O'Donnell vs Campbell
Alastair Campbell says he was 'punctilious in my approach to the vetting process' when publishing his diary extracts about life in Downing Street.
But this punctiliousness about vetting doesn't seem to have involved complying with the wishes of the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell. He asked Campbell not to proceed with the book at all - that's according to the evidence O'Donnell gave to the Information Tribunal. This evidence has been most usefully transcribed by Sam Coates of the Times, he says for the benefit of 'FOI watchers and civil service nerds' (thanks, Sam).
This was part of the current hearing into the disclosure of cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.
O'Donnell's reluctance to sanction Campbell's book is very interesting. This issue - of the extent to which ministers, officials and special advisers are or are not authorised to write memoirs - has important implications for the handling of freedom of information requests, and I am sure we will be hearing more of it in this context.
O'Donnell told the Tribunal yesterday that a number of Cabinet ministers had asked him about the case and how it might change how the Cabinet operates. I wonder if any of them were also thinking about its potential impact on the writing of their memoirs.
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Question - will the Metropolitan Police follow up Alistair Campbell's leaking of confidential information in a book that the Cabinet Secretary says should not be published?
On a similar note, have they investigated the leaking from the Treasury of the reduction in VAT before last Monday's mini-budget?
Observation - this FOI business is very complicated for politicians to get their heads round, when they seem to think that it applies to everyone except themselves.
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Suggestions that publication may make ministers overly cautious in future are ridiculous.
Surely, when contemplating war and the legality of it, Ministers would act in the most cautious way in any event.
If that meant the war might be illegal, they would surely have said so to the public at the time, and given their justifications for acting nonetheless.
Government responsibility is a responsibility to act in the right way for the public. They should be able to show that they have acted in the right way, or, if hindsight shows that they didn't, that they at least acted based on sound reasoning and having asked and answered all appropriate questions.
To act in a manner that is potentially illegal, and for grounds that may turn out to be unfounded, without spelling this out to the public at the time is not caution, it is reckless.
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#1 It's obviously not a leak, if they want you to have the information and of course it doesn't apply to politicians unless you happen to be in opposition
#2 Governments make decisions on our behalf and at the moment we are being basically told to stop questioning and be greatful, while they get on with running our lives for us
Until all information is freely available without time restriction, unless overriding national security dictates otherwise, we will never have democracy or accountability, just shades of grey and degrees of spin.
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There is an overwhelming case for releasing these minutes. This was the most significant event for the UK since the Falklands War, probably more significant than that.
I was serving as a RAF officer during the run-up to operations, during the invasion and afterwards. I resigned after Hutton when it became evident that no-one would be found responsible for this unprecedented misrepresentation of intelligence (except the BBC).
The information must be released. If the government do not, then there is something to hide. If the government do not, then it must be leaked and there is a clear public interest case for it.
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Ref #2 egrid
In an ideal world you are right. If cabinet minutes could be made public soon after the meetings took place then ministers would indeed consider every word they uttered.
However, the world is far from ideal. While we have the media that we do have, Ministers would always take the most media-friendly line, handing virtual power to the newspapers, and specifically to the most powerful broadcaster – the BBC.
At the moment the BBC is pretty much a left-wing machine, so we will surely end up with a more left-wing decisions at cabinet. At the moment we already see this phenomenon where all main political parties increasingly spout BBC-friendly statements and even policies are tailored to this end. This is making our main parties nearly indistinct from each other and is leading to increasing voter apathy.
I also disagree that decisions taken – especially about war – would be more cautious. If you consider a war-like act by another country or even, for example, by a terrorist group, the decision to go to war may be far from cautious if faced with a gun-ho media at that point in time.
I do not like the Freedom of Information Act as I feel it will do more harm than good and that it provides yet more power to an already too-powerful media. I agree with the Cabinet Secretary’s views on this one, especially as we do not live in an ideal world.
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#2 - interesting that you think that Campbell hasn't leaked anything, because by definition he's a politician and so it's all fair game. On the politician point, Campbell was of course (and still is) a partisan special adviser, so of course he has a political role. Even with that murkiness, I think that Politicians could leak (a dramatic , notional, example being the passing of information to a foreign power), and so should not be given the all clear just beacuse of their title.
In Campbell's case he appears to have acted against the rules, and has published material against the wishes of his Civil Service boss. Given the nature of the material in question - all at the highest level of sofa-cahet available in the Government - I would have thought a quiet word to the Met for an opinion would be the least we would expect given their reaction to Mr Green's illegal immigration stats ...........
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