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Oral Evidence given to the Public Administration Select Committee for the Inquiry into the publication of Political Memoirs
Witnesses: Lord Lawson of Blaby, a Member of the House of Lords, Lord Owen CH, a Member of the House of Lords, and Clare Short, a Member of the House, gave evidence.
Q350 Chairman: We are delighted to welcome Lord Lawson, Lord Owen and Clare Short. You have in common the fact that you are all former distinguished Cabinet Ministers but also the fact that you have produced distinguished memoirs and it is the latter that we are particularly interested in. You know what we are about. We are very interested in drawing upon your experiences of being memoirists. Would you like to say anything by way of introduction briefly or shall we just launch in with our questions?
Lord Lawson of Blaby: You can launch in, as far as I am concerned.
Clare Short: I did not set off intending so quickly to write a book. Normally, more distinguished people have taken a number of offices a bit later and then will write a memoir, but there was a very sharp attempt to muzzle me that came from a letter threatening prosecution under official secrets and being ejected from the Privy Council and then the Chief Whip threatening me with the withdrawal of the whip, which would mean I could not stand as a Labour candidate, which was a very serious matter. The threats were very crude and, I thought, inappropriate so I then decided to very quickly write a book. I needed to get in quick because I did not want it to coincide with the General Election. Mine was not a reflective, later memoir; it was a determination to not be muzzled, to get the truth on the page and get it out.
Q351 Chairman: Lord Owen, you have given us the detailed correspondence with Lord Butler as the Cabinet Secretary of the day, where you are absolutely playing by the rules, submitting material to the Cabinet Secretary who responds. You respond to him, correspondence goes on, you take some of the points; you do not take others. It is the negotiating process that goes on and it is fascinating to have observed it from the inside which you have given us. Clare, I am not sure whether you did that or not. Did you send your text in and did you go through a process?
Clare Short: Absolutely, I did. I had no intention of not going through the process but the minute Amazon puts out that your book is coming you get a letter saying that you have to go through this process. The manuscript is duly submitted. I dealt with a civil servant from the Cabinet Office, a very pleasant and reasonable woman, who brought a series of requests on behalf of the Head of the Civil Service 'C' and, one tiny one on behalf of the Department for International Development, and they wanted changes in words that I had written down in my diary at the time. We negotiated and I gave a bit but I resisted a bit - a similar sort of process, but we did it verbally. I did ask in the course of that what would happen if I did not agree and she said, "I am not sure but we would have a stand off." We did agree. Interestingly, there was none from Number 10. The bit about Tony giving a message to Gordon that he would let him take over if he let him join the euro was leaked to the media from the Treasury. The Independent had arranged to publish some of it and the money for that goes to the publisher, not to me, so that was in the contract I had. The Independent immediately chopped 10,000 off the price because of the Treasury leak, which I think is interesting. What are the mechanisms for controlling the book? The Treasury did not try to get a change or whatever but they did a leak to get the story out.
Q352 Chairman: I would like to ask all of you whether you think this process works, whether you think the existing rules as described in the Ministerial Code, drawing on Radcliffe, work well to handle memoirs now or whether in some ways the world has changed and we need to revise the whole system.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Maybe the world has changed since my time. I did not submit any written evidence to you. I have read Lord Owen's and I agree with every word he has written, which does suggest that there have been some changes since my time. I resigned from government in 1989. I can tell you about my own experience in this area which might shed some light on what you are talking about. There is first of all an understanding, a quid pro quo, when a former minister wishes to write his or her memoirs. The quid pro quo is that you are given full access to any document that you may have seen when you were a minister. Obviously you do not retain all these in your head but if you can remember that there were these documents you can see them. If you are an ordinary minister, you have to go into the Treasury or to the Cabinet Office but you are shown the documents you ask for. They will not allow you to go on a fishing expedition but if you say, "I think there is a minute of this meeting I would like to see to refresh my memory" or, "I think there was a submission on this I would like to see", anything you have seen when you were a minister you are allowed to see. If you are a former Prime Minister, the documents are sent to your home but if you are just an ordinary ex-Chancellor or ex-Foreign Secretary you have to go to the Cabinet Office or the Treasury. It is worth the detour. The understanding is that in return for this facilitation you will at the end of the day submit your manuscript or typescript to the Cabinet Secretary. Then the Cabinet Secretary makes a whole raft of comments. He will also discuss with the permanent secretaries who are relevant to the positions you have held and the story you are telling. I got from Robin Butler this huge raft: "You cannot say this. You cannot say that" and Terry Burns, who was Permanent Secretary at the Treasury at the time that I submitted my manuscript, said this, that and the other, quoting authorities for what I could or should not say. I had to exercise my own judgment. I read very, very carefully everything that Robin Butler had written. Where I thought he was making a good point, I took it. Where I thought he was making a bad point, I ignored it. The main changes I made were things which he was unhappy about but which were, I thought, not very important points to the story I was trying to tell and the sort of economic and political history I was trying to put on the record. If it was not really part of the main story, I was prepared to take it out. If it was something which I felt was important, I was not prepared to take it out except in one specific area. A lot of the remarks that came from Robin Butler were about protecting civil servants, protecting officials. That was the thing that seemed to concern him and Terry Burns, that officials cannot answer back and therefore they should remain in the background. Politicians are in the foreground. I had not intended anyhow to finger officials particularly but nevertheless in telling the story you know that Sir Humphrey Appleby is not a total cipher, so you do give him a role in your plot. But I did cut out a lot of that because there was considerable upset on Robin Butler's part. I used my judgment. When my memoirs were published, that caused a certain amount of consternation. It was during the Major Government and John Major, I believe, set up - I do not know whether it was at Robin Butler's behest or whether it was his own idea but I know that John Wakeham, Lord Wakeham, was involved - a small committee of senior ministers and officials inside government (it was never announced) to decide in the light of the Lawson memoirs what changes in the Radcliffe rules ought to come about. Although the Radcliffe rules are very sensible in many ways, they are clearly obsolete. The other thing that had caused problems for them was that the government of which I was a member had a few years previously liberalised the Official Secrets Act. If you avoid breaches of national security or anything of that kind there are very few things which are now a criminal offence under the Official Secrets Act, which used not to be the case. They felt a bit naked. They decided to have this inquiry and the inquiry strove for some time to decide how the Radcliffe rules should be rewritten but they were unable to decide and nothing happened.
Q353 Chairman: That is extremely interesting and no doubt we shall get access to those non-conclusions[1]. Lord Owen, would you like to add your own experiences to this?
Lord Owen: I think it is self-explanatory in the submission I gave to you. It was perfectly amicable. He was right to criticise some of my references to civil servants and I took them out. On the question of whether it would injure the country's international relations, that is a judgment. I took account of it. On national security, I think you are pretty much bound to go along with their views even if you disagree. Finally, on the question of the overall nature of government, politicians have to make up their own minds.
Q354 Chairman: Most of the comments that appear in the correspondence that you had and that you describe, Lord Lawson, are to protect civil servants by name. If Sir Jeremy Greenstock is right in what he has been telling us this morning and which Christopher Meyer has told us as well, which is that they want a level playing field now between civil servants and politicians, surely those kinds of protections would fall away?
Lord Owen: That is dangerous if it happens. I think the most important thing is the underlying problem of what has happened. If all foreign and defence policy is to be decided by a Prime Minister, if the Prime Minister gets the feeling that his discussions when he goes to embassies or anywhere else are going to be revealed, he will just shut them out. They are shut out enough already as it is. I think that would be very damaging. There is enough concentration and personalisation of all these issues. There is a marked reduction in Cabinet discussion and circulation of papers. If we go even further into a narrow cabal, that would be very dangerous. If the price is the old system, broadly speaking, where civil servants do not criticise politicians and politicians do not criticise civil servants in their memoirs, call me old fashioned but I think it makes for better government and I strongly uphold that.
Q355 Chairman: The Meyer charge - some people say this is the reason that he wrote the book - is that it was precisely because he was a diplomat in Washington and felt he was being excluded from the relationship that now existed between Number 10 and the White House, cutting out the embassy; and that this was an act of revenge to tell the world that this is how things now were. In a sense, he is agreeing with your analysis and he might argue that provides justification for the book.
Lord Owen: I have no doubt you are right.
Q356 Chairman: Does it?
Lord Owen: Initially there was a great love affair. He was chosen by the Prime Minister effectively, pulled out of Germany and made American ambassador. Clearly, there was a breakdown in relationships. You see that personal breakdown in relationships in the book. That is unfortunate. If you are going to get at this issue, you have to go to some of the points which I tried to make. There has been a very dramatic change in the way foreign and defence policy is conducted. Most people will not focus on it. In 2001, the Cabinet secretariat that served the whole Cabinet on defence and foreign policy was totally destroyed. A secretariat was established on European affairs and particularly now in relation to Iraq on defence and security affairs inside Number 10. That is very different machinery to what we have ever had since the creation of the Cabinet during the First World War.
Clare Short: The proprieties that Lord Owen describes relate to a situation that is dead. When I was a private secretary in the Home Office in 1974 those rules were still there. The Civil Service had its role. Ministers were in their roles; the Cabinet worked. That is broken to a very considerable extent. We now have these mighty special advisers. When I was in the Home Office there were the first Rowntree chocolate soldiers, quite small scale special advisers with a political role. From that to Alastair Campbell having a role that was mightier than most Cabinet ministers and yet no accountability to Parliament. In the specific case of Iraq, there was the complete capturing of power and decision making into Number 10. The Foreign Office was marginalised and all those Arabists were not in it. The system is broken. There was a lot of deceit, as we now know. It is now a matter of record. Parliament absolutely failed to deal with the deceit and that is meant to be the core of the whole code of ministerial responsibility to Parliament. The rules are broken and it is very important for the truth to come out. The position that Lord Owen is taking is the respectable, old position but we are in a broken position. The rules break; books are needed and we need to get it all out so people can discuss and decide what is happening to our constitutional arrangements, how decisions are being made, where the flaws are and what we ought to do about it.
Lord Owen: I did not criticise the publication of these books. Personally, I hope Jeremy Greenstock publishes as soon as possible.
Q357 Chairman: You say in your memorandum, "I have never known a time in the last 40 years when there has been so much disillusionment, bordering on contempt, for politicians by civil servants and diplomats and vice-versa." Is the argument that is being made that the old conventions are so breached, the old boundary lines are so down, that now anything is possible? People rushing into print, including senior diplomats and senior civil servants are part of this new order of things.
Lord Owen: It has been happening over quite a long time. It started with politicians. I remember a great moment in Cabinet when Denis Healey was talking. Tony Benn was writing away and Denis slowed down and said, "Tony, am I going too fast for you?" We knew he was writing his biography, but that was between politicians. If I had known that the Cabinet Secretary or the Prime Minister's Tom McNally or somebody like that was also writing his memoirs, I would have objected. I think the situation has broken down. I agree with Clare. I think personally it is damaging. To go back I do not think is ruled out and I would like that to happen but it would require some changes. The Prime Minister would have to get rid of the secretariats that he has established and go back to Cabinet government. He would have to remove a chief of staff who he has appointed - it is a political appointment - able to make executive commands to civil servants. We would have to go back to the power of the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Secretary would also be in charge of intelligence. At the moment, the Cabinet Secretary is neutered. He does not have control over a very substantial part of government. The old Cabinet Secretaries were very much involved in relations with MI6 and MI5. That is no longer the case. Any of this can only happen if the Prime Minister decides to do it. Personally, I think he should. Then there would be a consequential movement back to the older system, but that should not stop civil servants writing memoirs. Anthony Parsons wrote about Iran. I have no objection to any of it. It was a serious contribution to understanding about the fall of the Shah. Sir David Scott who was ambassador to South Africa wrote about his period there and again it was a serious contribution to how we were dealing with apartheid, Namibia, Rhodesia and Zimbabwe but I think they write in a slightly different way. Politicians are used to the rough and tumble. There is going to be more personality stuff in political memoirs and as long as they keep it to their own political colleagues I have no objection. If they go into civil servants I do object.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Things can change in different directions because it is the Prime Minister of the day who determines the way in which the government is to be run. Because Mr Blair runs it in a particular way which is quite harshly criticised by Lord Butler in his report of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, it does not mean that the next Prime Minister or the one after will. I do not take Clare Short's view that the genie is now out of the bottle and nothing can be done. There should be no question of a so-called level playing field between politicians and officials. As David Owen said, they are very different. It is quite obvious that it is ministers who are, very properly, held responsible for decisions. It is ministers who the House of Commons calls to account day in day out, year in year out. It is not officials; nor should it be. Because it is ministers who are responsible and exposed, ministers who have to take the rap and defend their policies, ministers after they have retired from office should be able to say exactly what they were seeking to do, why they were seeking to do it, how it worked out and so on. Officials have that protection. They are behind the screen. So they should be. Therefore, the standards for officials' memoirs have to be quite different. In return for that, the minister will refrain, as David Owen and I did, from fingering particular officials. That is one important point. Another thing which has not been mentioned which I think is complicating the matter - I am not quite sure what the answer is - is the Freedom of Information Act. David Owen said he would have been very concerned if he thought that officials were writing diaries and so on which were going to be published later. What happens, as this Committee well knows, is that in Whitehall it is customary after every disaster, whether it is the Millennium Dome, the foot and mouth outbreak or Iraq, that the
Permanent Secretary or the Permanent Under-Secretary of the department concerned will ask a senior official to write a post mortem purely for internal purposes so that they can draw the lessons and so that they might do better in the future. Why did it go wrong? What mistakes were made? That is regularly done. That was entirely confidential. Now, under the Freedom of Information Act, this is a public document. It is almost like the officials writing their memoirs while they are still officials. Knowing that this is now public and no longer private, the officials will tend to write it in a way that shows that the mistakes were all made by the politicians and not by the officials. That is human nature. Knowing that this is now going on, ministers today, following the Freedom of Information Act, are going to trust their officials far less than we used to trust them and they will certainly be anxious to get their memoirs out first.
Q358 Mr Prentice: Clare, I cannot remember if you said in your book or whether it was subsequently that Sir Andrew Turnbull allowed decision making to crumble in the run-up to the decision to go to war. Do you think Andrew Turnbull, now Lord Turnbull, should feel free to publish his own book on what happened and who said what, a kind of mirror image of the sort of book you published?
Clare Short: I personally believe there should be a pretty level playing field. I disagree with what Lord Lawson has just said. The appointment of permanent secretaries has been politicised. People are being told not to apply. People like Jeremy Greenstock are put on Newsnight and The Today Programme. The old rules that only politicians front are also breaking down. Therefore, to get the truth out, we need both to publish. There might be some rules about personal attack to protect civil servants who are not in the public domain but that is what I believe. On Andrew Turnbull, yes, I think a book from him would be very interesting. The crumbling of the authority of the Cabinet has been happening under the Blair Government since 1997. The two previous heads of the Civil Service did try to resist and use the old machinery. Defence and Overseas Policy never met. It was a stunning thing. I do not think Andrew resisted but I did change one quote in the book because he asked for it. Iraq in itself is a massive issue but if it is true that our constitutional arrangements are changing in such a big way and, I think, leading to very poor decision making in a whole series of areas, not just Iraq, this is monumentally serious and we have to have the books and the commentary to judge whether our system is breaking down and what we are going to do about it.
Q359 Mr Prentice: The internal wiring of the government is now bare after Butler and so on. We know who said what. We know you kept a diary because you told us but we have had evidence from Geoff Mulgan, who was the former head of the Strategy Unit at Number 10 and he said that all this diary keeping - I cannot remember the exact word he used - is something like corrosive to good government. If you know that the person sitting next to you is keeping a diary, that influences the quality of the decision that is made. You obviously do not subscribe to that view.
Clare Short: No. Let me tell you my Tony Benn story because he also used to be writing his diary at the National Executive Committee and we reached the point where he would write it in the diary and then say it. I kept a diary only in the crucial, last part.
Q360 Mr Prentice: Did people know you were keeping a diary?
Clare Short: No, I do not think so. I do not agree. I am perfectly happy for any of the officials in my department to publish anything that is said in the Cabinet. I think we should be sincere in what we do. The commentary might be unfair but if you mean what you say I do not mind anyone commenting.
Q361 Mr Prentice: People may hold back in expressing a controversial point of view because of a fear that this is going to appear in someone's diary.
Clare Short: Maybe it is just how one is temperamentally but I would not feel restrained in any way by that. We all know that Alastair Campbell was keeping a very detailed diary. I am not going to speak differently. I do not expect it necessarily to be a fair account but if you start doing that, what is the point of being there?
Q362 Mr Prentice: I wonder if I could ask Lord Owen and Lord Lawson the same question. Do you think this diary keeping, especially with the vast sums of money that are paid to the authors - Alastair Campbell is on record as saying his diary is his pension - has got out of hand and is affecting the quality of decision making?
Lord Owen: I personally do. I think diaries are very interesting and eventually should be published. You can look back at the war diaries of, say, Field Marshall Allenbrook, for example, who gives an incredibly important perception of how Churchill worked and how impossible he was in many respects. The timing for when you produce these things and who produces them is quite important. I believe Cabinet government broadly speaking is better for people arguing their case, losing the argument, and a period of time in which they do not reveal. What is that period? We used to have a 30 year rule. That is clearly obsolete and out of date. We should in my view go down to ten but certainly fifteen. We have to modify and change. The Freedom of Information Act, which I also support, also has an advantage. The chaos at the moment could be quite short lived. A very important piece of information has come out of what Christopher Meyer said. Throughout his whole time, the only time he was on the secret telephone was to Number 10. It was never to the Foreign Office. That must be the first American ambassador who would ever say that. That is a practical demonstration of the extent to which we now have a wholly personalised, Number 10 orientated, defence and whole security system.
Q363 Mr Prentice: The situation can change because I see in the memorandum that you gave us that the Cabinet was alive and kicking between 1990 and 1997, in John Major's time.
Lord Owen: I think John Major did return power to the Foreign Secretary. Douglas Hurd was given more autonomy than his predecessor, Geoffrey Howe. I think that was good and beneficial. You cannot deny a Prime Minister's right to have a different structure. It is a very different structure in terms of the relationship with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister. I am not denying there will be times when there are inner Cabinets or anything but on this question of diary keeping nobody can object to somebody writing a diary. Barbara Castle who did shorthand used to write a very accurate and interesting diary. I am not against diaries; it is when and how they come out.
Q364 Mr Prentice: Lord Lawson, your memoirs were published three years after you left office?
Lord Lawson of Blaby: That is right, yes. One of the considerations I felt I should attach and did attach some weight to was the fact that, by the time my memoirs came out, the Prime Minister who was the principal player if you like in the particular drama that I was writing about, was no longer in office. My 10 years or so as a minister were during the Thatcher period. I did not serve under John Major at all but, by the time my memoirs came out, John Major was the Prime Minister.
Q365 Mr Prentice: You said some pretty choice things about John Major.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: It was a different administration. You do have to take into account the passage of time and whether it is the same administration or a different administration. Also, you do need to exercise a certain amount of judgment as to what you say and what you do not say. I think nearly every former minister does exercise judgment on what he thinks is fair. Going back to Radcliffe, the Radcliffe rules are very peculiar in a number of respects. One in particular is that if you have had an argument with the Prime Minister over a particular issue you are entitled to write what you said. You are not entitled to write what was said back. This would make the account of the conversation a rather peculiar, one sided one. There may be some former ministers who were only interested in what they said but I felt, since I wanted my memoirs to be of some lasting value and in a sense an accurate, historical record, that it was necessary to include both sides of the conversation.
Q366 Mr Prentice: Your memoir was published when John Major was Prime Minister of course.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: That is right.
Q367 Mr Prentice: You said of him he often came to you ashen faced. You thought you might have made the wrong choice of Chief Secretary and then you went on to say that John Major found the job as Chief Secretary far more difficult than anything he had ever done before and had to work very hard to try and master it.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: As I pointed out, he did eventually master it.
Q368 Mr Burrowes: You were aware of Alastair Campbell's diary. Professor Hennessy talked about the notion of competitive memoiring and effectively you wanted to get your defence in first. That was the prime motive rather than necessarily letting the truth get out?
Clare Short: I do not know whether you had joined the Committee when I made my initial remark. There was this very harsh and deliberate attempt to completely silence me. The Chief Whip tried to get me to agree to say nothing that was in any way critical of the Prime Minister under threat of the whip being withdrawn from me. Given what I needed to say and what I think is enormously important for the historical record and debate, I wrote the book because I thought I had to get out what I had to say. I still think that.
Q369 Mr Burrowes: In terms of the timing, if you had perhaps waited would there not be more inclination to say you wanted to get the truth out but nevertheless you were not following on perhaps in undermining the system you suggest was breaking down? The genie is out of the bottle and you perpetuated that rather than letting the truth come out.
Clare Short: I personally think that the way in which we went to war in Iraq, the amount of deceit that was involved in it and the disaster it is for the Middle East is much more serious than Suez. People keep comparing it to Suez. As a country, as politicians, as people who are concerned for the governance of the UK and the role of the UK in the world, this is an extremely urgent debate. It is not just something to wait ten years for and then talk about. Parliament is doing very badly at attending to it. Our political system is functioning very badly. This is my one postscript to some of the earlier remarks: if we had a much smaller majority again, Cabinet government would probably come back. Of course, if we had a hung Parliament, that is certainly so. It is not necessarily for ever but I do think that once power has been accredited to Number 10 without a jolt to the system, it will stay there. This broken system might well go on malfunctioning, but my view is that we should have done a correction much earlier. I did not do a reflective log; I wrote this in four months, I did it deliberately and I still agree with myself.
Q370 Mr Burrowes: When you were doing the diary, did you always intend to publish?
Clare Short: No. I had no intention of doing the book. I was living through enormous turbulence and serious, historical events. It was a pretty scruffy diary and they were very heated times with late nights and all the rest. I was not writing a big, long diary. When I left the government I was intending to make speeches in the Commons, to go round the Labour Party to get this debate going, but then you cannot speak in the Commons any more. It is seven minutes and everyone has to go home at ten. It is very difficult to get the time to make any substantial speeches, especially when you are on the government's side with big majorities. It is a big change from when I was a back bencher when we were in opposition. The Labour Party is a very different creature.
Q371 Mr Burrowes: Away from the exceptional situation of the story that needed to be told, if you had come to the point of saying, "I want to put down a legacy of my memoirs", would you have considered it appropriate away from the exceptional circumstances of Iraq?
Clare Short: Yes, probably, but I did not get to that consideration because I was under this enormous pressure. We were approaching an election and the Chief Whip was saying, "I am going to take the whip from you" which would mean I could not stand as a Labour candidate. I have put my adult life into serving the Labour Party as an instrument of justice at home and internationally. This is a monumentally serious thing for my life and she is trying to tell me to be silent about things that I have already said in the House of Commons. I had to write something and I said, "Look, I have already made the speeches. They are on the record in the House of Commons. You are now telling me I cannot say what I have already said." That was the nature of the conversations that were taking place. This was a rather urgent matter for me and my life but also I think for the truth and the record of what took place.
Q372 Mr Burrowes: Away from those exceptional events, you had come to the stage where you had left office and you decided you wanted to do your memoirs. Would you have considered an appropriate time to be not the one but the three years or the five years?
Clare Short: If you wrote something in three years or so it would be different. It would be less raw and more reflective, especially if you had a change of administration. There is a place for those books too but I do thoroughly believe the truth should get out and we are living in a time when there is so much spin. Journalism is so tied into the sources in Number 10. Truthfulness and accuracy are diminishing in the discourse of public life so if books are a way for people to get their truths out they should happen.
Q373 Mr Burrowes: Lord Owen and Lord Lawson, were you expecting publications by your former colleagues?
Lord Owen: All the time I worked for Barbara Castle, I expected that she was going to write a biography. I had no objection to it. It was very accurate. The only slight thing was that Barbara had a habit of wanting to toughen up any recommendation you made or to change it. In order to handle her, you would have to recognise that so you would pitch your representations where you felt she would end up. She was very fair to civil servants. She would not castigate them. She broadly followed the normal rules. Her memoirs contributed to an understanding of politics. Mine was much later. Also, I was a member of a happy Cabinet. Whatever arguments about Jim Callaghan can be made, nobody denies it was an extremely happy Cabinet. There were disagreements but even Tony Benn never disputed the fact that it was a happy Cabinet. There was no briefing against each other and, broadly speaking, we lived harmoniously within the collective rules despite the differences of opinion.
Q374 Mr Burrowes: Rather than the characters of individuals in terms of publishing memoirs at certain times, it is really a reflection on the system of government that has led the way for people to want to react to it by publishing their memoirs. The genie has come out of the bottle because of the way government has been led and run.
Lord Owen: I really think we are in a different situation. I honestly cannot think of any situation, other than in most recent years, where a very senior ambassador would make so many personal comments about ministers. You cannot just isolate it and criticise his memoir and I am not going to get into that. You have to look at the climate of the time and why things have deteriorated so that this can happen; then, what can you do to correct it. I do hope we do something to correct it pretty soon because we are suffering. I supported the war on Iraq and I still do but the incompetence with which that war was conducted is very damaging. I am a supporter of the European Union but the European Constitution was not well handled by that inner Number 10 secretariat. Interestingly, on neither occasion, both on Iraq and the European Constitution, was public opinion held. I honestly think younger Members of Parliament forget that for a very substantial period of time bipartisanship in foreign and defence policy was the norm and it was quite valuable to this country. It was very hard to be the Foreign Secretary with the partisan political debate conducted on foreign policy. It is much easier if there is a great measure of support and that means also a good deal of trust. Things like intelligence information people accept because they have not seen it. There is a sort of trust. If you break that down and if you have a very real problem with the armed services - the armed services are very unhappy about the Iraq war at every level - we have to address that problem. It is up to you chaps to do this but this is Parliament's job now. Things have gone very badly wrong. Irrespective of your view on whether or not we should have gone into Iraq, things have gone very badly wrong and I hope you do address it. In a strange way, I think you are addressing it in a very fundamental way. By looking at these memoirs, you have the opportunity to ask, "Why has this situation occurred?". It does throw a very refreshing insight into what is happening.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: On diaries, I do not think there were any Cabinet colleagues writing diaries when I was in government. The only minister who it was well known was writing a diary was Alan Clark but he was writing purely for the purposes of entertainment and very entertaining it was too. He was never a member of the Cabinet anyway. He was a junior minister. We knew that a lot of people were going to write their memoirs in due time. I do not think that worried anybody at all and it has certainly never worried me. It is bad practice to write a diary because at times it does get in the way of your own effectiveness as a minister. The diary tends to become more important than the job you are meant to be doing. Even with diaries, and I think diaries and memoirs come to much the same sort of thing, it is a question of what you put in when you publish. As for the rather more serious point, the breakdown which has been discussed, I think it is a mistake to think of the problem as being a move from Cabinet government to Prime Ministerial government and that we need to go back to Cabinet government. This is an old chestnut. For a very, very long time, we have had a mixture of Prime Ministerial government and Cabinet government. It is not something new. Many people think, quite rightly, that Margaret Thatcher was a strong Prime Minister but there was a mixture of Prime Ministerial government and Cabinet government during her time. The big question is not whether it is Prime Ministerial government or Cabinet government but how the Prime Minister of the day conducts his or her aspect of the government and how he or she insists that Cabinet government is going to be conducted. It is the ground rules which are laid down by the Prime Minister of the day and these other ad hoc, institutional matters which David Owen was mentioning, which of course are far more acute in the field of foreign, defence and security policy than they are in the field of economic policy which I was chiefly concerned with, although as a member of the Cabinet you are also concerned with a lot of other things. Even in the area of economic policy there are a lot of important issues which have to be discussed and it is better if they are discussed in a reasonably orderly and rational way, a way that does not lead to a loss of trust between ministers and officials. One of the great joys of being a Cabinet minister is you have a back-up team of people who, for the most part - not always - are of exceptional calibre and who work very hard indeed and are, again most of them, extremely loyal. That is a great national asset and a great asset for the government. To allow that trust to break down is very serious indeed.
Clare Short: It is not just the breakdown of Cabinet discussion. It is serious not having an open discussion when Cabinet responsibility has gone. When all the decisions are made in Number 10, the expertise that is in the Foreign Office and the Department of Education and its linked practitioners in the field is not being brought to the table when policy is thought through. When the authority breaks, the departments are pushed outside and you get poor quality decision making because the places in our government system where expertise lies are being excluded and I think that is happening.
Q375 Paul Flynn: Lord Owen, one of the minor revelations that you made in your original text which was cut out was about a disagreement in the Jim Callaghan government on a relatively minor matter about the timing of the cancellation of a visit involving Iran. You say that Jim wanted to cancel the visit at an early stage but you wanted to hold on. Your view of that was influenced by the Queen. "The Queen did talk to me about her wish not to act too quickly and while the formal advice was against cancellation this was because, helped by knowing her view, I persuaded Jim Callaghan who wanted to cancel." That seems a fairly interesting and possibly very rare example of the Queen appearing to influence what is a political decision. Should that not have been kept in the book? Why did you decide to take it out? You were adamant that you were accurate on this, although the Palace, I gather, had a different view on it.
Lord Owen: Did I tell you that?
Q376 Paul Flynn: Page 19 is the reference to the Queen.
Lord Owen: Maybe I did. The Queen does not take political views but she has an extraordinary way of making clear what she thinks. It is a great skill. I cannot remember her ever making any political statement whatever to me but I can recall many occasions when I was left very clear on what her view was. I think that is her skill and why ministers have valued talking to her, travelling with her and gaining from her knowledge. She is extremely experienced about Africa. She knows many of the leaders. She has known them since they were very young presidents or prime ministers. On this particular issue it was pretty obvious that the Shah was crumbling and the question was do you let them make the cancellation themselves or do we do it. It was my view that, with the pace at which it was happening, it was going to come anyhow. It was my impression that she thought that as well. I do not think that changed my mind necessarily but it was a factor and I knew that Jim was pressing to do it too.
Q377 Paul Flynn: You say it was helped by your view. You and Her Majesty were on the right side. Jim appeared to be wrong and was proved to be wrong by subsequent events. The point is that if, on a far more serious issue, the future head of state decided to attempt to influence politicians, should we not know about it? Is this a matter that could be kept from us by the Radcliffe rules?
Lord Lawson of Blaby: The monarch is in a very special position. The Queen's views are always the product of a great deal of experience. She has been on the throne ever since Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. She has more experience than anybody else. It is wrong to say that she is seeking to influence decisions. She expresses a view from time to time but it is very important for the position of the monarchy that that should never, ever be revealed in any memoirs or any published document of any kind.
Q378 Paul Flynn: One of the things that concerns us greatly on this is the fact that, unlike the three of you, there are very good reasons for distinguished politicians writing about their long careers. Some would say Lord Lawson and Clare were writing after you had a very rough time, I believe, with unfair criticism in the press and you wanted to put the record straight. The financial factor of making money was very minor, if it was a factor at all, in writing yours. We do know that making money from memoirs is possibly the main impetus for many people writing their memoirs and they know that, if they are going to get a great deal of money from them, they have to spice them up. They have to make sure they are interesting. Do you think there is a case for saying - and it has been suggested - that political memoirs of this type from civil servants or politicians even should be declared to be Crown copyright and that the money from them should go to the Treasury, to get rid of this incentive for people not only to spice up their memoirs but also possibly to act in a different way while they are doing their jobs in order to make sure that they have juicy, sexy memoirs to publish for their pension?
Clare Short: That is an interesting suggestion. You could ask how long did Lance Price take to write his book and what is a reasonable return and the rest he cannot have. I think it is much more important to get the truth than the spice and the money because that distorts the truth as well. If we tighten up the code or make it more explicit, particularly on the personalised abusive comment level, which I think we could do, you could use a fine system. You could have rules and, if they are breached, money is the penalty. That is worth thinking about. If we want to get books out but stop abuse and if financial incentives are distorting things, the obvious mechanism to deal with it is financial.
Lord Owen: I know you are in favour of boosting government revenue but on this basis Alan Clark's sexual revelations would be the best way of boosting revenue, so I do not think it is tittle tattle of government; I think it is more sex in all memoirs from politicians in future.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Writing a decent memoir is extremely difficult. In my case, of all the jobs I have ever done, I found writing my memoirs the most difficult, partly because it is such a solitary business, whereas pretty well everything else you do in life you do as part of a team. It is reasonable that there should be some reward. There is an interesting question there and I do not know the answer to it. You have certain conventions as to what should and should not be published. You have this dialogue between the Cabinet Secretary and former ministers. The question is what happens if the ex-minister is unreasonable in a serious way. In the old days you could threaten them, though nothing ever was done about it because it was too much of a sledge hammer, but you could invoke the Official Secrets Act. People did not want to be in breach of the Official Secrets Act, even if they were not going to be prosecuted. That went away with the liberalisation of the Official Secrets Act. Now, it is really only ostracism. You might be ostracised from the establishment.
Clare Short: With the withdrawal of all patronage.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Yes. The great thing about life peerages is that we do not need to bother about that. But the establishment will not look after you. Alastair Campbell said that his memoir was his pension. Whether you should say, "If you opt for that pension you do not get the other pension. Your ministerial or Civil Service pension will be withheld" ----
Q379 Paul Flynn: I think we have followed that final point. One of the criticisms of Christopher Meyer's book is that it might permanently affect the kind of trust that has been there for a long time between ambassadors and politicians. Because of the revelations that he has made so soon after the event, while the same people are still in power, that could be permanently damaging. Do you think it is sensible to write into the contracts of civil servants bars on their publishing memoirs within a certain period after they retire or, as you suggest, having influences on the contract themselves? There are limits in their contract to restrict them from publishing matters that could be damaging to the national interest.
Clare Short: I think it would be wrong to muzzle civil servants when politicians are allowed to write, especially when there has been this blurring of roles. Jeremy Greenstock was a more central player than the non-foreign policy people in the Cabinet. He knew more; he was fronting things in the media, just to take one example. To have one set of rules for politicians and another for civil servants would be wrong. I think rules about revealing things about civil servants who cannot answer back still have to be attended to. I think we could tighten the rules on personalised, abusive comment. My view on Christopher Meyer is that, one, the trust broke down and, two, he submitted the book. It is astonishing they did not ask for changes.
Q380 Chairman: Surely there is a difference because the politicians take the flak. They are the publicly elected figures and they are fair game for everything. They want to vindicate themselves and answer back against colleagues. The deal with the Civil Service though is that they get anonymity but ministers get loyalty. That is the nature of the invisible contract, is it not? If we depart from that - you want to reassert the old conventions that have broken down - we are in deep trouble, are we not?
Clare Short: My argument is that the old conventions have broken down and therefore all the books are coming out. I agree with what Lord Owen said. You delving into this unleashes this other monumental argument about our constitutional arrangements. If we could get back to the trust, rules could be made within that trust. There is enormous politicisation. You have Alastair Campbell and the chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, being political appointees. I know there are supposed to be fair rules about promotion for senior officials but, believe you me, the ones who are not wanted are squeezed out. There is a deep politicisation on who is promoted and that is a shift because if you are promoted because you are in with Number 10 as a senior official and increasingly put into the public domain to front things the lines have been blurred. It is no good just having firm, old fashioned lines on memoirs when they are blurred on decision making and public statements.
Q381 Chairman: Lord Lawson tells us in his memoirs that he was involved in appointments way outside the Private Office. You have a lovely little section about that.
Clare Short: You have a veto of power. It is much deeper interference now.
Q382 Chairman: "My personal involvement in Treasury appointments and promotion extended well beyond the Private Office." You go on to talk about individuals and so on. You are quite robust in proclaiming that you had quite a large role in appointments.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: The role was three fold. Two parts have already been mentioned. The Private Office is very important, as is having a Permanent Secretary you can work well with. I was involved with a change of Permanent Secretary at Energy, for example. Then there is the question of the resources you have at your disposal. It is sensible - certainly this is the way I played it - to discuss with the Permanent Secretary which were the most difficult policy issues and how where we could put the ablest people into the difficult areas. It seemed to be common sense. I am sure any enterprise of any kind would do that but it would have to be done with the Permanent Secretary. It was not a question of going behind his back and, say, appointing somebody as a Deputy Secretary.
Q383 Chairman: It is corrective to the idea that there was some sort of golden age of purity.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: There is a difference between ministers and officials which you very clearly and lucidly set out a moment ago in response to Clare Short. I think that is absolutely right and should remain. I think it is well known that there are a number of officials who are extremely unhappy with the Meyer revelations, with the fingering of politicians in the way that he did in his memoirs, because they realise that if ministers think that officials are going to be fingering them in that way in their memoirs all their reticence hitherto about fingering officials is going to go. If anything, they are probably going to try to get their retaliation in first. This convention did, very properly, protect officials. Officials are now concerned that it may have been weakened as a result of the Meyer book.
Q384 Chairman: You told us at the beginning that you thought the Radcliffe rules were obsolete. Clare has given us a very strong statement for why, in the heat of the moment, you want to get this stuff out while it is raw and you cannot go through a 15 year wait and the kind of things you were doing, Lord Owen, with Robin Butler back when he was citing 15 years at you. It has a kind of unreal feel to it now. If we are all saying something has changed but we somehow need to put it back together again and to mend these relationships that have broken, the evidence for the break is the memoir field. What we are saying is how on earth do we do it.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: That is what your report is for.
Clare Short: I have not really studied the Radcliffe rules. Christopher Meyer's description of the way in which the Washington embassy is not functioning in the way it used to is important to our constitutional arrangements. As to Mr Major in his underpants and the rest, I think we could tighten rules on personal abuse. One would have to think about the phrasing. I think his book is important to what is going on and how the system is changing but we could tighten the rules so as not to permit the real spice in it.
Q385 Mr Prentice: His view is that junior ministers were political pygmies.
Clare Short: That is abuse too.
Lord Owen: As I understand it, the Cabinet Secretary did not raise with him or his Permanent Under-Secretary in the Diplomatic Service any of these points. That is just amazing. There is nobody who has gone through this process, I would suggest, who could possibly imagine circumstances when a book like that would not come back. Let us be realistic. If nobody comments on it and you are in the business of writing a memoir, you are not going to say, "I am surprised you did not take this out." The system has broken down and the then Cabinet Secretary has a pretty heavy responsibility for that particular area.
Chairman: Thank you very much for what has been a very useful session, not that you have had unanimity, but you have brought some very interesting observations to bear on this. As Lord Lawson said, it is up to us to make some sense of them. Thank you very much indeed.
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