CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 884-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SELECT COMMITTEE

 

 

ETHICS AND STANDARDS

 

 

Thursday 2 February 2006

MR PETER RIDDELL, MR JOHN LLOYD and SIR SIMON JENKINS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 69

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Select Committee

on Thursday 2 February 2006

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Mr David Burrowes

Paul Flynn

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Jenny Willott

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Peter Riddell, The Times, Mr John Lloyd, The Financial Times and Sir Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Let me call the Committee to order and welcome our witnesses and guests this morning, distinguished journalists all, and we hope that you are going to help us with at least two inquiries that we have got running at the moment. We may find that you can help us with more as we go along, but it is a great pleasure for us to have Peter Riddell of The Times, John Lloyd of The Financial Times and Simon Jenkins it says here of The Guardian, but of many other parishes too. Thank you all very much for coming. I am not sure of two things, whether you are clear quite what we have asked you to come and talk to us about or whether you would like to say something by way of introduction, or should we just start off?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Just start off.

Mr Lloyd: We were briefed well by your clerk, so we know roughly the content.

 

Q2 Chairman: If you make sure you say whatever you want to say to us in the course of the next hour and a half, perhaps we could dispense with opening shots. Can we get memoirs out of the way to start with? Peter, you have given us an excellent note, as ever, but at the end of it you rather discouragingly say something like, "I do not know why you waste your time with this kind of nonsense." No, you do not. You say there are many more important issues for the Committee to consider. When we had David Owen here last week his line was precisely the opposite. His line was how adroit it was of us to see that the issue of memoirs opened up the key issues about what was happening to government now, and in fact he gave us a memorandum which says, "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", and then he adds, "I have never known a time in the last 40 years where there has been so much disillusionment bordering on contempt of politicians by civil servants and diplomats and vice versa." So he thought we were onto the case here.

Mr Riddell: No, I think there is a distinction between saying that David Owen's point, the final one, is an important one for the Committee to look at, which you have been looking at when you have been looking at the Civil Service Act and things like that, and what you can actually do about political memoirs. That is the point in my final sentence, that actually what you can do is pretty limited, or rather what the Government can do on it, and I would not disagree that there are some very interesting broader issues, but the actual specific point of political memoirs is a kind of minor subset of that.

Q3 Chairman: But his point was that it is the fact that the old traditional boundaries and the old conventions are breaking down, we have now got warring tribes, and that the upshot of the warring tribes is that we have behaviour on the memoir front of a kind that we would not have had before. That is the thesis.

Mr Riddell: Yes, but that is the kind of final end product of it. The more interesting issue, I would suggest to the Committee, is what happens when they are actually working together rather than what happens after they stop working.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think there are two totally separate issues on memoirs. One is what should be, if at all, the responsibility of my profession, or the publishing industry, or whatever it might be, towards people who want to make revelations which are in some sense outside what was done in the past, and on that I am completely libertarian - we can do whatever we bloody well like - and, subject to the laws of libel, if someone comes along with some startling revelations about the antics within Number 10 Downing Street, that is fine by us, and I therefore do not think there is any public policy issue that attaches to disclosure, to memoirs, to publishing, to journalism vis-à-vis the Government - that is not a problem as I see it. There is clearly a problem for government, and I think that is, in a sense, your business, not ours. It is how you keep your secrets, and that is timeless; that has always been the case. What I imagine David Owen is getting at is that there has been some dissolving of the bonds of the profession of politics and government which leads people to feel that they can be more revelatory than they were before, and I think that is undeniably the case, but I would have thought that was part of a much wider question about the nature of power and government and the institutions and the relationship of participants to those institutions than an issue to memoirs themselves. That said, if I was in government, I think I would worry about it, and I would think to myself: what is the nature of the contract that governs people who are employed by the state? Does that contract need redrafting in some way? Are there restrictions that we want to place on people which we did not feel it was necessary to place on them in the past because they were committed to this career for life, or whatever?

Mr Lloyd: I would also make two points: the obvious one that, insofar as there were inhibitions within the media about publishing things - that is, we should not publish this because it is against the national interest - these have gone for some time. About ten years ago there was a programme in which Max Hastings, who was then on The Telegraph, reflected that what had happened with coverage of the Royal family during the Diana period showed that newspaper editors, including editors of The Telegraph, who might have stayed their hand on printing gossip which might have been ill-founded, had gone. The sheer competition for Diana stories, and for scandal stories more generally, meant that no editor could take a view that you should not publish this because it was bad taste or against the national interest or it might damage the Royal family. Inhibitions of that kind, if you like what had been thought of as the natural inhibitions against publishing things, had gone for some time. The other thing I want to say which touches on this is that all of us often lament, and politicians often lament, the decline of hard news, that there is less news about policies and what people say in speeches and so on; and that is true - it is true both in newspapers and on television - but what has hugely increased is soft news about politics. Politicians and politics and public figures have become much more the feed-stuff of entertainment in satire shows, comedy shows, so that politics or news about politics has to some extent migrated from the hard to the soft part, especially with television, and that has vastly increased the market for gossip, for revelation, for revelation, above all, about character, and that is where Sir Christopher Meyer, with a clearly and finely tuned nose to the market, put his memoir. It is a memoir which became famous not so much for what it revealed about policy but from what it revealed about character, and the market for character stories is now vastly increased, because the soft news, entertainment news, about politicians, especially, obviously, leading politicians, Prime Ministers, cabinet secretaries and so on, has expanded hugely in the last 20 or 30 years.

Mr Riddell: Can I make a historical point on this? If you look historically, there have been a number of memoirs by public servants - leaving aside what politicians have said about civil servants, which I think is also an issue, which I mention in my memo - both Alan Clark and Geoffrey Robinson talked a lot about named civil servants. It was put to me by one senior civil servant, "Since they were both bounders, it did not really matter" - honourable bounders, of course - but public servants writing about it has occurred several times, and I think there is a danger of us saying, "Shock, horror, Christopher Meyer said rude things about people. He should not have said it", and all that, from the point of view of good government, but it has happened before. If you look at the Nicholas Henderson diaries, they came 12 years later, but they make as many personal remarks about ministers as Christopher Meyer does. The classic example is the Alanbrooke Diaries - a very interesting historical study. There he was, the greatest staff officer Britain has ever had in the war, and they published the bowdlerised form, by that great toady Bryant, within a dozen years of the war when Churchill was alive, and they published Alanbrooke's because he wanted to make some money because he had a rotten field-marshal's pension, and they were a 100 times more revealing, more damaging and much more interesting about the running of the war. They have subsequently been published a few years ago in the full version without the prior bowdlerisation, but they are a terribly important document. So there have been several cases of this. Even now, whilst I agree exactly with what John and Simon were saying about the change in the journalistic market, it is only a minority of public servants who do it, but the interesting thing, I think, in the Sir Christopher Meyer case where the real fault is in five or six pages, and I have written that and I have told him it myself, is the fact he has been cold-shouldered by his old buddies. There was a meeting of the permanent secretaries, a weekly meeting. They decided they would cut him off and they would have no contact with him. All that I think will result in not many others doing it. The other was Sir Jeremy Greenstock, you had a session with Jeremy Greenstock. The fact that he is director of Ditchley, I do think was a factor, I am sure, in his caution and unwillingness to pull it off because, if he had gone ahead against official approval, it might have made life difficult for him in Ditchley, which I think he effectively conceded in the exchange with you.

Q4 Chairman: In your memorandum, Peter, you give us a very nice roll-call of the past cases, which is a useful reminder, but, of course, many of them did, or were obliged, to play by some kind of rules, usually in terms of the waiting period. I think, in the correspondence David Owen had with Lord Butler about his publication, I think Butler says at one point, "But I am trying to hold the line on Henderson, and, if I let you go", you know, there is a sense of lines being held here, but what I am putting to you, and it follows what John has just said, maybe we are in a different era, maybe the dam has burst, maybe people do not play by those rules any more and there is nothing much we can do about it.

Sir Simon Jenkins: You can go beyond that and say, "Is it a bad thing. I think I disagree with John in this respect. I view the change that he has described in slightly derogatory terms as wholly benign. The portrayal of public figures as rounded personalities I welcome. The portrayal of civil servants as other than faceless bureaucrats I welcome. This is a gateway for ordinary citizens into politics which you do not get through conventional political reporting. I am slightly on George Galloway's side here.

Chairman: Steady on now!

Sir Simon Jenkins: At least at the start of his argument. The fact that nowadays you discover, admittedly through these somewhat bizarre channels sometimes, like pseudo revelatory memoirs, you do learn about the process of politics, and we just did not know before. We had no idea what was the relationship between a civil servant and a minister until they started ratting on each other, and I think ratting, as you implied before, is largely a matter of dates. It is like treason.

Q5 Chairman: It is getting the balance between the public interest in knowing and the public interest in, as you said at the very beginning, having an area of secrecy in government, and it is finding where that balance is and how on earth it can be enforced even if you decide where it is. Can I go on quickly, before I bring my colleagues in, to our second area. We are turning our minds to the whole area of what we call ethical regulation, all these ethical regulators that have popped up in the last decade or so in particular, although in the case of the Civil Service Commission, of course, it has been there for 150 years, but to try and to take stock of this, the question I want to ask you three is if you look at the evidence over this period, over the last ten years or so, we have had all these things established - the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Commission for Public Appointments - all these things. They commission these surveys regularly to see if trust in public life has got better or worse, if trust in the public appointments process has got better or worse and, of course, they find that it has got no better, in some cases it has got worse, so you have got a kind of paradox that we spent ten years setting up these ethical regulators to provide public reassurance that government is being conducted properly whenever these scandals blow up and yet it seems not to make a blind bit of difference. Is this because at the same time, for John's kinds of reasons, we have had a media which is so consumed by an agenda which says that all people in public life are basically fools or knaves that it just cuts across any other thing that we might try and do.

Mr Riddell: As I said in my memo, I am on the advisory board of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which is purely to do with looking at their research. They have brought in various people to provide some new research on that; and it is very interesting, and, if you look at their report and research, it shows those trends but with two interesting caveats. One is, of course, if you distinguish between individual politicians, Parliament, politics as a whole, there is a massive distinction, and, as is true of all services and attitudes to people, the nearer you get to the person - the headmaster gets a higher trust rating than the council official, let alone anyone in Whitehall - the higher the rating average is, which reinforces Simon's localism points on that very strongly, and that is consistently true. In Pendle they will undoubtedly think that Mr Prentice is wonderful and it is no doubt a wise judgement, but in his collective role here with all the rest of you it is a different verdict. That has been consistently true. The second point is in trust questions, and this is something that when we had a discussion with the advisory board, that it was almost impossible to get questions asked because people do not think in those terms. When they look at government they think of what the government is doing. When we were doing the first lot of research it was in the aftermath of the Iraq war, so when you asked about trust in government people were thinking about WMD, Iraq and all that, they were not thinking of more narrow ethical issues of conflict, financial interest and behaviour like that because people understand that we do not think like that. Why the hell should they? There is a great problem in the trust thing because often it is delivering a verdict on the government rather than specifically the ethical issues, and that is a virtual insuperable conceptual problem. I make various suggestions on research trying to separate it out and it is very difficult; and also people do not have any clear idea of some of the kinds of distinctions between senior civil servants and ministers, for example, when you ask on that.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I would also say that I think the fact that the better they know you the less they think of you does not necessarily mean that you are worse. The fact that people know more about politics is a good thing in itself. If one of the consequences of that is that they trust you a little less, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor does it necessarily reflect on you. It might well mean that a certain sort of poison of secrecy is coming out of the system, but that is slightly playing with words.

Q6 Chairman: But Peter's point is that they know Gordon and they trust him and like him, but he is contaminated by his association with the rest of us.

Sir Simon Jenkins: That is a different point, which is the relationship between the general and particular in people's attitude to anybody. The research that Peter draws attention to, which I am sure is universally the case, if you ask people in New York what their view is of people in public life, they will think of their local councillor, they will think of their mayor, they will think of the Controller of New York, they will think of the Governor of the State before they ever start thinking about the President. Here you have so effectively wiped out all these tiers that they only think about you, and, of course, the less they have got that is familiar to think about, as Peter said, the more they have got that is unfamiliar and they trust that less because it is unfamiliar. I think you have got to disentangle these questions.

Mr Lloyd: I just add this. I think you in public life are judged by three standards: one the old standard - probably fading off - what was called decency and honour: the sense that you did not do certain things, but that standard was not written down, it came out of the atmosphere, as it were, and, of course, with it, since people did do certain things sometimes, would go hypocrisy and secrecy - what I think Simon meant by "the poison of secrecy". To counteract that you have erected, as you have said, a number of committees and mechanisms which are much more objective - people are being held to objectives, measurable observable standards - and then the third one, as the Liberal Party has discovered in the last month or so, is the tabloids. The morality being enforced by tabloid revelation, and that kind of morality, if you like media morality, scandal morality, increasingly weighs upon public life, or is part of public life, and is said to be - I do not know how much evidence there is of this - a major discouragement of people becoming politicians or becoming public figures. Moving from private business with that third kind of morality does not apply, or applies much more rarely, into public life where it applies all the time. These three, if you like, moralities or moral standards constantly interact in your life, in the life of a public figure, and the higher up the pole you get the more they press upon you.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Can I say one thing about the institutions that you have described, because we will probably come onto this anyway. I do think you need to bear in mind that the bodies to which you have referred which are now in some sense regulating public ethics, I think are perceived by the public as just another part of the same system - they are just you - and that is why I believe very strongly that, if something constructive comes up in this sort of discussion, the need to establish an institution, literally an institution, utterly separate from you governing some of these issues is crucial now, in the same way that a Supreme Court in America is over against the legislature. You need to establish some institution, some commission that is over against you and regulating you. You cannot pretend you can do it yourself and get benefit from it.

Q7 Mr Burrowes: On that point, do you think all the regulatory bodies and all the regulations post Nolan have done any real good in terms of trust and confidence in public institutions? Do they just perpetuate, just expose, some of the problems rather than actually achieving any real good?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Coming back to what I said before, there are two questions. One is whether they have improved public trust and the other is whether they have done any good. I take your word for it; they have not improved public trust. I am not sure they have not done some good. If you now look at a public body, almost to a fault, the people have been sieved to destruction to get onto that body or interviewed or cross-examined; the procedures are ludicrous (I have been part of them myself), and I think it has gone too far, but I do think one consequence is that you look at a public body now and you do not just think they are all friends of the Minister, and I do think that is an advance.

Mr Riddell: A number of instances. If you look post Nolan - so we are talking about a dozen years now - I think to take the example of the House you are members of, the system of parliamentary regulation is much better than it was in the mid nineties, which is partly thanks to two individuals, Sir George Young and Sir Philip Mawer, the Standards Commissioner. In the last four or five years a lot of the problems have been dealt with, partly through sensible advice given to all you as Members when you become Members about any conflicts and the sensitive way that the Committee on Standards in Public Life is run. Taking Simon's distinction absolutely, which I agree with, which is outside perception, reality is no longer to my mind, apart from a very occasional problem, to do with MPs' interests, and beyond it, because of disclosure, people can make up their minds on what you have as outside interests and take it as good or bad and that is it, so I think there are gains there. Equally, things like the Electoral Commission. The problem is, as Simon has taken it, classically the pendulum has swung enormously, and that applies, as you will know, with your local council, with the standards body where clearly there are now moves to simplify it where it did become grossly onerous going down to parish council level, but I think there are gains. The Electoral Commission is unquestionably a gain - and I know you are going to be looking at that. Umpteen bodies are looking at the Electoral Commission, and there are big issues about what it does, but in general, in terms of the reality of things, yes, I do think so. There is also a factor, taking up Simon's point, I think it is very useful to have grit in the machine. I think this has been shown several times recently by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, where successive Chairmen - Nigel Wicks, now Sir Alistair Graham - had not minded having rows with the Cabinet Secretary at the time, and that has been a good thing because it has exposed disagreements, exposed arguments and I think that is good; so I think there are gains, but it comes on to - and I know it is something you are looking at in this inquiry - how much more independent the bodies need to be made, and I think the present confusion where some of them are off-shoots of government, some of them are off-shoots of this place and so on, that is where I think there is a lot you can do and the direction should be, I agree with Simon, independent.

Q8 Mr Burrowes: In 1995 both of you were talking about how it is rewriting the British Constitution and it is fighting it as a major constitutional change. Do you think that has come to play and has there actually been such a change?

Mr Riddell: We are now in a much more code-based system. Governments could still get round codes, like the Ministerial Code, but the fact these things are published and are public documents, your committee and the predecessor committee when Giles Radice was chairing it pre 1997, getting the code more accepted - all of these things are gains.

Q9 Paul Flynn: Sir Simon Jenkins, you raised the interesting point that you thought it might be a good idea if Tony Blair would consider reporting Christopher Meyer to the Press Complaints Commission for invasion of privacy, passing on confidential information and possibly for making profit out of proceeds of a war crime. You pointed out that the difficulty there is that, of course, Sir Christopher Meyer is running for the President of the Complaints Commission. We did raise this with him, the fact that he was simultaneously a poacher and game keeper. Do you think it is right that he should be doing the job with the PCC?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I was being facetious in the first place, I hope you appreciate. I do not feel it very strongly, I really do not. The Press Complaints Commission is really not a great advance on sliced bread. I do not rate it at all highly, so I do not care really. I was making an ironic point about the Prime Minister. I will give you a straight answer. I think it is extraordinary that he should be Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, but then almost the entire commission is composed of compromised individuals.

Q10 Paul Flynn: So it is a useless organisation?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I was on the Calvert Committee, which preceded it, and we never in our wildest dreams thought something so toothless would be set up.

Q11 Paul Flynn: Can we look at other compromised organisations. After the great scandals about lobbying where you saw the disappearance of lobbyists - lobbyists have now called themselves consultants and all sorts of fancy names and do not exist as lobbyists - they set themselves up as the Association of Professional and Political Consultants. There was a case last year of one of their members, Media Strategy, flagrantly breaching their regulations by paying money directly to a peer. Instead of expelling that organisation, they allowed them quietly to resign and no action was taken against them. We see a man called Mark Adams on the radio this week, who shamelessly said it was their right as lobbying organisations to subvert, and the example was an interesting one, it was patients' groups in the House of Commons. If you have the patient group for rheumatoid arthritis that Diana Hemmings has been setting up for a while, it has now been taken over by Rose Pharmaceuticals, who are pushing a drug of doubtful efficacy and they are now servicing that all-party organisation, and there are the examples in the all-party groups that we have in the Commons, and virtually all the reports, all the serious work done, all the thinking, is done by organisations who wish to make profits out of the groups. I am sorry, this is a long question. The point I want to make on this is that these matters have been brought up but the system becomes endemic; it becomes accepted here; all-party groups become the mouthpiece, in theory, of the pharmaceutical industry and all the rest of them. Are our own institutions within parliament for looking after standards adequate, in your view, or do we need, as you seem to be suggesting, some group that is entirely divorced from this to meet the standards in parliament?

Sir Simon Jenkins: It seems to me that the cases you mention are for you to determine. I am always impressed by how much, dare I say it in this company, lobbyists feel it is worth their money finding certain people in this building, but that is their business. If you are asking a slightly different question, which is simply who should oversee the custodians, which is the central question, I think, you are asking, I come back to where I was before. You have got to get it out of this building. If you think of all the conversations that took place within the Metropolitan Police in the 1960s and 1970s after Robert Mark, and he kept on saying things like, "Don't you trust me? I can get the rot out of the system", and everybody says, "That is not the problem. The problem is that you are the system". You cannot persuade people that you are looking after yourselves very well when case after case comes up which shows that you are not and when the only person who is overseeing you is you. That is why I feel it is not a matter of setting up another committee; I think there needs to be a substantive institution within the British Constitution over against you. There is a great argument for the BBC within the media. The BBC is so big and powerful that nobody can actually question, supposedly, its independence; it is just big, rich and powerful. You need something big, rich and powerful that is not you overlooking you, and I feel that about the courts and the law, and I feel that about Parliament, and I think I feel that about the press, but certainly unless you can move something - which is what Peter said - out of house which is big enough, strong enough and recognisable enough to the public to oversee you, you are not going to break this one.

Mr Riddell: Can I add a caveat to what Simon has been saying. I think there is a distinction between looking at the complaints about individual instances and looking at systemic faults, and I think that is where the key distinction lies. I think there is a case for self-regulation but with maximum disclosure. If I can reply to Mr Flynn on the all-party point, which one of my colleagues in The Times, Simon Coates, did a big thing on this a few of weeks ago, the point there is to shed light on it. I think anyone can want to lobby Parliament. What we ought to know is exactly what the basis of all these things is, and then you can take your view. You know, the X or Y group is funded by whomever, and everyone can take a view, but it has got to be absolutely clear what happens. I think there is a distinction between Parliament dealing with individual complaints - because I think constitutionally that is right - and systemic problems being looked at outside by properly independent bodies. For example, to give a case, the Committee on Standards for Public Life is effectively part of the Cabinet Office. Its staff are on secondment, and so on, so they have to look at their future careers via the Cabinet Office. That strikes me as completely wrong, and the same is true of a lot of these bodies, and they are all in the building half a mile away from here - it is kind of Ethics House - and it is all set up by the Cabinet Office. They come within the Cabinet Office budget. That is mad. You have got to have an independent looking at the systems, but - I think Parliament is in a slightly different position - individual cases - you have various mechanisms - I think they are a lot better but, the whole thing is shedding light and then we can retry the judgments.

Q12 Chairman: Is not one of the curious things about the last ten years not just what we have talked about in boards, that we have gone down the transparency route. That has been the whole ethos of the Committee on Standards in Public Life approach to party funding and everything else; so now donors are exposed in a way they were not before; the expense accounts of Members of Parliament exposed in a way that they were not before. The effect of this has not been to raise confidence in public life but to diminish it further because of the way in which all this has been reported, is not it?

Mr Riddell: I wonder if it is actually much more to do with how government is seen as performing. I am not sure that disclosure has made things necessarily worse. I think a lot of it is bypassed actually.

Q13 Paul Flynn: You have written convincingly that detecting lying, misrepresentation and the more slippery substance of bullshit is now a major, and at times seems to be the major purpose of political commentary, and I think most of us would say amen to that. As we are seeing, it is spreading now with the tabloidisation of the vocal press in the way that we call it the national press, and I think you agree with Simon Jenkins about the fact that the PCC is ineffective. How can we control it? What can we do to restrain the excesses of the press?

Mr Lloyd: I would agree with Simon on this. I do not think there is much you as parliamentarians or any government can do. I think there is a case for it, although one would have to see the legislation for privacy laws, but as far as controlling what you say is the tendency towards tabloidisation and to focusing upon the downside or the underbelly of politics and of all public life, I do not see how you can do anything about it. What I believe is that a journalistic culture has to look at itself, and journalistic cultures differ enormously between countries. The one that we are most familiar with apart from our own - we have a big Anglophone culture - is America, and America has developed over a century mechanisms for, if you like, self-criticism both institutional in journalism schools and institutions and built within the profession of self-examination in a way which we do not. People in our profession do argue a lot about what that produces and there is an argument that says that American journalism tends to be bland, balanced in the sense that one side says one thing, one the other and you do not get any real sense of what the truth is. I think that can be true, but I think what also can be true in America and the best of American journalism is that it avoids what we do, which is to do what you describe, to bring down public life into its grimiest level; but I think that effectively only journalists and people in public life can address that outside of the law; whereas we have to look at ourselves, our practices, we have to debate them in a way which by and large we have not in the past and think how far our responsibilities, our claim to be a pillar of democracy, which is the case - a free press is necessary for democracy - is being served by us. Other than that, I think you are into a dangerous route of suppression. In other words, once you start trying to address what we may all agree in different ways is nasty coverage, you are then suppressing a freedom which is basic.

Sir Simon Jenkins: If it is any comfort, we get emails every week saying, "Why can't you be nicer about the Government?", and I go into the office and I say to the people with whom I work, "Come on, let us think of something we can write about this week which is not negative about the Government", and we sit round and say, "The statistics on literacy have just gone up a little. We have actually opened a new power station in Iraq", and then somebody says, "What about this?", and, "What about this?", and there are six issues, all of which are negative about the Government, screaming to be written about. It is not that we do not try. It is that you keep on giving us open goals.

Paul Flynn: I am not complaining about your work at all.

Mr Riddell: On a more altruistic note, whilst not disagreeing fundamentally with what either John or Simon have said, is it now possible that your constituents are better informed about politics and public affairs than they have ever been full stop, because of the internet? There is unmediated access to information, and there is a lot Parliament can do to improve the way it presents information, but that is a similar topic which I know is being looked at by a different committee, but the ability to be informed about public affairs is infinitely greater than it has ever been in the past. I also think, from a journalistic point of view, that the existence of the internet provides a facility for serious commentary, serious analysis, which may not always be appearing on the printed pages. Increasingly I think we will have a brand, which will be The Guardian, or The Times, or The FT, which appears in various forms. The internet provides scope for a lot of things which you complain about, period.

Q14 Paul Flynn: A final question. We know that the news that is trusted by people to a huge extent is the news that comes from broadcasters. There is a phenomenal difference between the way they trust the information they get from tabloid press and that which they get from the BBC and ITN, and that is because they have a duty of balance. That is possibly the reason. They have to produce it because of statutes that say they have to have that balance. Could we elevate the trust in newspapers we have to a similar extent if we have similar statutes on the press? I take the point you make about restricting the freedom, but there is no restriction on the freedom of broadcasters. They are generally trusted and they produce news that is generally balanced.

Sir Simon Jenkins: We could be here all day on that one.

Chairman: I am anxious not to get into a great inquiry into the nature of the press and so on, but an interesting exchange.

Q15 Jenny Willott: We have already talked about the fact that lots of different attitude surveys have shown that no matter what is happening in terms of ethical regulation it does not make much difference to public perception. Can I ask which you think is more important, to eliminate or to reduce sleaze and corruption or for people to think that it has been reduced?

Mr Lloyd: There is no contest. A real reduction is much more important than an apparent one or a hypocritical one. I think both Simon and Peter have spoken to the odd fact that you have more regulation, more transparency than we have ever had. We may even have more honest public figures and more honest politicians. I think it is a perfectly reasonable supposition to think that the public figures and politicians now are more open, less corrupt, less open to corruption than they have ever been, but the perception of this is the opposite because of the transparency, and also, I would add, because of the way in which the media cover the transparency. It is not as though you get any benefit from being transparent. You get the disbenefit of what the transparency throws up, and I think everyone in public life simply has to live with that.

Mr Riddell: One of the reasons why trust does not improve is not to do with the ethics, it is to do with other factors: because when people take their view on trust they are taking it across the range. They are taking it on Iraq, they are taking it on what was called in the first and second Blair terms "spin" and all that - they are taking it on that - but they are not just saying narrowly: are MPs taking money from lobbyists? They are not thinking about that. You cannot distinguish that. In fact in research, when they ask on issues of trust, Iraq came out on top, and that was slightly embarrassing because it was not supposed to be about that, it was supposed to be about ethics, but people do not think that way; so I think it is very difficult to provide an answer, but I agree with John, get it right, that is what matters.

Q16 Jenny Willott: In which case does public perception make any difference? Does it matter?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Can we just tackle this phrase "trust in public life". I think people do not know what you are talking about. I do not think they have got a clue. I totally agree with Peter. They just think of a specific and wherever the latest specific was on their scanner they will say "yes" or "no" to that question; but if I could repeat my previous answer, beating the vocalist drum a bit, public life to most people is not you, public life to most people is their community and the big problem not least for my profession, is to try and relate to what people's actual understanding of public life is, which is what is happening around them. One of the problems which has arisen in the last ten, 20 years is that they are feeling that the people they meet in public life regularly, who are people in local government - that is who they meet, that is their public life, 90 per cent of the people they come into contact with are not you, they are councillors - no longer deliver them a sense of empowerment. They no longer say to them "Yes, I can do that", or, "I cannot do that", or ,"Vote for me and I will do that." This conversation is stopped. They are saying, "The Government will not let us do that", or, "The Government will let us do that", and I think it is that deterioration in the concept of the public sector, or the public domain, that infuses a lot of these responses to these questions.

Q17 Jenny Willott: Do you think that public perception of levels of sleaze and corruption and so on does matter?

Mr Lloyd: Yes, I think it does matter. I think actually we do not know how much it does matter. I think that is quite an urgent issue. It may be that this Committee has a remit for that or it may be beyond it. I think that we in the news media have been traditionally, and continue to be, insouciant about the effect we have, and maybe we have to be. Maybe you cannot write thundering prose or do a great television exposé and worry all the time if you are getting it exactly right or if you are being fair to everybody, maybe it is just a tradition of journalism, but I think that what we also should do, both of us should do, outside of any kind of legislative structure, is to look at the effect. Is it true, for example, as I was saying earlier and as is frequently said - I heard it said very strongly in the last couple of days - that people are discouraged from being in public life or being ambitious in public life because of the effect of the news media revealing their private life. Is that right? It is constantly said, but is it right? Is it perhaps an excuse of some kind or a rationalisation, or is it just something that everyone says? What is the effect of a media culture which constantly emphasises sleaze? Is it because there is more sleaze or is it simply because that has become, as I was earlier arguing, a kind of soft news area which is popular, if you like, and which is constantly touched upon? I think that kind of conversation, both within the profession and between public life and the profession, is necessary to have. What are we doing to public life?

Q18 Jenny Willott: Is it possible to both eliminate or reduce sleaze or corruption and improve public perception of that?

Sir Simon Jenkins: By definition, the more you reveal it for its suppression the more you publicise it. The logical consequence to your question is, no, clamp everything down, lie through your teeth, cover it all up and people will think you are terrific. That is clearly not a sensible way of proceeding. As the Chairman said, you have gone in the opposite direction over the past ten years and I think it is for the public good that it has gone in the opposite direction.

Q19 Jenny Willott: Is there anything that can be done? If we are looking at how you can improve ethical regulation and so on, what do you feel could be done to improve public perception of it as well as improving the system?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think we need a new institution, but we can come on to that.

Q20 Jenny Willott: Do you feel that the fact that there are regular reports from ethical regulators just adds to the negative public perception. It is going back to what Tony was asking about publicising MPs' expenses and things like that. Do you feel that adds to the negative public perception?

Mr Riddell: I do not think many people pay the slightest attention to it, to be honest, apart from the MPs' expenses thing, which is a one day wonder. I do not think it has inhibited William Hague, the fact he earned nearly a million quid. His career seems to have prospered since that revelation. To give a parallel example, in my earlier career I was an economic journalist and dealt with the Bank of England on interests rates. It was a wonderful job to have, I was a colleague of John's on The FT at the time, because we got nods and winks from the Bank and we were a kind of conduit to that, so it was absolutely fantastic journalistically. Now we have a totally open system and I think it is one hundred per cent better, and it is just what should happen. It is totally above board and open. At the time if you had suggested to Gordon Richardson, who was Governor of the Bank of England 30 years ago, you would have a Monetary Policy Committee, you would have the votes published and I am sure you would hear muttering about it: "Dreadful - could not do it - destabilise the markets", but the reverse has happened: we have got increased stability. An example of openness working brilliantly, which, in fact, the changes you have brought in over the last decade have done, is a perfect example of where openness had actually produced stability, and I think, to use the parallel, apart from a few cases, a lot of publicity which has come out, I think, washes by, and that is a good thing. You could argue the less coverage it has it shows that people are just shrugging their shoulders.

Q21 Mr Prentice: We have got all these ethical regulators and the position is four times cleaner now than it was ten years ago, but why do we still get stories in the press that honours are for sale? Do you believe that honours are for sale?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Yes.

Q22 Mr Prentice: Would you like to say a bit more on that?

Sir Simon Jenkins: It is a straight answer; I gave you a straight answer. They are clearly for sale.

Q23 Mr Prentice: How much is a peerage then? While you are thinking let me ask Peter, because there was this story in The Sunday Times?

Sir Simon Jenkins: It is based on James I, I once worked out.

Q24 Mr Prentice: There was this story in The Sunday Times, let me read this out, and it was Des Smith, who works for the Specialist Schools and Academy Trust, and The Sunday Times reporters got in touch with them and they masqueraded as people who were minded to support financially the Prime Minister's pet project, the City academies, and Des Smith told them that a "benefactor who sponsored one or two academies could expect a knighthood and somebody stumping up money for five would be a certainty for a peerage for services to education"?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I am not quite sure what is surprising you. This has been going on for decades.

Mr Prentice: I think it is surprising.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Well you have not done anything about it. It has been in the public domain. I know someone who once offered money and when he protested he was not in the list he was told he did not give enough.

Q25 Mr Prentice: Why are you so relaxed about this?

Sir Simon Jenkins: We are not. We write about it all the time. The people who are relaxed about it are you.

Mr Riddell: As Simon was saying, if you go back to James I when he created baronets, there was a fixed price ratio, and that has been true virtually all the time.

Sir Simon Jenkins: It has just gone right down. It was £10,000 then!

Q26 Mr Prentice: What are our ethical regulators doing about this?

Mr Riddell: That is a question you should address less to us than to the Prime Minister. Perhaps when the Prime Minister appears in front of the Liaison Committee on Tuesday morning it is a question. Indeed, there is an interesting question about why the rumoured list of new peers is so delayed, because I think perhaps, whatever the Scrutiny Committee is called now, is kicking up about some of the more blatant practices you describe.

Q27 Mr Prentice: The Prime Minister does not give a toss; that is what you are saying.

Mr Riddell: It is not just him; it is all the party leaders. If you go through the political peers lists there is a direct correlation over the long-term years with money, and it applies to all of them. It is not just your party leader, but it is also true of other parties - again, openness, transparency, and so on. The Honours System is inherently a system of patronage and patronage is going to turn on money, and we do report it. It is endlessly reported.

Q28 Mr Prentice: The fault is ours?

Mr Riddell: No, I did not say the fault is yours, because you have never had the advantage, as far as I remember, of dispensing peerages.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Michael Foot's first list of Peers was turned down by Michael Cox on the grounds that they were all too poor.

Mr Lloyd: I am not sure how much this is the basis of your question, but are you saying we do not write enough about this?

Q29 Mr Prentice: No, I am suggesting that we have this framework of ethical regulation post Nolan, and I was getting the impression that perhaps politics is cleaner now than it was before because of all the transparency, and we still get, to me, these shocking revelations that people can give money to a political party and end up in the House of Lords. In fact we have got two - Sainsbury and Drayson - who are not only peers but ministers of the government having given huge amounts of money to the Labour Party.

Mr Lloyd: It is indicative of the way in which politics change. That is, I think, much an effect of the media, although perhaps partly that, but much more an effect of the fact that politics is becoming much more expensive. It is nothing like as expensive in the States or elsewhere in the democratic world, but it is more expensive. Indeed, a conversation I had yesterday with some people who had been thinking about going into Parliament, this person said that he was not rich enough, and that shocked me because I assumed still it was the case that people could become Members of Parliament by being voted rather than by being rich, but apparently the price has gone up. Certainly the price of running parties has gone up, while the income from membership has declined enormously. It is partly a function of the decline of political parties, is it not, that there fewer and fewer members paying their dues, therefore you have to put in rich supporters to the House of Lords.

Sir Simon Jenkins: We had a proposal in the Economist, I remember, some years ago when we simply said honours should be auctioned by Sotheby's each year, and that would fund the political parties.

Q30 Mr Prentice: Why are we not doing it?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Give Sotheby's some commission!

Q31 Mr Prentice: The Chairman will not allow me to bang on about honours. Can I ask a couple of questions about memoirs? The central issue, for me anyway, is about where the line is drawn, whether there should be confidentiality agreements, whether we should pick up Gus O'Donnell's point about Crown copyright, whether there should be a kind of timescale for publication, whether publication should be allowed in the run up to general elections, and so on and so forth, what constraints there should be on the publication of memoirs and diaries?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think, if I were in the position of government, I would want to have some of these constraints, because you cannot run an organisation without a measure of confidentiality in it. Whenever you are involved in managing newspapers, if someone reveals certain things, they get fired, and they get fired for being too open. You just have to have a framework within which you run an organisation. That framework depends, to a certain degree, on confidentiality. I accept that. Therefore, if I was in government, I would want to have a relationship with employees that was enforceable. I have to say (and I probably disagree with my colleagues here), I think it has gone much too far. On freedom of information, I cannot quite see how that operates, because absolutely everything that happens in government is unclear, and if that means that somebody is going to give his spin on what is already a public fact, it is hardly breaking a confidence. I genuinely think that some of the things that have come out recently in the form of memoirs, seen from the stand-point of government, do require some remedial action, and I think that remedial action has to surround the law of contract and the law of confidence.

Q32 Mr Prentice: So you just sign a confidentiality agreement?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Given FOI, it has got to be fairly well described. There is no point in saying to someone you cannot reveal something that everyone else can see on the internet. All I am saying is that I think there has to be some framework within which people do work together as colleagues in government that is bounded by some agreement of confidentiality, yes.

Mr Riddell: I would largely agree with that. The distinction is one Simon drew at the beginning, between our desire to find out as much as possible and from the good government perspective. As has emerged from your previous hearings, the Radcliffe rule, if not the spirit of Radcliffe, the 15-year rule, is dead. Indeed, in the Nicholas Henderson example, he eventually kicked over the traces and said, "I'm going to publish anyway" and there were three years to go for the 15 years, so that rule has been dead for a long time. It has to be a much more realistic rule, and, as Simon said, it has to be somehow related to FOI and the Official Secrets Act and so on and so forth to make it more realistic. Also, the definition of memoirs is sometimes too narrow, with TV now. For example, in Christopher Meyer's case, he had said a lot about the Iraq war in TV interviews within a year of the war with no problems at all.

Q33 Mr Prentice: He did not call ministers "political pygmies".

Mr Riddell: No. That is a different point. It is a question of what he was revealing about inside discussions as opposed to his value judgments about individual ministers.

Q34 Mr Prentice: What about value judgments? Should retiring civil servants and eminent former diplomats be allowed to publish books which are just full of value judgments about politicians? Should that be water off a duck's back? Meyer thinks politicians are political pygmies. Big deal. He thinks Jack Straw is a waste of time - and he did not say that; that is my take on it. Is that fair game?

Mr Riddell: You have touched exactly on the problem. In terms of the confidentiality agreement, it would relate to: Did he say anything about the private discussions between Downing Street and the Whitehouse? In the book there is practically no revelation which had not already appeared in public. Indeed, he said the real point was a lot of resolve - which it was. I have written a book on this area and I have tilled this area: I did not find anything new in his discussion of the run-up to the war. What was the point? It was exactly the value judgments. It is very difficult to police value judgments, apart from, as both Richard Wilson and Andrew Turnbull said to you, a kind of code believing that is not the done thing, and therefore the results are that you pay a price for doing that - which in fact Christopher Meyer is now paying.

Q35 Mr Prentice: The "good chaps" thing.

Mr Riddell: The good chaps - still, for the civil servants. On revealing confidential things - which gets to the Lance Price issue, and, indeed, as Andrew Turnbull talked about here, the "big question mark" which of course is Alastair Campbell's memoirs - confidentiality agreements, I think, would cover revelations about private discussions with named civil servants and things like that, which, from the good government point of view, there is a problem with. On value judgments, it is very difficult to ban people from expressing value judgments. You get into a slight absurdity there, whatever you might think about it. You can think, "Well, it was a tacky thing to do," but you cannot ban tackiness.

Sir Simon Jenkins: You must draw a distinction between disapproving of something and wanting to ban it. I think Meyer got as good as he gave by the end of that whole saga.

Q36 Mr Prentice: Yes, my default position is not to ban things. But there is a problem that has to be addressed. We are trying to find some practical solutions which people would not find oppressive, which people like you would not write scathing comments about. A kind of middle way.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Maybe the deterrent has been found in the Foreign Service by saying, "The man is a rat and we won't talk to him ever again."

Q37 Chairman: We had Bernard Donoughue here last week. Of course he was in Number 10 under Wilson and Callaghan and he was remembering - indeed, we looked at the extract from his diary - when Wilson tried to get the Cabinet then to sign up to the Radcliffe contract, and Jenkins said, "Get lost," Castle said, "Get lost," Benn said, "Get lost." I mean, this may sound a reasonable approach, but in the real world of politics it is undoable, is it not?

Sir Simon Jenkins: One of the differences between the Meyer memoirs and the Greenstock memoirs - and I do not know how far you want to go into this - is that it was clearly the case, as Peter said, that Meyer was not revealing anything that was of any great moment. These were just, as you say, value judgments. They may well be ill advised, they may be tacky, they may be tasteless, but that is life. Greenstock, so we understand, was revealing actual relationships between governments that would be really quite damaging to those relationships were they to be revealed. The system worked, is all I would say. The system worked. He was leaned upon; he agreed; he has postponed.

Q38 Chairman: The Committee, by the way, has had a letter from Alastair Campbell which says, "I do intend to publish a series of books" - a series of books - "about my experiences in politics at some time, but I would consider it wrong to publish in a manner or at a time detrimental to the interests of the government or the party I served." Then he goes on to have a swipe at the media.

Mr Lloyd: What does he say on the media?

Q39 Chairman: "With our media and politics as they are, I am in little doubt that publication would be used to try to damage the Government, the Labour Party, the Prime Minister and others. For that reason alone I have decided against early publication."

Sir Simon Jenkins: Forgive us while we laugh!

Q40 Chairman: I thought I would share this sentiment with you.

Mr Riddell: I am just looking at what the bidding will be for the book! Sorry.

Q41 Julie Morgan: I would like to talk about the improvement in public life that you have all talked about and the greater openness and transparency. I think Simon said that the one thing you could be sure of was that it was not the minister's friend who was on a board or a public appointment committee, and you seemed to imply that things have almost gone too far, in relation to the hoops and things that you had to go through. I wondered if you could expand on that.

Sir Simon Jenkins: All I was really saying was that the extent to which the appointments process for public bodies has now been sort of mechanised has simply gone too far. It takes six months to do it, people are put through a mildly humiliating process, and that is a deterrent to people coming forward to serve on public bodies. I have to say, all this is a consequence of a bee in my bonnet, which is that if you base your government entirely on an appointments system, the needs for openness and scrutiny will require those appointments to be in the manner they are now. You have a kind of totally surrogate form of accountability which takes place, from the minister down through all the appointments bodies, to ensure that everybody who appears on a quango is crystal clear. In the old days, these were elected people: they put themselves up for election, they were scrutinised by the public in some rudimentary sense and they were voted for. Because I believe passionately in that system, I find the other system relatively irksome and inappropriate in a democracy. But it certainly has gone, even within its own terms, too far now. The result is - and I hesitate to say this to colleagues of mine with whom I have served occasionally on quangos - that you think to yourself, "Where were they found?" In the sense in which in the old days Royal Commissions and commissions of inquiry were composed of friends of the minister, at least they were slightly more interesting at the time. I am in favour of making it more regular, but I do think, as do those people who are involved in the process now, that it has gone too far. You are probably aware of the famous caravanning question: If you ask one person applying for a job what their hobby is and they say caravanning, and any member of the panel cross-questions then on caravanning, all the other applicants have to be brought forward and asked questions about caravanning. It has got to that level of absurdity.

Q42 Julie Morgan: I understand that is a slight exaggeration, but you are saying you do not think there should be any public appointments at all of that nature.

Sir Simon Jenkins: No. There are roughly 25,000 people who are elected to public office in Britain and about 65,000 people who are appointed to public office in Britain. I think the proportion should be the other way round. I think that if you place so much weight in the participatory organs of government on the appointments system, the appointments system itself will require ever greater scrutiny and accountability to be seen to be fair, and it will become cumbersome and relatively ineffective as a result.

Q43 Julie Morgan: Do you think the people who are being appointed now are less interesting, partly because of the more open system?

Sir Simon Jenkins: That was a slightly flippant remark on my part. No, I do not. Apart from anything else, they are far more representative - no doubt about that at all - and I think that is a good thing. They represent a wider section of the community. The fact that people lean over backwards to make sure they represent a wider section of community is probably a good thing. I am just saying that somehow or other this has to be monitored - and we can still come on to that question. I think even the procedures by which the appointments are made needs monitoring by a body that is outwith the political structure.

Mr Riddell: I would largely agree. A lot of it is more common sense. It is like gold plating regulations. That is what happened. The original Nolan Report has just been taken too far, particularly with things like local government and the lower level quangos, and the regulatory burden needs to be eased and made less onerous. Then there is the broader point that Simon makes on election versus appointment. An initial thing - and indeed some of that is already happening - is to reduce some of the absurdities in the appointments process and just simplify it. We all know what the objective is, but it has been gold plated, and that, I think, has acted as a deterrent to people. The standards board affecting local government, I think, is a classic instance of this. You can ensure the requirements to avoid corruption of local councils without such a heavy weight of it, and also the whole complaints mechanism ... I mean, that has been cleared up anyway, as far as I understand it.

Q44 Kelvin Hopkins: I agree with some of the things Simon Jenkins was saying earlier on, particularly the idea of having a strong force outside government that can challenge it. You are really suggesting reconstructing an effective pluralism in society, which has been destroyed or half destroyed. I remember, when I was a student, we studied the Soviet constitution. It was elaborate and full of structures, ethical regulators and God knows what, but it meant absolutely nothing because everybody had to do what Stalin said and that was all that mattered. In a sense, has not in reality our system been inching in that direction, and away from the essence of our democracy which is competing power centres and a high degree of pluralism?

Sir Simon Jenkins: You used the parallel, I did not. I think you are right, yes. I really do. If you look at the debate, which interests me, over a new Supreme Court, the question is how do you surround the Supreme Court with protection? Because there is no constitution next to our Parliament, you cannot do that, but you do try to surround it with the sort of protections de facto if not de jure. I think you need a Supreme Commission (or whatever you would like to call it) which embraces almost all of the things you are discussing and takes it simply outside the realm of politics. Now, put it under the monarch, or whatever you do, for form's sake, but the Supreme Court has traditionally been under the House of Lords. That has taken it in a degree away from government but it is largely built around the very powerful profession. It is really the Supreme Court of a profession, and that gives it the element of pluralism that it has had and it is hoped to have even more when it does get set up. In this case, I think you want a body which is seen by everybody as the sort of Court of Appeal on Ethics and which is not composed of politics, it is not composed of people who are appointed by the whips or the prime minister of the day or whatever it might be. Its chief function is to become known. In the way that every American knows that over and against their president is the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is not the president, the Supreme Court holds the president to account - the Supreme Court elected the president once - and is a body which has completely autonomous significance, albeit under a written constitution. I think you need a body similar to that to cover so many of the things that vex us today.

Q45 Kelvin Hopkins: My second question is a bit more uncomfortable. Have you and your colleagues not collaborated in this undermining and destruction of pluralism? The pluralistic forces used to include the trade union movement, local government, a degree of resistance within political parties. There was a range of views within political parties - and with big political parties it is necessary to have a range of views. A whole series of areas, Parliament, the cabinet, have been weakened very substantially.

Mr Riddell: I think you are exaggerating your case quite substantially. I notice there have been quite a wide range of political views in the Parliamentary Labour Party recently - and, indeed, that has been true for a long time. The scale of revolts by your colleagues has never been higher historically. There is a great danger or romanticising what happened in Parliament. Remember, there were two years in the 1950s (the Tories were then in government) when not one single Conservative MP voted against the whip. There is a danger of romanticising these things as well. Also, it is not entirely negative. To the three Welsh members on your Committee, devolution in Wales and Scotland has created a form of pluralism. They are very strong, even though they are bodies created by the Westminster Parliament. It is totally different from the US system of bottom up. I think one can be too negative on these things. The increased role of the judiciary. Simon has talked about the Supreme Court which is going to be created in a few years time and which is already in law. The judges are acting much more independently, partly because of professional ethic, so described. I think you can overdo the kind of Stalinist view of it. It is certainly true in relation to local government. That is an issue. I think there is also a danger, even if you look at the history since 1997, of viewing in aspic what happened in the first two years and not looking at changes since then. I think the whole system has been shaken up a lot - particularly, obviously, since Iraq, but certainly in the last few years. There is a kind of caricature of what has happened. I think it is much more complicated, and there are countervailing factors, like devolution, like freedom of information, and, one can sense, the Human Rights Act and the greater role of the judiciary, which counterbalance what you are saying.

Mr Lloyd: I would also deprecate the Stalinist simile but I would have more sympathy with what you are saying than I think Peter has. You made a connection between the media and the decline of these institutions. I think there is some connection, but I think more what has happened, certainly since the war and especially in the last 20 or 30 years, is that you have had a dramatic decline in what had been institutions to which people gave their loyalty and their faith: ideologies: socialism, conservatism, liberalism; the trade union movement; political parties; religion - perhaps most dramatically, organised religion, except, if you like, the expanding one, Islam, but the Christian religions have all declined dramatically. These have, as it were, cleared the space for the expansion of the media. The media has, in that same period, expanded enormously, both in the time that it takes for the citizens to watch it - mainly television, obviously - and also in its power, its power to describe our world, unmediated by other institutions like religious institutions or political institutions or patriotic institutions, whatever. Whether the one has caused the other, I am less clear about. I think the media has benefited from these declines, in that the media now give the messages much more than these centres of authority or opinion once did. But how far the media clear the ground I think is more questionable.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think there is a theory that the centralism of British public life is caused in part by the economic structure of the newspaper industry. Because it is very easy to get London newspapers to every part of the country, local newspapers have declined dramatically, and the London newspaper is the language of the nation. To that extent there is an unholy alliance between politics at the national level and the media, and they feed on each other, and the Today programme becomes Parliament and Parliament becomes the Today programme. These are familiar theses. Where I would not follow the line is that I do believe very strongly that the media is a derivative: it is a reflection of what is happening. It evolves itself in response to what is happening; it does not lead. Although it is easy to see the media as powerful - I would never deny it is very powerful - I do not think it does anything other than respond. If you weaken your institutions, if you deteriorate local government, if you make civic pride insignificant, civic newspapers will decline and the national domain will take over. We dance to your tune.

Chairman: This is entirely fascinating, but I do think I am going to have to bring you back home a bit, if you do not mind.

Kelvin Hopkins: We will pursue it another time.

Q46 David Heyes: I would like to press Simon Jenkins a bit more on this new institution, get him to put more flesh on it and find out whether his colleagues agree with him or not. It is a pure, unsullied body enjoying huge public legitimacy, monitoring and regulating, sitting in for politics and the political process. I would like to know what it looks like. Who are these people who are in it? Does it incorporate the role of all the existing monitoring and regulatory bodies? How does it interact with what seems to me to be a completely contradictory argument that you are putting, about the real responsibility for these lying somewhere within the democratic process, an enhanced local democratic process. There seems to be a fundamental contradiction in what you are proposing here.

Sir Simon Jenkins: No, a paradox. The responsibility for doing something about this does rest with you. The power lies with the political community. The question is what comes out of the conversation we are having now. I think that a lot of people feel that what comes out of it needs to be greater pluralism. The sort of institution I was envisaging - which I have not thought through very carefully, I have to admit - is an institution, as I described it before. I think the essence of it has to be that it is terribly well known. One of the problems with the Press Complaints Commission or the Press Council before it was that no-one believed in it. They did not know it existed, they had not heard of it really. Quite a good parallel for this is in Danchev's biography of Oliver Franks. Oliver Franks was a one man walking commission of the sort I am describing. Whenever anything went wrong, someone sent for Franks. Towards the end of his life when he was having to do the Falkland's Commission, they had to send up to see if Franks still had his marbles: Was he still capable of conducting this great Franks function - and if he did not, could we find another Franks? But the word "Franks" ran through public life in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. I think the point about Franks - and he sort of embodies what I am talking about - is that he had all the qualities without the constraint of appearing to be under Downing Street. All I am saying is that I think we need to find a body. The same conversation surrounded the setting up of the commission for appointing Members of the House of Lords - which still exists under Lord Stevenson, I think. It should not be beyond the ingenuity of the political community to find a way of selecting the right people to appear on such a commission and then giving it sufficient independence for it then to appear to be guiding the custodians.

Mr Riddell: I would disagree with Simon to one extent. I agree with the aims of independence - actually I think you would find it in most people. If you look at things like the Electoral Commission and so on, there are independent people there. You contrast it, for example, with the American system, where the FEC in America is entirely appointed by political parties and is totally at stalemate. They have all kinds of laws on political funding in the States, and it is stalemating - they have equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, therefore nothing happens - where we vote for the Electoral Commission to have genuinely independent people on it. I think that is possible. My disagreement with Simon is the kind of one big body. Perhaps I am more of a pluralist, curiously, on this one, but I think the key principle is independence. I think the problem at present is that they have set up all kinds of commissions - and with some, as the Chairman was saying, like the Civil Service Commission, we are back to Gladstone's era and all that. Others have been genuinely because of circumstance and expedience and all that. I think the principle should be independence of government. One of the answers in relation to Parliament is: But, yes, how in relation to Parliament? There are all kinds of ways these bodies are related to Parliament. The model is the NAO and its relationship which can be related to Parliament but not in a managerial sense. One of the problems is that these bodies should not get too sucked into here. Perhaps some of the accountability should be here to ensure separate money and appointments, which is vital, but not too much sucked into the system because that can also be a damaging influence too.

Mr Lloyd: I have thought through Simon's idea even less than he has, so I am not sure what it would be. It is attractive but I would only note this: I think it is possible to have committees of elected Members of Parliament which would have rather more status and authority than they presently do. Again, the analogy is in the States, in that senate committees, congressional committees - and Peter would know this better than I since he has worked in America - do have an authority and their findings have a status which we presently do not have. I would be attracted to that system, in part because the people who run it are elected, as long as they fulfilled Simon and Peter's functions of being independent, as long as they were seen to be independent of government. That would be the important thing. But the construction of a large and powerful and financially independent body of people who are appointed by government might end up falling into the same trap: "These are the kind of people they would appoint anyway, are they not?" which we have talked about already.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Be careful with the word "independent". Everyone says they have to be independent but not too big or not too independent or not too pluralistic. I just think independence is related to bigness. I just think you are never going to be independent if you do not have, in some sense, clout. Quite a good parallel is the thing which Margaret Thatcher hated, the Royal Commission. She hated Royal Commissions because they took too long and there was a serious danger of people having to do what they said. You now have a committee of inquiry or ... A good parallel is local government. Constitutional change used to be preceded by Royal Commission. That was the tradition. The reason was that the Royal Commissions were seen as independent, bi-partisan and uttering their judgments with such thunderous authority that the government simply had to do them. So for the Bank of England, the BBC, the university, whatever it was, you had a Royal Commission into them. That was completely rubbished by Thatcher, for the familiar reasons, but now, interestingly, the Government is trying to reform local government and they have appointed one man, Michael Lyons, to look into it, virtually ad nauseam, and when I asked them why they did not appoint a proper Royal Commission, because this is an important constitutional change, they said, "Because with a Royal Commission we might have to do what they say." This is Stalinism. If you take this seriously at all, you have to have a body so big that it is taken seriously. The parallel I have produced before of the BBC I think is quite relevant. If you look at public service broadcasting in America, it is impotent. There is no way in which public service broadcasting really challenges government in America. It is perpetually scrabbling around for money because it is so poor and weak and un-independent. The BBC, for all its faults, I think is a very remarkable aspect of pluralism in British public life, and that is because it is big and rich.

Q47 David Heyes: For this body to be created and to exist, would you not first require major constitutional change? We would have to Americanise our system and have a much clearer separation of powers. That is the only way it could function, surely. We are light years away from that.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I would make it standards and appointments, and it would be in charge of standards - the sort of thing you are discussing - and public appointments. All matters of standards and public appointments would be referred to this commission - call it Royal Commission, if you like. You do not have to change the constitution; just set it up.

Mr Riddell: Your point on the separation of powers I agree with. I think there are problems with American parallels because of the separation of powers. You all know the constraints and limitations on select committees of this place and what they can do: you are quite often pushing at the envelope and it depends on the individuals on the committee and so on. For some issues in the category, as Simon says, of standards and appointments, you want something which is perhaps accountable via Parliament but is not of itself of Parliament. I think there is a difference of function between what you do as select committees and what we are thinking of on an ethics basis. They are different. I think independence can mean not appointed by government but appointed by cross-party discussion. I do not think there is too much difficulty finding independent bodies with diversity. It can be done.

Q48 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Have any of you ever tried to buy the rights to serialise a book by a politician? Have you been involved in negotiations?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Yes.

Q49 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Who?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think it was with Whitelaw once. It was a nightmare. I would have to have notice of that question.

Q50 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It would be quite a few. Have you suggested to anybody that they should write their memoirs because they would be worth quite a lot of dosh?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I do not think it needs anyone to suggest it.

Q51 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You have thought, "I know they are going to write it" - and it does not matter who -----

Mr Riddell: You are getting the mechanism wrong. The key figure you have to get is a literary agent. What happens is that X or Y will do their book. They will operate via an agent, who will advise them, "Look, you are probably going to get more out of serialisation than out of sales" - because very few political memoirs sell that many, and then you get the newspapers. The newspapers are much more in a kind of bidding position. They are not creating the product, they are bidding for the product.

Q52 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There was a very interesting article by Ian Jack in the Guardian in March last year about the background to all this, about him being summoned to see Harold Wilson, who had newspaper cuttings all around him, and he was very disappointed. Ian Jack commented that it is staggering, the money that will be paid for a political memoir. It is obviously money well spent, because you would not do it, but can you recoup it on sales?

Sir Simon Jenkins: No. I can remember very well a certain Chancellor of the Exchequer, who shall be nameless, inquiring as to what his memoirs might be worth and the answer was: "A quarter of a million tomorrow, £100,000 next week, £10,000 two months from now. How fast can you write them?" It was as simple as that - because there were going to be no sales two months from then. It is show business. You know the answer to your own question.

Mr Riddell: When you say it was a staggering amount of money: for very, very few people. I look forward to the memoirs of everyone on this committee but I had better advise you that your parliamentary pension will be worth a bit more than you would get from your memoirs. Those of us who till the area of writing about politics and current affairs have not made ourselves wealthier as a result of it. The number of political memoirs which make money is tiny. And there have been a lot of miscalculations on it, too, with big advances paid. On the economics of it, you are taking a gamble. Obviously ex-prime ministers could do things, but of current politicians and their books, there are very, very few indeed who are likely to do it. You mentioned Alastair Campbell - and I was interested in the plural on books - but I cannot think of many others at all.

Q53 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Kelvin has just whispered in my ear, "What about Galloway's book."

Mr Riddell: He comes in a totally different category.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is right - with photographs of the leotard!

Q54 Chairman: The only way to do it, of course, is once you know you are helping to release serious scandal. Mark Oaten's earning power has gone up hugely, has it not? - for the next week or so.

Sir Simon Jenkins: We offered Whitelaw to help him with his memoirs on the Sunday Times and he said, "Why?" They said, "We think we can make them a bit more interesting." and he said, "Good God no."

Q55 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Willie Whitelaw was horrified to find they were interesting and was mortified that anybody ----

Sir Simon Jenkins: He was reassured when he was told they were not!

Q56 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Thinking back to that - and you may not know the answer to this - did Willie Whitelaw ever say, "Are they worth anything?" He was independently wealthy anyway.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I do not know.

Q57 Mr Liddell-Grainger: People who write do it for three reasons. The first is because they want to get the story out; the second is revenge; and the third is money. If you had a pie chart, where does the money part come in? Is that two thirds?

Sir Simon Jenkins: I think revenge comes first. People want to tell their side of the story. I understand that. I mean, I would too. They want to tell their side of the story. As Peter said, very few of them get very much money for it.

Mr Lloyd: They want to tell more now - which is the point we were talking about earlier. What has grown up - and it was not unknown, say, 20 or 30 years ago, but it is very common now - is the quickie biography. Not the autobiography or memoirs but the biography. Nearly every leading Labour politician has a book, written by a journalist who followed him and who to some extent exposed him. The famous one is Paul Routledge's on Gordon Brown. It was the cause of the first downfall of Peter Mandelson. The pressure on the politician is for revenge, partly on the journalist if it was a hostile biography, as it usually is, or to get his side of the story out - because already a large amount of the story is out, in part because the market now pays much, much more money for revelations of a personal kind. So the beneficiaries have been at least as much journalists as they are or will be politicians or public figures. The journalist comes in first with a certain quickie biography and then it whets the appetite for major revelations. Has Alastair Campbell had two biographies or three?

Sir Simon Jenkins: Certainly two.

Mr Lloyd: Certainly two, so that already there is a market created - created partly by him and his behaviour at Number 10, but also by journalists, as it were, smoothing the path.

Mr Riddell: But it is only for those who have become celebrities. It is a very, very small category indeed of that.

Q58 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There are two sorts of diarists who have given evidence. One is Tony Benn and the other is Alan Clark. They could not be more opposite of each other in many ways. One was a sort of serialised scandal writer, the other was a very serious politician and still is. How have they had the longevity in that way? Is it because they keep publishing? Is it because they were such characters that they can do it? I know that neither of them went in it for money - that would be the last thing - and they did not really go in to kiss-and-tell. They went in because they wanted to. Why have they had the longevity of that? Alan Clark obviously cannot publish any more. I believe Tony is going to do something else.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Alan Clark will be publishing for a very long time. There is an awful lot more where that came from.

Mr Lloyd: Benn had success because his diaries are fascinating. They are not quite as opposite to Clark's, as you say, but there is a lot of personal detail. I remember a very vivid series of diary entries about George Brown and his drunkenness - which was maybe not a revelation to that many people but it certainly got that aspect of his character more widely known. It was considered a bit scandalous when he revealed that he, when he was Paymaster-General, sat down on the carpet with the Queen, on the floor, looking at designs for a stamp. These kinds of things were revelatory - so there is a lot of revelation in the Benn diaries.

Mr Riddell: Because he was one of three in that Cabinet, with Crossman and Miss Castle. I think Peter Hennessy gave evidence to you at one stage that Tony Benn was taking notes during a cabinet meeting and the crack was that Denis Healey said, "Am I going too fast for you?" - which is probably apocryphal but it is a wonderful story. One of the issues is if you know someone is keeping a diary. One of the interesting things is how people behaved differently with Alastair Campbell, knowing that he was keeping a diary.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Geoff Mulgan said that the effect on the Blair Cabinet of knowing that Alastair Campbell was keeping a diary was devastating - not only that he was keeping a diary but because it was he who was keeping the diary and apparently he had a licence to leak. I think that was just devastating. Going back to the original question: What do you do about that? I really do not know. I think you look your friends in the eye and say, "Will you please not reveal the conversation that we are just having." But if they do, you cannot do anything about it.

Q59 Mr Liddell-Grainger: But the money they get from the serialisation is the money they are going to get. I think even Cook only sold 14,500 copies. These are quite small numbers. Surely if the serialisation figure was small enough, that would deter the ones who are doing it for that reason. The revenge ones you are never going to stop.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I can say with almost absolute certainty that 90 per cent of the advances paid to politicians for their diaries is not earned; in other words, a certain sort of fever takes over Fleet Street and publishing when a big name politician resigns and they think, "Gosh, we've got to get him" and the following week they wonder what on earth they did.

Q60 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Have you ever been against each other, dare I ask, in smoke-filled rooms, saying, "I'll give you ..."? Have you ever had to do that, the two of you?

Mr Riddell: I have never been involved in it. All I have been involved in is assessing for various editors - not, in fact, when Simon was my editor, but for other editors - my view of a book. Fortunately I have never been involved in the money side of it - I am very glad to say.

Q61 Paul Flynn: One of the first things you said, Simon Jenkins, was about the eccentricity of the ethos of politics: a parliamentarian can start an illegal war on the basis of a lie and still walk tall in Westminster but if he commits a minor misdemeanour, particularly a sexual misdemeanour, he is disgraced and has to resign. I warmed to this, having had the task of trying to explain to a French and an Italian politician why Peter Mandelson resigned and why David Blunkett resigned. They are completely baffled as to why people should leave politics for what they would regard as the normal course of politics in patronage and so on. It is barmy and the code itself is relatively useless because people are resigning for the wrong reasons.

Chairman: I am going to wrap these points up together and you can pick which ones you want to answer in a minute.

Q62 Kelvin Hopkins: What is your reaction? You have portrayed the BBC as wonderfully independent but in fact of course it has had its wings clipped. Greg Dyke started off as a New Labour luvvie and ended up falling out with them. Even your own journal, the New Statesman, was taken over by New Labour and stripped of its radical journalists and the sales fell. Alastair Campbell, time and again, allegedly bullied journalists to get the story 'right' in his terms. And there was this constant pressure on the media - a high proportion of whom, I may say, were so much in love with New Labour that they were willing collaborators - but there was an attempt to control the media. What was your reaction to that?

Mr Riddell: That is nonsense. That is absolute nonsense. If you look at the press, it starts from Bernie Ecclestone onwards, if you believe there is control of the press, look at the headlines.

Q63 Mr Prentice: I am paraphrasing what Simon told us earlier, that the press do not make the news but they report it. My question is this: all over Europe newspapers are publishing the cartoons that caused such controversy in Denmark but no British newspaper has so far published them. Since it is allegedly all about freedom of expression and so on, do you think the press here in Britain should publish those cartoons?

Mr Lloyd: I do not think they should be afraid to do so. In that sense, I suppose they should, if they wish to. It is a news story, a large news story, that the Danish newspaper has caused riots throughout a number of countries in the Middle East, and one would want to see what they were. I would want to see what they were. Actually, of course, I can - I have seen what they were because they are on the internet. But, I think, newspapers, yes, should publish them. I do not think they should be afraid of that.

Chairman: Do either of the other two want to have a go on that?

Q64 Mr Prentice: I would like to hear your views.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I am not terribly sure I agree. I mean, presumably under the new government law they would not be publishable anyway, because they would clearly be designed to cause offence.

Mr Prentice: We have taken that out.

Q65 Chairman: We have taken care of that.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I am not sure you have altogether.

Q66 Mr Prentice: Let's say you can thank us for that.

Sir Simon Jenkins: I draw the distinction between banning something and disapproving of something. I think as an editor I would not have published that cartoon because it was going to cause grave offence to a large number of our readers and the public. You do think that way. There used to be a rule that you did not publish pictures of dead bodies if they were British. Why? The answer is you did not publish a picture of a dead body if they were British because the relatives might see the picture. If they were not British, they would not. That is a perfectly reasonably distinction of taste that is made by newspapers all the time. I think I would apply the same rule to the cartoon. I would not ban it, though.

Mr Riddell: I think there is a distinction between censorship and whether you should publish something and I agree with Simon absolutely on that. No, you should stop people doing it, but it is a different matter when you do it.

Q67 Chairman: Once someone told you that you should not, then, presumably, you would feel that you should.

Sir Simon Jenkins: Bloody well wanted to.

Mr Riddell: Yes, exactly.

Q68 Chairman: Could I throw in my last question, which is back to the boring stuff about the regulation that we are supposed to be on. Peter you have banged on for years about the need to fill the gap around ministers; that is, we need someone who can investigate allegations of ministerial misconduct and we do not yet have that. I want you really to confirm that is a gap that you want to fill, and then, more broadly, on this thing which, I suppose, I call in my head "Public Standards Commission". I am interested in what you have been saying. The issue is of course how much we put into it, then, particularly, whether it has a role simply of monitoring or whether it has a role of doing things. I think that is rather an important distinction. Should it keep an eye on things? Should it report? Should it find the facts, and then, as it were, the decisions go somewhere else? I do not know whether any of you have taken this thinking further.

Mr Riddell: On the Ministerial Code, governments have shot themselves in the foot by not having a proper advisor like you have in the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner separate from permanent secretaries, and not having at least someone they can turn to when problems arise, rather than doing it on the ad hoc basis, as was shown in Alan Budd's department and Alan Budd's reflections on that. There is a distinction between looking at individual cases, some of which can be done by self-regulation in the case of Parliament, and having someone outside to look at systems. I think there is a distinction between systems and individual cases. Also, on appointments, you want to make sure the appointments process is fair. The government wants to appoint people to things, so you appoint people to things. The key thing to ensure from the outside is that the system is fair.

Q69 Chairman: But Simon's point seemed to be that this body should actually do things, as opposed to ----

Mr Riddell: I think there needs to be a distinction between making sure they are done properly and the body that does that.

Chairman: It is for us to reflect further upon this. It has been a treat having the three of you together and we have benefited more than just the narrow terms of our inquiry. Thank you very much indeed all of you.