Examination of Witnesses (Question
Numbers 1-18)
Professor Peter Hennessy and Dr Tony Wright
3 JUNE 2009
Q1 Chairman: Dr Wright
and Professor Hennessy, good morning. Thank you very much indeed
for joining us. We are being recorded and I would like to ask,
if I may, that you identify yourselves formally for the record
and then, if you so wish, say a few words of introduction.
Professor Hennessy: Good morning. Professor Peter
Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at
Queen Mary, University of London.
Dr Wright: I am Tony Wright, and I chair the Public
Administration Select Committee down the other end of the building.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you
very much indeed. Can I begin by asking which key constitutional
issues you think that we should have in mind in relation to our
inquiry into the role of the Cabinet Office and the centre of
government?
Dr Wright: May I just
commend your ambition in undertaking this inquiry? I have chaired
the Public Administration Committee for, I think, nearly 10 years
now and over several years in the early 2000s we had a continuing
inquiry on the go called The New Centre. We never completed
that inquiry because the new centre constantly changed. We were
going to try and pin it down and say something intelligent about
it, and then, instead of that, we rather feebly, I think, eventually
published a report called The Emerging Issues. So I am
genuinely full of admiration for you taking this project on. You
cannot, I am afraid, just look, as you know, at the Cabinet Office,
you really do have to look at the centre of government, and that
means looking at the big players at the centre; I am afraid it
means you have to look at Number 10, you have to look at the Treasury,
you have to look at the Cabinet Office and, indeed, you have got
to look at the big players. You have got to look at the Cabinet
Secretary, the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and because these
things are determined not by organisational flow diagrams but
by political dynamics, the thing changes all the time, which will
be one of the features of my remarks. So to answer your question
directly, there is a big constitutional question and a big machinery
of government question about the role of what you might call the
corporate centre in British Government. There is a continuing
discussion, which you all know about, between departmentalism
and the centre in Britain, and that has taken different forms
at different periods. It has taken a particular form since 1997,
but it is a continuing discussion, and that, in turn, then raises
issues about the role of the Cabinet and about the role of the
Prime Minister and some of the players involved. That is an unresolved
issue; it is an evolving issue. You will do well to pin it down.
If you can go beyond pinning it down to, as it were, resolving
it, then my admiration will be unbounded.
Professor Hennessy: Tony
has touched on the central question, Lord Chairman, which has
been lurking since May 1997 in a pretty acute form, and it is
this: have we seen a real shift away from the spirit as well as
the practice of collective Cabinet government which is meant to
underpin our system—it is the opening paragraphs of what
is now the Ministerial Code and what used to be Questions of Procedure
for Ministers which are dedicated to that—to something more
prime ministerial? In fact, what we have had since May 1997 (and
Tony Blair's people would say this privately, as do Gordon Brown's)
is a Prime Minister's Department in all but name pretty well a
fusing of the Cabinet Office and Number 10. But they treat Parliament,
public and scholars as if we had not noticed. They behave as if
they are Sherlock Holmes in The Reigate Vampire: "The
Giant Rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared,
Watson." Do you remember that line? They really should come
clean about it, and I hope that, as part of your inquiry, you
will actually anatomise this directly, clearly and cleanly. I
am not sure who you are getting as witnesses on this, but you
really do need to get certain people who have been on the inside
since 1997 in various forms to admit publicly to you what they
will admit privately, because it is a big constitutional shift
and it has got in the way of what I think is always a necessary
separation in the Cabinet Office between classic Cabinet Office,
the secretariats, the tradition of Lloyd George and Hankey running
through, which serves the whole Cabinet and is the combination
of co-ordinator and central thinker for collective Cabinet government;
and around that citadel there have always been little encampments,
little units, little fires, little temporary outfits, some better
than others, some bigger than others, some more enduring than
others. And the trouble is that we have managed to contaminate,
to some degree, classic citadel Cabinet Office, which I think
is indispensable to the proper functioning of Cabinet government,
with these outliers and these outriders. The other question which
I hope we will talk about, or that you will investigate, is the
desirability, or otherwise, of having the heads of those Cabinet
secretariats, classic citadel Cabinet Office secretariats, as
hybrids, who are the Prime Minister's personal advisers as well
as the heads of those secretariats. So that is my main concern,
and that is also why I share Tony's pleasure and praise for your
conducting this investigation and, given that we are surrounded
by a high degree of political turbulence at the moment, the political
class is in a state of tremendous displacement activity, that
the serene but utterly important questions of the British Constitution
should not be neglected in this hour.
Q3 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
I quite understand what you have said. In a sense it sounded a
little bit like the civil servant telling a minister he was brave,
but it seems to me that one key constitutional duty of the Cabinet
Office is it is the duty of government to govern according to
law and it is the duty of the Cabinet Office to advise ministers,
from the Prime Minister downwards, if they are going to break
the law, and there are one or two examples. For example, Tony
Blair's comments on the British Aerospace case were absolutely
contrary to the legal obligations which he had taken this country
into in relation to the OECD. Why did not the Cabinet Office flag
it up, or did they? There is the misleading use of intelligence
in Iraq. That is slightly murkier still. There is the arrest of
Damien Green, who is arrested, unless there was some national
security thing, for offences which were decriminalised by Douglas
Hurd in 1989. Why did not the Cabinet Office know and flag it
up? Is this not a central constitutional point?
Dr Wright: I hesitate
to dissent in any way from Peter, whom I simply adore, but Peter
is a great romantic and in some ways a traditionalist in these
things. I think there is an issue here that you have to get hold
of. Can I quote very briefly Andrew Turnbull, his valedictory
speech when he left the office of Cabinet Secretary in 2005? He
said this: "When Mr Blair became Prime Minister in 1997,
he found in the Cabinet Office the traditional secretariats responsible
for managing and co-ordinating government business, a number of
units responsible for propriety and ethics, plus an HR function
still vested in administration rather than development. In Number
10 he found a small private office and a small communications
function, but one dealing only with news and one with national
media. The leader of a large organisation would expect to find
far more than this at its centre. He was entitled to ask, `Is
that it?'" All I am saying to you is that I do not want to
be on the side of the argument which says there is corruption
of a traditional model going on here. I think there is a development
model going on all the time, but there is a problem, which is
what should the centre of government do and how should it be organised?
What is this corporate centre in Britain? It is disaggregated
amongst different institutions? The Cabinet Office is one player
in it. Peter asked the question: should we clarify whether it
has become the Prime Minister's Department? I remember John Prescott,
in evidence to us, when it became the Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister, saying that it had become the Prime Minister's Office.
Of course, he had not really thought through what it meant, but
I think there are questions about whether we need a Prime Minister's
Office and what it would contain, what that would leave for a
Cabinet Office to do as the collective arm of government. These
are all questions that I think you have got to get your head around,
which are different from just: there has been a corruption of
traditional arrangements.
Q4 Lord Lyell of Markyate: I am sorry; you
just have not answered the question, Tony.
Dr Wright: Well, I cannot
tell you about these particular instances.
Q5 Lord Lyell of Markyate: Is it not part
of the duty of the Cabinet Office to see that the government of
the day is advised if it is likely to break the law?
Dr Wright: It is the job
of the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet Secretary to see that government
business is conducted properly, yes.
Professor Hennessy: If
I may say so, the legal side should be the easy bit. The Government
Legal Service has extremely good people and you have got Law Officers
and the Lord Chancellor, and so on. That should be the straightforward
bit. The trouble always comes in the informal constitution, the
unwritten bits that used to be called, rather unkindly but accurately,
the "good chap" theory of government—the good
chaps knew where the lines were drawn and did not push it (the
good chaps of both sexes, I hasten to say). Kenneth Pickthorn,
a Member of this House a long time ago, 45 years ago now, said:
"Procedure is all the constitution the poor Briton has."
Well, that has changed considerably, we have got much more constitutional
legislation now, but it is those areas that Pickthorn had in mind
that is the problem. The interpretation of whether the Ministerial
Code has been breached or not is proper procedure. For example,
if you have a destiny Prime Minister like Tony Blair, and Mrs
Thatcher also in a similar way, they get very irritated by these
fusspot constraints and they would say: "Romantic traditionalist,
dyed-in-the-wool civil servants keep telling me why I cannot do
this. Do they not realise the problems I am facing?" Proper
procedure and care and due attention to it can irritate destiny
politicians profoundly. The Jim Callaghans of this world, whom
Lord Morris remembers, were much more attuned to a collective
style, as was John Major. So a problem quite often arises from
the temperament of the Prime Minister when he or she chafes against
these unwritten constraints. For example, if you take the Intelligence
question which you raised, the tradition of British Intelligence
as it has developed (it is not written down) rests on a series
of deals. Deal one is that the secret agencies and the Joint Intelligence
Committee provide the picture, as they see it, with no holds barred.
They put reality in front of their customers, and it is then the
duty of the customers, ministers in the end, to decide what is
done on the basis of that intelligence, and you avoid the contamination
of both the KGB and the CIA doctoring it to it suit the known
perceptions of the reader. That is a classic lesson of World War
Two British intelligence, a pearl beyond price, I think. The other
deal in British intelligence is that, because we are in an open
society, you only use the secret agencies and their special methods
for the last opaque 10% of things you really need to know about
potentially dangerous people in countries that they spend a great
deal of effort trying to conceal from you. Also, linked to all
of that, anybody in that chain of provision of Intelligence must
speak truth unto power, and they must spare them nothing, and
they must flag it up, which is also the Joint Intelligence Committee
tradition, when it is based on very little solid evidence. If
there is ever any problem with that, as indeed there was on the
road to Iraq, all those unspoken assumptions, which are not written
down, that have made British Intelligence, per person, per pound
of public money, far more effective than any other Intelligence
system in the world, are jeopardised. So I agree with you entirely,
but the problem arises in the unwritten bits. It should not arise
where the law is the main determinant, but I accept that it does.
Q6 Lord Lyell of Markyate: In
my few excursions into the Cabinet Office what I discovered was
that there was a terrific lot of immediate ringing round on these
legal problems. The Cabinet Office legal adviser was on to Juliet
Wheldon at the Attorney General's Office and on to the Lord Chancellor's
department. It was very quick. It just does not seem to have been
happening in the examples that I gave you, and I think the system
is breaking down, but do you have a comment on that?
Professor Hennessy: It
is always difficult to determine, particularly when it is a recent
past, even when you have got the archive, if it is a question
of people or system, because the private office network is an
amazingly efficient network and has been for many years. It is
amazing, is it not, how we had Prime Ministers that got through
two world wars, the disposal of a British Empire, a 40-year confrontation
with the Soviet Union and its allies, without feeling the need
to have 70 special advisers around them in Number 10? It is not
as if Mr Attlee, Mr Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Jim Callaghan
or Harold Wilson felt deprived because they did not have an abundance
of 25-year olds with political science degrees who knew the square
root of bugger all about life around them. I am sorry; I have
distracted the flow of the questions.
Dr Wright: There have
been endless reviews, as you will have discovered, on the Cabinet
Office over the years, and over recent years in particular, and
we have had capability reviews of the Cabinet Office, all exploring
its role and identifying the things that it is thought to be rather
good at and the things that it is thought to be bad at. Actually,
the things that it is thought to be good at are those things where
it clearly does possess a body of central expertise that government
needs, like propriety and ethics for example, and that is the
example of where you just need something at the centre which,
as it were, fertilises the whole of government. The things which
it is less good at are to do with answering these questions about
what actually is the underlying role and purpose of this organisation
in a number of different ways, and that, I think, is an unresolved
question that hangs in the air.
Q7 Lord Peston: This is
all very big stuff. Could I bring the questioning down to my level?
What staggers me, which I have mostly got from reading memoirs
which are pouring out these days, is that the intervention of
the Prime Minister, or his office, and related bodies in what
goes on is mostly of the utmost triviality. It is obviously connected
with spin-doctoring. Do you agree that we should not create this
image of a central set of arrangements of very deep thinkers thinking
fundamental questions when mostly they are asking questions like
"How will this run in some newspaper or other"? Whether
we want to spend public money on vast numbers of people to claim
they understand that is beyond me, but I would certainly like
your view. It would have been interesting to have been able to
do a study of how most of these people that you are talking about
actually occupy their day.
Professor Hennessy: It
is very difficult to pick that up in the recent past, let alone
through the archive, because it is on the telephone and the emails
seem to get lost, do they not? The Hutton Inquiry and the Butler
Inquiry showed how vulnerable we are going to be to the disappearance
of government by email. You are absolutely right. Early on in
the Blair years I used to do these six to nine-month surveys of
the Blair style of government, because historians tend to tidy
up a bit when things are over and they forget how they misled
themselves and other people, a sort of snapshot, and I remember
somebody who is still around, a bit battered but he is still there,
saying the two most powerful words in Whitehall are "Tony
wants". The trouble is, people would say to me you do not
know if Tony really wanted it because it is some special adviser
saying "Tony wants"! It was very often: "how will
this play on the Today Programme and Newsnight?",
and that is where the weather was made a lot of the time in the
Blair Number 10, and now in the Brown Number 10, on the part of
these—how can I put it?—they are not hybrids; it is
the froth of it. It is not citadel Cabinet Office and it is not
traditional Number 10, but that is the world they live in, and
it does make the political weather, it uses up an enormous amount
of nervous energy and it means that in the government departments,
which are given functions by statute, secretaries of state should
be big figures in their own right: a lot of the weaker ones, and
there were a lot of weak ones, I am afraid, would not move without
clearing it with Number 10 first, which very often meant a special
adviser, which I think is a corruption of what our system of government
should be, and, also, the permanent secretaries then had to agree
with the Prime Minister their work plan for this year. It is like
you and I, in the old days, dealing with a rather ropey research
student, saying you have got certain deadlines; it is hopeless.
Both permanent secretaries and secretaries of state are much,
much diminished figures, and it has not led to good government,
has it? But it comes back to being a human problem. If somehow
New Labour created the most supine Cabinet since the war, which
I think it did, particularly on the road to Iraq, how do you stiffen
them? It is a Disraeli phrase—"an injection of water
would have stiffened their backbones" a lot of the time,
and it is a human problem. You can have all the ministerial codes
you want and all the understandings about what proper procedure
is, but if they do not breathe life into it and say to a Prime
Minister: "Wait a minute, we did not know that. Have you
had a meeting that we do not know about? Can we have a proper
paper, please?" Do you remember that extraordinary bit in
the Butler Report that top flight papers were prepared by the
Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office on the
road to Iraq but they were not circulated? One wonders why, and
one wonders why the Cabinet ministers concerned did not ask for
it. That is the problem in the end. It is both a human and a systems
problem. You always have to try and recreate as a historian where
the weather-makers are and who they are and the degree to which
they crowd out other heavier duty questions.
Dr Wright: I do not dissent
from a lot of that, but I would like to add to it, if I can. There
is an issue about, I think, the number and role of the special
adviser world in Number 10, and this has been well rehearsed in
recent years, as to whether it is actually helping the Government
to get a strategic focus and to keep departments up to the mark,
and so on, or whether it simply interferes and gets across things
and makes things more complicated. Sir Richard Mottram, who is
always someone worth listening to, told our Committee a week or
two ago that he thought that was a real issue in government at
the moment, so it is worth looking at. The bit I would add to,
though, is, please do not think that that is the only issue or
that it is simply the negative thing that you want to focus on,
because you also have to understand why it is that, not just this
government, but all governments have wanted to try to strengthen
the strategic role of the centre, right from Ted Heath and his
Central Policy Review Staff and all that, and some of what has
been going on is a response to an enduring issue in British Government
and I think some of it is successful. Some of these units which
float between the Cabinet Office and Number 10, I think, have
done well; at least they have done well over periods. I think
the Strategy Unit run by Geoff Mulgan was extremely valuable.
Our Committee did a report on (we called it rather grandly) Governing
the Future. We wanted to look at how well government actually
did work preparing for the future. We went to Finland, which is
supposed to be at the forefront of all this, and they said, "Oh,
we think you are at the forefront in Britain. Your horizon scanning
work and your Strategy Units are world leading", and they
did excellent work. The Delivery Unit under Michael Barber did
excellent work trying to identify government priorities across
the board and then chasing them with departments and having prime
ministerial backing, which is the key thing to do. So it is a
mixed picture.
Professor Hennessy: Could
I agree with that, Lord Chairman? I think the great successes
post 1997 in terms of the units were Geoff Mulgan's Strategy Unit
and Michael Barber's Delivery Unit, and pre/post Barber we can
see a big difference, for example, as indeed the Central Policy
Review Staff was very good in some of its phases, but it was a
resource for the whole Cabinet. Some of you around this table
were customers for it at various times and Ted Heath and Burke
Trend, the then Cabinet Secretary, worked it out so that it was
a resource for the whole Cabinet, not just the Prime Minister.
I think that is a key question too, because you do need to strengthen
at certain times, and every Prime Minister should have the right
to get the configuration that he or she wants, provided shortcuts
are not taken and all the rest of it. The model I would go for
is the Central Policy Review Staff in recent times plus the experience
of the Mulgan Unit. And Geoff Mulgan spent a good deal of time
working out how the Central Policy Review Staff had in fact worked,
so there is a kind of continuity there, a passing on of tradition
and knowledge. But I would back what Tony said wholeheartedly
about the Mulgan Unit and the Barber Unit.
Q8 Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank: Putting
it in rather simple terms, how relevant is Cabinet Office to good
government? There have been many changes, and we will be discussing
later on who is mainly responsible for the changes. But can we
say, going back not only over the 30 years but even further, that
government is better as a result of changes in the Cabinet Office,
in broad terms as between parties—government—in 2009
and government, say, 40 years ago? We talk about this, and so
many members of the Cabinet Office are enthusiastic, and academics
and others enjoy this, but what do you say?
Professor Hennessy: I
have just been reading the papers again—and one of my research
students, Rosaleen Hughes, is doing a thesis on this—the
great crisis that you sat through, the 1976 IMF crisis, which
was extraordinary at the time, as I remember it as a young journalist,
but also, when I get the entrails of the papers (and we have got
remarkable papers). Somebody had the wisdom to put in a big brown
envelope the notes that John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, gave
Jim Callaghan at various points in those nine crucial Cabinets
that Lord Rodgers will remember, plus Jim's own notes of where
the discussion was going. When you put that alongside the formal
Cabinet minutes and Ken Stowe's Principal Private Secretary notes,
a remarkable reconstruction is possible, which I am sure you would
enjoy. But in those circumstances the tests of some of the systems
are in tough times. John Hunt and his Secretariat, and indeed
the Central Policy Review Staff under Ken Berrill, were pretty
crucial to helping you get through. They were not absolutely the
determinant, of course they were not, because it was a political
matter and a human matter. But you can see in those files Cabinet
government under real duress, as you remember it, over quite a
sustained period, and I think without John Hunt and the strength
of that tradition and those capabilities, you might well have
found it harder to get through, but that is for you to judge.
Q9 Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank: That
is very specific. Looking at it in the round, that is what I am
asking, not about a specific event or bits of history.
Professor Hennessy: It
is like clean water. If a good Cabinet government goes, you only
know when it has gone, and you regret it. It is a necessary but
not a sufficient condition for good government. But if Cabinet
government is not working, either because ministers are not living
up to the requirements of the informal constitution and testing
things out and requiring proper briefings, everything begins to
suffer. But, of course, in many ways government is better. Lord
Rayner's unit, which was another hybrid Prime Minister's Office,
Cabinet Office number, I thought was very effective in the 1980s
at improving the quality of public services, and, indeed, the
public services and the customer care elements are much better.
But that is a bit separate from the core old-fashioned requirement
of Cabinet government, which is that at the apex of the political
and the administrative systems you have due care and due process
and, as the Ministerial Code says, there is proper discussion,
at the apex or near it, in Cabinet committees of all serious matters
that affect the country and where there is dissent within the
Government and within the country. So, Lord Rodgers, I am concentrating
on the Hankey/Lloyd George reform and the way it panned out through—proper
minutes, proper agendas, which they did not have before 1916;
and my argument would be it is very hard to do a rolling audit
of the quality of government because circumstances change and
people change. But without that central bit, that indispensable
core working properly, you are in deep trouble, and I think the
Butler Report showed that in technicolor.
Dr Wright: Your question
is: have any of these changes made government work better? Of
course, that is the mission statement of the Cabinet Office; that
is its strap-line, making government work better, which is quite
a formidable objective. You do need a bit of perspective, because
I cannot remember the golden age when government was working beautifully.
Indeed, if you go back 30 years, we were being told on all sides
that our system of government was collapsing; that we were ungovernable;
that there was overload; real meltdown was going on; that there
was something systemically wrong with our system. But, of course,
it was a combination of how we do things with external factors;
so you have just got to keep a bit of perspective. All I would
say is that the issue that Prime Ministers then knew about, Harold
Wilson, Ted Heath, who we have spoken of, in a sense were grappling
with the same thing, which is how you try to get some strategic
direction to a government that is run on a departmental basis
in facing an external environment. We have not got the answer
to that. We have had lots of goes at it over the years; we have
had some excellent attempts to analyse it. The best one, by the
way, in case you are interested, I think, was done two years ago
by Suma Chakrabarti, who is now the Permanent Secretary at the
Department for International Development. He did a report for
the Cabinet Secretary on the role of the Cabinet Office which
is excellent, and it shows you, I think, a model of what a centre
of government would properly do, but, ironically, of course, no
sooner had he produced that than we had a new Prime Minister who
went and changed the furniture again.
Q10 Chairman: Suma Chakrabarti
is now at the Department of Justice.
Dr Wright: I am sorry;
I got the wrong department.
Q11 Lord Morris of Aberavon: I
found your answer fascinating and challenging. What do you think
has been the most significant change in the operation of Cabinet
since 1997? Has there been a loss of independence by individuals?
You have mentioned Iraq and all that. We have all noticed the
frenetic activity of recent Prime Ministers, either in travel
or even latterly in odd telephone calls, but Harold Wilson used
to say in his second period that he did not have much to do. His
Cabinet ministers fed him with a ball and all he was was the centre
forward scoring the goal, if he could, and that was quite a different
tempo to that which perhaps the demands of today impose upon Prime
Ministers?
Professor Hennessy: The
world is different from when you were first a Minister. The 24-hour
news media cycle, and all the rest of it, is always the obvious
one to cite first. But, having said that, you do not have to succumb
to it. You cannot go back to being my one political hero, Mr Attlee,
and delivering two sentence replies with the Movietone cameras
running. But would it not be wonderful if, somehow, somebody came
through the political system that did that? You do not have to
be dominated to the extent that we have been since 1997, and still
are, whereby at the very earliest stage of policy formulation
in a department, let alone before it gets to the Cabinet Office
or full Cabinet or Cabinet committee, how it will play on Today
or Newsnight is the question. And if you let the mania
of the electronic media create the circumstances in which you
operate, you have already begun to lose. It is government-by-incontinence
really. They do not know how to ration themselves. The only time
they ration themselves is when they have got mens rea (guilty
knowledge)—they know they have done something wrong—and
then you hear the Radio 4 sequences saying, "We tried to
get X to come and speak, or a spokesman, but they would not".
But this kind of government by press neurosis and incontinence
is very corrosive. It uses up a vast amount of nervous energy
and it means that you feel the need to employ people who should
not actually be in Crown service either as temporary civil servants,
special advisers, let alone established ones. You have actually
lived through the change, I know you have, because of your career.
But it was not that the problems were any less severe in some
of the meetings through which you sat as a minister. There were
extraordinarily tough times in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The
1970s was an immensely turbulent decade, and the 1980s was not
exactly tranquil. I do not want to portray the Government in the
way Rab Butler used to, as some kind of serene Rolls Royce—he
was joking: he was quite good at jokes, was he not?—but
you have got to have a kind of capacity to think and talk amongst
yourselves privately without leaks, without a constant obsession
with how it will play on the sequences on Radio 4, let alone Newsnight,
so that you can think and you can talk candidly and you get the
maximum out of the departments in terms of their stored knowledge
on questions. The departments have been really very thinly used
in recent years compared to the degree to which they used to be.
Quite often Number 10 will have a Prime Minister making a speech
where the crucial parts of it have not even been shown to the
department concerned and it is written by some special adviser.
The people we have to defend ourselves against first in this country
are ourselves actually. We have a lot of clever and good people
in Whitehall, a lot of stored wisdom in those departments and
we do not actually so arrange matters that our Government is greater
than the sum of its parts. The two and a half governing tribes,
the permanent civil servants, the ministers, or transients, the
half being the tribe of special advisers, live in this very scratchy
and unsatisfactory relationship. And so the processes of government
of which the Cabinet Office is meant to be the guarantor and the
standard-setter are very, very diminished, and I think that is
the big change from your time. It was not a golden age. I was
a young journalist reporting in the Willie Whitelaw/Denis Healey
generation—very different from this. To be unkind, which
goes against my nature, this political generation now reminds
me of Kitty Muggeridge's immortal line about David Frost: "David
is risen-without-trace." This is the risen without trace
generation. What have they done on the way to becoming secretaries
of state? The square root of bugger all again! In the end, it
is a human problem. I am mixing metaphors here and also wandering
into areas where I should not, but you have got to look at both
structures and cultures. I commend to you, Tony's terrific lecture
to the Political Quarterly three months ago, because he
actually came in on this crucial question of the need always to
see it as a mixture of a structural question and as a human question.
Q12 Chairman: To be fair to the Government
mens rea surely
means guilty intent, rather than guilt, does it not?
Professor Hennessy: That fits too, does it not?
Dr Wright: I agree with
so much of what Peter says. The crucial thing is to make sure
that the structure that should work works. There needs to be a
robust Cabinet system, it needs to do its business properly and
all that, but, of course, the environment has changed. Your hero
and mine, Clement Attlee, would not last five minutes today. I
doubt that you could have a Macmillan who goes and reads Trollope
in the afternoon. There is something about the relentless environment
now, and although you can say, yes, you should not respond to
it, and of course, you should not respond to it, the pressures
to respond are enormous, because every newspaper is demanding
that this day produces a new initiative in relation to the latest
issue that has arisen and, of course, you get into this dreadful
cycle; but the conclusion from that is not just to repeat the
old verities but to be more strategic, to say, "Actually
what is the underlying purpose of this Government?", and
to stick with that purpose and not be blown off course by all
this stuff that happens every day. That is what the centre should
be helping you to do, and that is the bit that I would insert.
Q13 Lord Morris of Aberavon: Are
they doing it?
Dr Wright: They have been
struggling to do it, and some of it is bad, which is all the media
management stuff, which is a reflection of some of this that we
have been talking about. Insofar as there was an obsession with
that, it was always going to end badly, and it did, but insofar
as there was a real grappling with the issues of how we get some
real cross-cutting stuff inside government, how we recognise that
issues do not sit neatly inside departmental bunkers, some of
the biggest issues now are essentially cross-government, finding
machinery to deal with that, to progress-chase across government,
to keep an eye on future issues, and so on. All that is the work
of a good centre.
Professor Hennessy: I
hope you will have a look, Lord Chairman, too at the state of
the secretariats, because they are messy and overlapping now.
There is the national security one, the foreign policy and defence
one, the global issues one. It is very difficult even for somebody
who is nerdy about it and as interested as I am to work out who
is doing what. What I think we need, and I have suggested this
to the Cabinet Secretary, for example, in the context of the National
Security, International Relations and Development Cabinet committee,
which is a very important one, it is a very good idea to have
an equivalent to the National Security Council in the UK. The
trouble is the big one does not meet, it goes down into its little
groups, so there is no real change there. But there has been the
beginnings of this, there has been a review, which you might want
to see the product of, which is completed now, on the relationship
of the Cabinet Office to the secret agencies, for example. So
one bit of it has been done. But I suggested to the Cabinet Secretary
that he has a capability review of how all the inputs to that
National Security, International Relations and Development Committee
work from the first line of British defence, which is the SIS
agents in the field and the people who run them, to the last line,
which is HMS Vanguard, the Trident submarine which is out
there in the North Atlantic as we speak, with politico-military
diplomacy trade-aid soft power in between. This was Gordon Brown's
great effort to try and meet some of these concerns and to do
what Tony has quite rightly suggested needs doing, but I do not
think it is working. His National Economic Council may be working
rather better, because that meets all the time and they have got
very good people helping them and it is the issue of the hour,
apart from the frenzy relating to expenses, and so on, but it
is very difficult. I agree with Tony exactly: all you can ever
hope to do as a government, because the world is an unforgiving
place and an unforeseeable place, is to work out four or five
key things you want to do in a Parliament, or preferably two if
you think you are going to have eight years, and stick to them.
You cannot ring-fence everything, you certainly cannot in terms
of public expenditure and all the rest of it. But you should stick
to four or five things which preferably are interlocking and reinforce
each other and it gives you a kind of ballast, a gyroscope as
a government through the difficult times, and the Cabinet Office
should be crucial to that; but, of course, the Prime Minister
and the Cabinet have to set that for themselves. I remember, I
re-read it the other day, Victor Rothschild, after the rather
bruising experience of being head of the CPRS from 1971 to 1974,
gave a lecture, and he said that new governments coming in should
be forbidden to do anything for the first six months except listen
and get briefings. Ministers can be allowed to do completely harmless
things, like open new hospitals or visit the European Parliament,
but new governments in the first six months do truly frightful
things. I think there is a lot in that. I do not want to be unkind
about the political class, but one of the key self-delusions of
the political class is that they think that when they are put
there with a mandate from the electorate, because it is them it
is going to be different, the intractables are going to become
the malleables. Aux contraire: every government after another
that comes in with a particular majority and, particularly if
you have a destiny politician who lacks self-irony like Tony Blair,
you are in real trouble, and that is when old sweat civil servants,
diplomats, spies, military will say, "Wait a minute. It is
not that simple. Calm down". And I am not sure that is happening
either, or will happen in a year's time.
Chairman: Lord Norton,
perhaps the latest question and the last question that you had
in mind it would be helpful to cover, because time will elapse,
sadly, in a few minutes.
Q14 Lord Norton of Louth:
You have been explaining what has been happening, and in a way
the starting point has to be what should be, which is what you
have already alluded to. The Cabinet Office itself says its functions
are to support the Prime Minister, to support the Cabinet and
strengthen the Civil Service. How relevant are those? How appropriate
are those? Do they bear any relationship to essentially what you
have been explaining has happened over the past 30 years, and
if there is that mismatch, that failure to relate to what you
think they should be doing, what changes should be made?
Dr Wright: I mentioned
the Chakrabarti Review, which I think is very helpful on this
because he tries to separate out what he calls the core Cabinet
Office functions from what he calls the added value functions.
I am not going to go through them, but it is all done elegantly
and set out, I think, in an extremely useful way. Some of the
core things are things we have been talking about, and there are
the additional things which it would be nice for a centre to do
but are not absolutely indispensable and some of these things
will change at different times, dependent upon how different departments
are performing, and so on, but there is an incipient model there
that is worth looking at. The problem is, I think, we have had
a kind of stop and start arrangement with these endless units.
If you went through the last 10 years and just drew up a list
of all these different named units—I see you are smiling
because someone has had to do it—it is utterly bewildering.
I remember years ago, to our Committee, Michael Heseltine, who
then was in the Cabinet Office (and we were having this discussion
about what on earth he gets up to), described it memorably to
me as a bran tub, and I think it has always been the bran tub
of government—it is the sort of lucky dip section: everything
gets tossed in but you are not really sure what you are going
to find when you go there—but it was not doing what a collective
centre should do. You have simply got to work out what you think
Number 10 ought to be up to properly, or improperly, and what
you think the collective centre in the Cabinet Office ought to
be doing properly and improperly; that is, separating out clarity
and then sticking to it.
Professor Hennessy: If
with all the ancient power of this ancient House you could give
me one reform for a new government, or this one re-elected, or
whatever, I will tell you what it would be, what the big gap is
right from the beginning of the last century. I have just been
doing a study of horizon scanning, if we can call it that, in
Whitehall since the Committee of Imperial Defence was formed in
1904, and there has always been a gap in terms of (Douglas Hurd's
phrase about the think-tank) rubbing ministers' noses in reality.
We have had a very good Joint Intelligence Committee system—I
have already alluded to that—but what we need is to build
on the recent advances in horizon scanning and in the Cabinet
Office to have a unit, no matter what you call it, that brings
it all together, that spares ministers nothing about the state
of the world. Richard Mottram, the former chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, said that if he had produced a paper on
derivatives, it would not have gone down well, for example, because
we do not do own-side intelligence. So with all that huge intelligence
apparatus, which is vital, they did not pick up at all the signs
of what was making the political weather, and still does and will
do for the next 10 years. So that is what I would do. For example,
you might want to inquire, my Lord Chairman, why it is that the
Joint Intelligence Committee is now meeting only once a fortnight.
The world to me has not become a noticeably easier place in the
last three months. Why are they meeting only once a fortnight?
I think you might actually ask them about that. They certainly
have not announced it. People have tried to explain it to me,
but I am not at all convinced that it is a good idea they should
not; but that is the gap at the centre and, if I was David Cameron
and part of these transition talks with the Cabinet Secretary,
I would say, "I want you to prepare for day one a huge horizon
scan that spares us nothing looking five, 10, 15, 20, if you can
30 years ahead of what we might be facing and give us an idea
of the particularly malign combinations that would make real trouble
for us that may be just foreseeable, as Braudel said, "the
thin wisps of tomorrow that are just visible today". That
is what I would do and that would be a classic Cabinet Office
function and it would bring together all those strengths that
it has in its different parts. So if you could wave your more
powerful magic wand, Chairman, and give me one reform, that is
what it would be.
Dr Wright: Can I add one
very quick thing? That is excellent but the difficulty with it,
I think, is that in a sense we have done it. That is what the
Strategy Unit did; it produced some excellent broad forward-thinking:
what is the future going to hold for us? What does this mean in
policy terms? The problem is that it has nil impact on the day
to day policy process and it gets ignored by departments because
they are busy doing other things; the centre is overwhelmed by
whatever the headline is today and Parliament is not interested
in it. So, yes, Peter, do that but then do the next bit, which
is to say what you do when the first storm comes along.
Q15 Lord Norton of Louth: If
one was to encapsulate all in one word what it should be doing,
surely the word is "co-ordination". But then what goes
beyond that, because. if you have departmentalists and departmentalitis,
where is the element of enforcement of ensuring the rig throughout
Whitehall?
Professor Hennessy: If
you can produce knowledge of the kind that you do not routinely
get as a result of this new approach to horizon-scanning, pulling
it all together and all the rest of it, which is part of co-ordination
and only that, and if, for example—and David Cameron has
talked about a National Security Council—that National Security
Council week in, week out met every Thursday at 10—because
Cabinets do not meet on Thursdays any more—maybe for only
half an hour, if the world is relatively serene, to get updates
on that, this would feed into a National Security Council, the
defence-of-the-realm-in-the-round and British interests and all
the rest of it, not least domestic matters too that might impinge,
I think that would be a reform. Because the reason the Hankey-Lloyd
George reform endured was that it was a combination of process
and meetings and back-up; that reform met Tony's requirements
in 1916 and Lloyd George, who may have been dodgy but he was a
genius—and one of your Members, Kenneth Morgan, said he
was an artist in the use of power—knew that this was a first
order question getting this right. He was in the middle of the
most enormous crisis in a total war and yet he saw the question
that you are addressing as a first order one and that is the first
thing he did when he became war Prime Minister, set up a War Cabinet
and a War Cabinet Secretariat, and it served the country extremely
well; and it is the blob of DNA from which all the classic Cabinet
Office functions, to which I have been referring, stem. So I think
sparing your blushes—I always do this when I appear before
Tony's Committee too—I say thank heavens you are interested
in this and I hope that you will actually shove reality in the
nose of power, if I can put it in a vulgar way, Lord Chairman.
Dr Wright: Your word "enforcement"
I think raises a whole lot of different issues which I do not
want to speak at length about, but just to say that that is a
massively important issue. For example, when the Chakrabarti Review
looked at the Cabinet Office and it tried to identify the context
in which it operates, one of the things which it identified is
this: what it called the constitutional reality—"Permanent
secretaries have stronger lines of policy and management accountability
to their Ministers than to the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the
Civil Service." That is the context in which trying to do
things at the centre rubs against the realities of how we do government
and politics; so you are on to something rather big in talking
about enforcement. That is why Civil Service reform has been endlessly
around because it is quite difficult for a Cabinet Secretary charged
with Civil Service reform to deliver reform across a very disaggregated
system.
Chairman: We do not blush
about our blushes, but a final question from Lord Shaw.
Q16 Lord Shaw of Northstead: How
would you characterise the changes that have taken place in the
Cabinet Office and indeed in central government itself and what
effect has that had on parliamentary accountability at the centre?
Arising out of that, of course, what have been the reasons that
you give for the changes that have taken place? Finally, if a
Prime Minister is determined to perform as a President with a
presidential style of government how could anybody stop him?
Professor Hennessy: Can
I start with the last bit first because I think it is crucial?
Cabinet Ministers are there to say, "Wait a minute."
The only sprinkler system that the British system of government
has—because for all the laws that we have there are no laws
that cover proper conduct in the Cabinet room—if the Cabinet
collectively or sufficient of them is not prepared to say, "Oh,
come off it" or "Are you sure?" you cannot do anything
about it. The press cannot be a substitute; the Houses of Parliament
cannot be a substitute; the Civil Service cannot be a substitute.
If the Downing Street 22 do not act as the sprinkler system on
an over-mighty or potentially over-mighty Prime Minister nobody
else can or will, and that is the first order human requirement
on the Cabinet. Why I question this, it is very difficult for
even a nerd like me who is interested in this, to produce the
cartography of a changing scene; it is very, very difficult to
keep up with it. Given that under the Blair style of government
you had a kind of informal "Hello, you guys" system
running in parallel to the formal one it was extremely difficult
to do the cartography. I think that the current Prime Minister
is almost impossible to fathom in all sorts of ways—a very,
very interesting case of premiership. How he operates—we
hear all sorts of things about tantrums and all the rest of it
and we know how he operated in the Treasury, and we were always
interested in the degree to which he would just run that across
into Number 10. But you cannot really run a country with about
eight key figures; you can just about get away with it but I do
not think it was satisfactory in the Treasury; but also how he
would deal with the stuff that flies in unexpectedly. Each Prime
Minister, as Tony says, sees this as a problem—the weakness
at the centre. If you had ex-Prime Ministers before you they would
say, "What is all this about over might in my premiership?
If you sit where we sat it does not look over-mighty to me. What
instruments did I have?" They always see it in a different
way, from a different perspective. I suppose the bit that is missing
in all this cornucopia of change, this kaleidoscopic change that
we have been discussing this morning, goes back to Walter Bagehot
writing about a very different world in the 19th century—Sir
Robert Peel—and he said: "The great genius of Sir Robert
Peel as Prime Minister was he always kept a mind in reserve"—that
was the phrase—so he had something in reserve to cope with
the unforeseen, the difficult and the truly stretching. The problem,
which I think lurks in your question and indeed in the territory
we have been covering today is that they are worn out; it is not
just the overload of the 1970s that we have talked about, they
are absolutely worn out. They live off their nerves and they are
much more tribal than they used to be. That is what I meant about
the risen without trace generation; they have not got out enough,
they had not been in professions long enough before they came
into the House of Commons. It means that when things go wrong
they talk to their own kind and they cannot listen, or do not
want to listen to what is going on around them; they get immensely
cut off. And for all the talk of the people and understanding
people and endless focus groups and all the rest of it, I think
the political class we have managed to create for ourselves is
a severe problem. So I come back to where I began, that the human
problem, which is extremely difficult for you to opine on or to
write a report on, is absolutely central to everything you are
doing, and unless—and heaven knows what we do about that—there
is improvement there all the fine-tuning in the world, all the
capability reviews in the world are not going to help that much.
That is a cheerful thought on which to end, is it not, Chairman?
Q17 Chairman: I will ask Dr Wright whether
he thinks there is any such thing as a political class.
Dr Wright: I do. I was
going to rattle off a few bad things with which you will probably
agree: too many laws, too many ministers, too much frenetic activity
of a purposeless kind inside government, too much responsiveness
to an environment that is pushing in all the time, and the rise
of a political class which has been referred to, which I think
is a real issue. Career politicians are the people who have known
nothing but politics, who are dependent upon the system; the enfeeblement
of Parliament is part of the story. There is a whole agenda of
stuff there that we have to get hold of. Could I just give you
one positive thing, though? I see my role in life as being Peter's
representative on earth! He badgered me years ago on the basis
that the key bit of the centre, which is Number 10, the Prime
Minister, is not directly accountable to Parliament. Yes you have
parliamentary questions, but unlike other ministers there is no
Select Committee on the Prime Minister; he does not have to come
and answer to a Committee of Parliament. Peter kept on at me about
this and I in turn kept on at the Prime Minister of the day about
it, saying, "Could you not come as part of the accountability
of the centre to come and give evidence to a Select Committee?"
And I thought we had him because we tried to find something for
which uniquely the Prime Minister was responsible, and that was
the annual report that the government had produced at the time,
which was the Prime Minister's document, a cross government document.
We had a series of exchanges and I thought "we have actually
pinned him down here; he cannot wriggle out of this". I had
been told that it was constitutionally impossible and then I thought
we were getting there; then they abolished the annual report so
that we could not do it. But we returned to it through the Liaison
Committee and Tony Blair finally announced that he was going to
appear twice a year before the Liaison Committee and of course
that has now I think become a constitutional feature and that,
in its own small way, is quite a constitutional breakthrough because
it will never be altered—it will only be improved upon.
So you have to capture your gains where you can find them and
bottle them.
Q18 Lord Peston: Just
to give us a perspective, Peter, if I could take you back to the
late 1970s you may remember that Jim Callaghan made a speech,
I think written by Peter Jay, which essentially espoused what
I would call naive monetarism. The important point, upon which
I would like your view, is that none of us knew that speech was
going to be made, so how the Cabinet could possibly have said,
"That is nonsense" I do not know because the speech
was just made. But more to the point, since I was advising at
the Department of Prices, I pointed out immediately that if monetarism
is true we do not need an incomes policy because the monetarists
say the economy works perfectly, so we would have had no winter
of discontent and no Mrs Thatcher; and equally we did not need
the Department of Prices where I was earning a living. So there
is nothing new about Prime Ministers pre-empting things by saying
things and no one can do anything else about it.
Professor Hennessy: There
is a lot in that. Also, Tom McNally wrote the bulk of that speech
but the key paragraph was Peter Jay's, and it led Denis Healey,
who was very cross, was he not, to say that one rule in political
life is never get your son-in-law to write speeches for you—I
remember Denis saying that. But to be fair to Jim, of course on
certain things he was very prime ministerial, not least on nuclear
weapons policy, which did not come to even a formal Cabinet committee.
But in severe crisis he practised classic Cabinet government.
You could argue—some would do—that he had no alternative,
given the difference of views in that Cabinet in November 1976,
as you and Lord Rodgers remember only too well. But to Jim's great
credit it was collective, as Lord Morris remembers too—it
was genuinely collective. But Jim, like all Prime Ministers, operated
twin-track. But the problem after 1997 is that it was not really
twin-track, Cabinet became the recipient of presentations, and
I remember a senior official saying to me that presentations are
never an analysis. That is the problem. Jim had been around the
block a lot and he knew how to operate. Just as he used his Policy
Unit for certain things and the Central Policy Review Staff for
others and the career Civil Service for others. Jim was a grown
up about all these things. But I do take your point and that will
be remembered at Blackpool, that paragraph, for as long as Jim
is remembered—absolutely.
Dr Wright: There is a
moment at the beginning of the Blair government, told in Andrew
Rawnsley's book—and I think everyone assumes that it is
true—where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown meet on the sofa
in the presence of Robin Butler to announce what they are going
to do about monetary policy and the Bank of England and Robin
Butler says, "But you cannot do that without telling the
Cabinet; this is huge stuff, you cannot do it", and they
said it would be all right. And of course "it will be all
right" went on being all right for a lot of other things
as well. And, as Peter said, we paid a terrible price for that
around Iraq because Cabinet government failed us. Cabinet government
is not the whole story—we need to do all the things that
we have been talking about—but it is a sine qua non
of decent government in this country that you have to have a robust
government full of big people in their own right. The only consolation
is the very moment when Cabinet government is announced as having
disappeared it tends to reappear, and I suspect that we are probably
at a moment of imminent re-emergence.
Chairman: Dr Wright and
Professor Hennessy, can I thank you most warmly on behalf of the
Committee for joining us this morning and for the fascinating
evidence which you have given us; thank you very much indeed.
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