Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 385)
THURSDAY 19 JANUARY 2006
LORD LAWSON
OF BLABY,
LORD OWEN
CH AND CLARE
SHORT
Q380 Chairman: Surely there is a
difference because the politicians take the flak. They are the
publicly elected figures and they are fair game for everything.
They want to vindicate themselves and answer back against colleagues.
The deal with the Civil Service though is that they get anonymity
but ministers get loyalty. That is the nature of the invisible
contract, is it not? If we depart from that—you want to
reassert the old conventions that have broken down—we are
in deep trouble, are we not?
Clare Short: My argument is that
the old conventions have broken down and therefore all the books
are coming out. I agree with what Lord Owen said. You delving
into this unleashes this other monumental argument about
our constitutional arrangements. If we could get back to the trust,
rules could be made within that trust. There is enormous politicisation.
You have Alastair Campbell and the chief of staff, Jonathan Powell,
being political appointees. I know there are supposed to be fair
rules about promotion for senior officials but, believe you me,
the ones who are not wanted are squeezed out. There is a deep
politicisation on who is promoted and that is a shift because
if you are promoted because you are in with Number 10 as a senior
official and increasingly put into the public domain to front
things the lines have been blurred. It is no good just having
firm, old fashioned lines on memoirs when they are blurred on
decision making and public statements.
Q381 Chairman: Lord Lawson tells
us in his memoirs that he was involved in appointments way outside
the Private Office. You have a lovely little section about that.
Clare Short: You have a veto of
power. It is much deeper interference now.
Q382 Chairman: "My personal
involvement in Treasury appointments and promotion extended well
beyond the Private Office." You go on to talk about individuals
and so on. You are quite robust in proclaiming that you had quite
a large role in appointments.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: The role
was three fold. Two parts have already been mentioned. The Private
Office is very important, as is having a Permanent Secretary you
can work well with. I was involved with a change of Permanent
Secretary at Energy, for example. Then there is the question of
the resources you have at your disposal. It is sensible—certainly
this is the way I played it—to discuss with the Permanent
Secretary which were the most difficult policy issues and how
where we could put the ablest people into the difficult areas.
It seemed to be common sense. I am sure any enterprise of any
kind would do that but it would have to be done with the Permanent
Secretary. It was not a question of going behind his back and,
say, appointing somebody as a Deputy Secretary.
Q383 Chairman: It is corrective to
the idea that there was some sort of golden age of purity.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: There is
a difference between ministers and officials which you very clearly
and lucidly set out a moment ago in response to Clare Short. I
think that is absolutely right and should remain. I think it is
well known that there are a number of officials who are extremely
unhappy with the Meyer revelations, with the fingering of politicians
in the way that he did in his memoirs, because they realise that
if ministers think that officials are going to be fingering them
in that way in their memoirs all their reticence hitherto about
fingering officials is going to go. If anything, they are probably
going to try to get their retaliation in first. This convention
did, very properly, protect officials. Officials are now concerned
that it may have been weakened as a result of the Meyer book.
Q384 Chairman: You told us at the
beginning that you thought the Radcliffe rules were obsolete.
Clare has given us a very strong statement for why, in the heat
of the moment, you want to get this stuff out while it is raw
and you cannot go through a 15 year wait and the kind of things
you were doing, Lord Owen, with Robin Butler back when he was
citing 15 years at you. It has a kind of unreal feel to it now.
If we are all saying something has changed but we somehow need
to put it back together again and to mend these relationships
that have broken, the evidence for the break is the memoir field.
What we are saying is how on earth do we do it.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: That is
what your report is for.
Clare Short: I have not really
studied the Radcliffe rules. Christopher Meyer's description of
the way in which the Washington embassy is not functioning in
the way it used to is important to our constitutional arrangements.
As to Mr Major in his underpants and the rest, I think we could
tighten rules on personal abuse. One would have to think about
the phrasing. I think his book is important to what is going on
and how the system is changing but we could tighten the rules
so as not to permit the real spice in it.
Q385 Mr Prentice: His view is that
junior ministers were political pygmies.
Clare Short: That is abuse too.
Lord Owen: As I understand it,
the Cabinet Secretary did not raise with him or his Permanent
Under-Secretary in the Diplomatic Service any of these points.
That is just amazing. There is nobody who has gone through this
process, I would suggest, who could possibly imagine circumstances
when a book like that would not come back. Let us be realistic.
If nobody comments on it and you are in the business of writing
a memoir, you are not going to say, "I am surprised you did
not take this out." The system has broken down and the then
Cabinet Secretary has a pretty heavy responsibility for that particular
area.
Chairman: Thank you very much for what
has been a very useful session, not that you have had unanimity,
but you have brought some very interesting observations to bear
on this. As Lord Lawson said, it is up to us to make some sense
of them. Thank you very much indeed.
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