previous eras to look for the
precise truth. Therefore, transparency from a range of sources
about public events of importance to national interest is a good
thing. Where mistakes are made, where things seem to get a bit
edgy, where there is controversy, let there be controversy. Our
system is strong enough fundamentally to take it. They are only
minor shocks for a short period. The health of the public interest
will be greater if there is transparency and therefore I think
there should be good general principles for proper behaviour.
If people are judged to have behaved improperly, let that be a
fuss for the moment. Let their reputations take it but let us
not try and legislate against it.
Q338 Jenny Willott: Do you think
Sir Christopher Meyer got what he deserved for publishing the
book he published?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: He got
many things and he got a great deal of support. He published a
lot of it in his book and he said a lot of interesting things
about what it is like to be the American ambassador, which are
usefully revealing. He will have to bear the cost of his misjudgments
which I think he is gladly doing.
Q339 Chairman: He runs the Press
Complaints Commission; you run the Ditchley Foundation. Is it
not the truth that had you been cold-shouldered by Whitehall you
would have been dead in the water as the director of such an organisation?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: As you
put the question, of course, but I do not think I strayed so far
into difficult territory that I was risking my responsibilities
as director of the Ditchley Foundation.
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