Memorandum by the Rt Hon Lord Owen CH
In May 1991 I submitted the manuscript of my
autobiography, Time To Declare, to Sir Robin Butler, then
Secretary of the Cabinet. I felt bound by the guidelines set out
in the 1974 Radcliffe Report but as will be clear by the correspondence,
which I attach (Annex), there was a negotiation between myself
and the Cabinet Secretary. This correspondence is already in the
public domain as part of my papers held by the Special Collections
and Archives Department at the University of Liverpool, of which
I am Chancellor.
As you will see I reserved the right to make
the final decisions on the guidelines in the light of advice from
Sir Robin and did not consider his judgement absolute. Of course,
I gave great weight to his views on whether they contravened the
requirements of national security. On whether they injured the
country's international relations, I gave his views serious consideration.
On whether they undermined confidence in relationships within
Government I made largely my own political decisions. Broadly
speaking, I considered it right to delete all named criticisms
of members of the Civil Service or Diplomatic Service since I
think it is a good rule of thumb that politicians should keep
named criticism to that of their political colleagues who are
in a position to defend themselves.
It seems now, from the outside, that the undoubted
mess we are in over political memoirs or diaries from politicians
and civil servants is that the traditional separation between
impartial administration and political decision making has become
damagingly blurred. The Committee will see evidence from the enclosed
correspondence that this was starting to develop in 1991. This
blurring has, in my view, become much worse in recent years because
of three factors:
1. The appointment of two political
appointees, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, by the Prime
Minister in 1997 with executive power over members of the Civil
Service and Diplomatic Service.
2. The creation in 2001 of two new
Secretariats in 10 Downing Street, the European Secretariat and
Overseas and Defence Secretariat, which have contributed to a
level of incompetence in the Prime Minister's handling of the
proposed European Constitution and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
3. The diminished role of the Cabinet
Office, Cabinet Secretariat, Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet itself
from 1982-1990 and from 1997-2006.
I have never known a time in the last 40 years
when there has been so much disillusionment, bordering on contempt,
for politicians by civil servants and diplomats and vice-versa.
Hopefully the next Prime Minister will restore the separation
between political advisers and civil servants, abolish the two
Secretariats in No 10, and restore the authority of all four aspects
of Cabinet Government. If that happens there is a good chance
that mutual trust and respect can be restored and the UK governed
with much greater competence and far more public support, whether
at home or abroad.
9 January 2006
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