Examination of Witnesses (Questions 428
- 439)
WEDNESDAY 29 MARCH 2006
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP
Q428 Chairman: Foreign Secretary,
it is very good to have you amongst us to help us with our inquiry
into political memoirs. I think you wanted to make yourself available
to us because you had some views on this in the light of recent
events. I do not know whether you would like to make a statement
by way of opening, or whether you would just like us to ask you
some questions?
Mr Straw: I am very happy for
you to ask me questions in view of the time.
Q429 Chairman: In that case, let
me start off briefly, and I apologise for the fact that we shall
be interrupted. When you last came in front of this Committee
you were introducing the Freedom of Information legislation and
you were the purveyor of openness. My sense is that you have now
come as the purveyor of closedness, that is that you take a dim
view of these former diplomats and former civil servants who rush
into print with their memoirs. How can one approach be reconciled
with the other?
Mr Straw: I think it is easy to
reconcile, and indeed I am still a purveyor of openness. Let me
say that I spend far more time in the office seeking to expand
on answers to parliamentary questions than ever I do in seeking
to restrict them. I remember Norman Baker, when I was in the Home
Office, although we had some disagreements on policy, complimenting
me for openness. So I am very keen on openness and being as open
as possible, but you will recall, Chairman, during all the debates
which you and I personally had on the Freedom of Information Bill
that all sides accepted there was a balance and the balance is
built into the Freedom of Information Act itself between openness
on the one hand and a public interest which actually requires
that information in some cases should be kept secret, in some
cases should be wholly exempt and in other cases should be confidential
for a period. This particularly arose in discussing the exemptions
to cover the business of government and it was accepted on all
sides, the politicians and officials had to have a private space
within which to be able to examine issues in frankness without
the possibility that their views (as decisions were being formed,
not at the point where they were ready to be promulgated) and
that that debate would be made public. There was a very clear
understanding that if that debate was going to be made public
it would actually make the quality of decision making in government
much more difficult and would actually undermine it. So far as
these memoirs are concerned, let me say this: I served, 30 years
ago now, as a special adviser in government for three and a half
years, I served for two years from early March 1974 until April
1976 as special adviser to Barbara Castle and then for fifteen
months from April 1976 until July 1977 as special adviser to Peter
Shore. I formed the view then that I could not do my job unless
there was complete confidence in me not only by the ministers
I was serving but also by the officials alongside whom I was working.
You have to live by your deeds and you have to be judged. I never
ever thought it appropriate, as it were, to lift the veil on the
private advice which I was giving to the ministers I was serving,
nor to expose the views of the officials, because if I had been
of that mind and I had said to both the ministers and the officials,
"Look, here, you need to know I am keeping a diary and the
moment I can I am going to write this up and publish it for money,"
both the ministers and the officials would have said, "Thank
you very much, but you can't do your job in that way and we can't
do our job either if everything that we are saying to you is going
to be published very shortly after you leave this job, so there's
the door." The test that I apply, for example in respect
of Christopher Meyer, is that if any of those who had been dealing
with him at the time (whether they were ministers, the Prime Minister,
officials, his own colleagues or foreign diplomats) had thought
then that he was writing a diary and was going to publish it with
no regard effectively for the Diplomatic Service Rules nor for
confidences that he had been offered then everybody would have
said, "Thank you very much, Christopher, but we are not willing
to have a relationship with you on that basis, and indeed you
are incapacitating yourself from doing the job." That is
a very different issue from general openness in government.
Q430 Chairman: One of the issues
which we shall want to discuss with you is whether the rules for
former ministers are the same as the rules for former civil servants,
but your reference to Barbara Castle is interesting and I know
that you were a special adviser to Barbara Castle in the 1970s,
because we have been looking at the history of all this and we
have had in here some of the people from that period. We have
had David Owen and Bernard Donoghue in and we had Tony Benn in
a week or two ago, and they took us back to the Cabinet records
of those days and of course when, in the wake of the Crossman
diaries and then the Radcliffe report, Harold Wilson wanted members
of that Cabinet to sign undertakings that they would follow the
rules and not rush into print, Barbara Castle said no, Tony Benn
said no, Roy Jenkins said no and so did one or two others, so
it is quite difficult, is it not, making this stick?
Mr Straw: I do not think it is
so difficult to make it stick, and let me say that I think there
are two obligations on ministers, but they are in some respects
(not all respects) different from those on officials, and I will
explain why in a moment, if you wish. That was a particularly
difficult period and Richard Crossman had been determined to try
and breach the rules. In those days, in any event, let me say,
there was far too much secrecy. I have been refreshing my memory
of the Radcliffe Committee Report in preparation for this session
and I had actually forgotten that in those days just the fact
of who was on a Cabinet Committee was an official secret, so I
have no doubt that 30 years ago I would have been breaking the
Official Secrets Act just mentioning, as I did earlier, that I
have a Cabinet Committee meeting which I am chairing at 4.30,
and the level of classification of documents, say in the Department
of Health and Social Security, which does not have that many secrets,
was absolutely extraordinary. There is not only more openness
now, but in practice and in law many more powers are available
to parliamentarians and to the public to get at truths which ministers
or officials may wish to cover up, and there have been recent
controversies to prove that. That is a different issue, in my
judgment, from keeping diaries. I have said what I said about
diaries. I do not keep a diary myself. I am uncomfortable about
the idea of diaries. Barbara Castle was very nice about me on
every page where I appear, so I have no complaints personally
about her diary keeping, but I do just say that if people are
going to write a diary quite swiftly after the time they leave
then it can be very difficult in terms of personal relationships.
Q431 Chairman: Can we just try to
unravel some of the points as we go along, because I asked you
about the Freedom of Information Act to start with and you said
it was designed to protect certain categories of information,
and of course it was, but if you go back to those debates I remember
we had these very exchanges and you were adamant that it was not
designed simply to protect politicians from embarrassment, that
there had to be proper criteria, yet when I look at the Diplomatic
Service Regulations—
Mr Straw: The new version or the
old version?
Q432 Chairman: I think both actually—the
criteria which are given for things that should not happen, one
of them is publications that "create the possibility of embarrassment
to the Government in the conduct of its policies".
Mr Straw: Which paragraph is that?
Q433 Chairman: I am on paragraph
2.4. Surely that is quite inconsistent with what we argued about
freedom of information?
Mr Straw: No, it is not. First
of all, because this is talking about responsibilities on officials.
What this third tier does is to reflect the fundamental relationship
between civil servants and ministers. What you have in this country,
and I happen to think it is a good system, is a permanent civil
service who serve successive governments of different political
persuasions and there is essentially a bargain between the civil
service and ministers and political parties. The bargain is that
we, as ministers, we collectively as a government, take on trust
those officials who appear before us. Even after all these years
in government, apart from my own private office and very senior
officials, I have no say whatever, nor do I think I should, over
the appointment of officials. You take them on trust both as to
their professionalism, their integrity, their ability to keep
confidences and their general trustworthiness. In return, as a
minister, you offer them trust and agree that you will not seek
to know their political opinions, provided they reciprocate in
terms of loyalty to the Government, and also you do not gratuitously
criticise them because they cannot answer back. It is not for
officials to create the possibility of embarrassment to the Government
in the conduct of its policies, that is for parliamentarians,
it is for the use of powers under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is for parliamentarians, and I have spent 18 years in opposition,
so every day of my time in opposition I would try and embarrass
the Government, and quite right, too. It is for journalists and
for members of the public these days under the Freedom of Information
Act, for which I am proud to say I was responsible.
Chairman: I think we will settle for
that as the opening exchange. There may be one or two votes, but
we will resume once we have done that.
The Committee suspended from 2.47 pm to
3.11 pm for a division in the House
Q434 Chairman: We will continue our
session, and I apologise again for the disturbance. We were having
an opening exchange about this balance between freedom of information
generally and the provisions to do with controlling publications
by former civil servants and also former ministers. Just one last
point I would put to you on this is that when Sir Jeremy Greenstock
came to see us, our former man at the UN and our former man in
Baghdad—and I am sure colleagues will want to ask you about
some of the details of that case—he put a very, very strong
argument about where the balance of public interest would lie
in a case like his. He said, "Mistakes were made over Iraq
and part of the whole point in writing about it is in the public
interest, the lessons to be learned from the true story rather
than from assumed facts or distortions of facts. I think there
is a value in some transparency about these things in the public
interest." Is that not a strong argument?
Mr Straw: I think it is a strong
argument. I do not think it is a conclusive argument, and it has
to be balanced against other considerations. Could I just make
it clear that I have absolutely no criticism to make of Sir Jeremy
Greenstock. He observed the rules, he submitted his book. I had
a discussion with him and that would have been preceded by some
correspondence. We had a difference of view, but he accepted that
the rules were such that in the end it would be my view which
would prevail, and let me say that he is a diplomat whom I hold
in the highest regard, and also on a personal level I have got
very great affection for him. I just want to make that clear.
As it happens, what I read of the book was rather helpful to the
Government's case in respect of Iraq rather than unhelpful, so
there was no suggestion of seeking to stop its publication because
of embarrassment. Could I just say in respect of that, Chairman,
because you asked me about that in the truncated discussion, the
rule in DSR 5, paragraph 2, is "create the possibility of
embarrassment to the Government in the conduct of its policies".
We are not talking about embarrassment to the Government generally
or embarrassment to individual members of the Government because
something has been said personally disobliging, and it is quite
important to say that that rule is qualified by "in the conduct
of its policies". Of course, above all with issues of war
it is crucial that there are records and that these records are
in due course available for scrutiny by historians, by parliamentarians
and by the public. That has always been the case and that is absolutely
fundamental because in war, more than anything else, ministers
should be fully accountable, responsible and answerable for the
decisions which they have advised Parliament of, and they have
put men and women in harm's way and some of them will have been
killed and injured, which has been the case in respect of Iraq.
Coming to this discrete issue about Sir Jeremy Greenstock's book,
he was only able to gain those insights that he had because everybody
around him, including me, assumed that he was following the same
rules and conventions of confidentiality as everybody else in
the room, everybody else who was receiving in writing minutes
and memoranda. So he had privy access, confidential access. I
think in that situation—and this is a point which in the
end without very much debate he accepted—it cannot be for
one individual to determine whether those conventions and rules
should or should not be broken because the system simply cannot
operate in such circumstances. It has to be some kind of objective
set of rules and objective criteria.
Q435 Chairman: The problem is, he
went through all the processes. As you said yourself just now,
he played exactly by the rules, submitted the manuscript, was
getting all the clearances and then you saw him, I think, and
told him he should not do it?
Mr Straw: No. There was one thing
which he might have done, and I think we now make it very clear
in the new rules, which is to seek approval in principle before
entering into a contract with a publisher. As I say, I have no
criticism of him in respect of that, but it happens to be the
case that if he was applying the rules to the letter then he should
have sought prior clearance for the writing of the book and that
may have saved a lot of difficulty. In any event, there was correspondence
with Jeremy. I then had submitted to me an extract, not the whole
book, and I know that he made the point to you when he saw you
that I had not read the whole book. I have got a huge amount to
do, but what I did do was to read all the extracts which had been
flagged up for me which were relevant and got a sense of it, and
I felt that it should not be published because it breached a number
of the criteria laid down by Radcliffe and reflected in the DSRs.
In the end—and I do not know whether you are complaining
about this—ministers have to make decisions. If you are
saying to me he felt strung along by officials, that is simply
not the case. As I recall, officials were in no different a position
from me, but in the end these things are matters for ministers
in any event.
Q436 Chairman: But the Diplomatic
Service Regulations say: "The final authority for all members
and former members of the Diplomatic Service is the Permanent
Under-Secretary"?
Mr Straw: Yes, and the Permanent
Under-Secretary agreed with me as well, let me say, so there was
not an issue between Michael Jay and myself, but I am entitled
to have an opinion in that situation, I would have thought.
Q437 Paul Flynn: What we heard in
evidence from Mr Greenstock was, "At the end of June 2005
Sir Michael Jay informed me that the Foreign Secretary had just
become aware that I was intending to write for publication and
had expressed strong objections, though he had not read the text."
Greenstock told us that the writing is clearly written for publication
and all the signals were that it would be okay and that you personally
had intervened before you had read the book and said you did not
want it published. Is that true?
Mr Straw: I had been given a synopsis
of what was in the text, I had not read the text at that stage,
but I took exception in principle to the idea of a very senior
diplomat publishing a record of events which were as fresh as
they had been in such circumstances. I just come back to the point
I made right at the beginning—
Q438 Paul Flynn: Rather than repeat
the point, could I carry on as there is a number of questions
I want to ask in the limited time? Is not the difference that
your attitude to Christopher Meyer's book (which was tittle-tattle
and of no great consequence) was that you were happy to see that
go ahead, offensive as it might have been to you personally, but
that you had strong objections to Craig Murray's book about Uzbekistan
and Greenstock's book because they were in a different category,
because they talked about something serious, which was the relationship
between Britain and America, and that was something which might
embarrass you and embarrass the country and you wanted to stop
them being published?
Mr Straw: There is a complete
consistency between the decisions which were taken in respect
of the Meyer book and those taken in respect of Jeremy Greenstock's
book, and also which have been taken in respect of the Murray
book. In the end, a judgment was made in respect of Meyer's book—and
this was spelt out by Lord Turnbull when he gave evidence—that
we were unlikely to succeed in obtaining an injunction to restrain
publication because it was mainly tittle-tattle. It was fairly
inoffensive tittle-tattle, but Meyer was disobliging about me,
amongst many other people, but that seemed to me to be not remotely
a reason for seeking to prevent publication. For that reason,
Meyer was written to on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary to explain
that we were not going to seek to restrain publication, but neither
were we approving it. In respect of Jeremy Greenstock's book,
it was different and the reason it was different was because we
judged that it did breach those criteria laid down in Radcliffe
and which successive governments have followed.
Q439 Paul Flynn: But the criteria
which you were worried about, surely, was the personal embarrassment
to yourself as Foreign Secretary?
Mr Straw: No.
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