It’s all too easy to leave Top Secret papers lying around — I should know

News last week that police are investigating a ‘serious’ security breach after a civil servant lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on alQa’eda sent a shiver of alarmed reminiscence down my spine.

The unnamed Cabinet Office employee apparently breached strict security rules when he left the papers, in an orange cardboard folder, on the seat of a train bound for Surrey. It just would be Surrey. Apparently the papers were classified Top Secret.

Mine were more secret than that. Top Secret isn’t the top secret classification — or wasn’t in 1976. There were (to the best of my recollection) two more secret grades above Top Secret. I think they were Penumbra and — most secret of all — Umbra. And given that I was only a Grade Three administrative trainee in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and allowed to see these papers, there must have been grades above and beyond Umbra, not dreamed of in my philosophy.

What I cannot remember is what the papers were about. Most Intelligence stuff (and in the Western European Department we saw a lot of it) was boring and inconsequential: bits and pieces of gathered information which might or might not be significant if studied in the context of other information which we did not have. Perhaps these concerned the Italian Communist party, about which we were all in a great flap in the FCO in the 1970s.

And I left them strewn around. On my desk. Where cleaners and messengers and telephone engineers and anybody who cared to wander into an entirely unsecured ‘Third Room’ at King Charles Street, could see, read, steal or photograph them. They were there for the whole weekend. Returning on Monday, I was told that the Head of Department wished to see me at once — and why. My heart sank. We had a sort of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ office policy as regarded serious security breaches, and this (I think) was my second.

Nothing came of it. Whether HMG’s knowledge of what one Italian communist might have said to another in a bar was seriously compromised, I doubt, but I don’t make light of the incident. It was stupid: one of the things that caused me to start asking myself whether the Diplomatic Service was really the right career for someone as persistently shambolic as me. I heard some pompous chap on the radio last weekend opining that the latest hapless official should be prosecut ed under the Official Secrets Act, lest it be thought that bureaucrats made light of these lapses. Believe me they don’t. The incident will have been a career disaster for the officer involved. No further punishment is needed.

Civil servants are governed by the strictest codes. There are different rules for politicians. I didn’t know at the time that George Brown — later to become foreign secretary — and MP for the town of Belper (where I would later follow him) had got himself into far worse a scrape, and escaped with no career damage at all.

It’s all in Tired and Emotional — The Life of Lord George Brown, a splendid biography by Peter Paterson, now hard to find, of a nearlystatesman and very senior Cabinet colleague of Harold Wilson who, had he drunk rather less and thought twice rather oftener, might have inspired a biography that was more than just tremendous fun.

Who now remembers the National Plan? It was big news, once, and George Brown lost it while hitch-hiking in an unknown citizen’s Mini.

Paterson recounts how, before moving to the FCO, Brown had been put in charge of the newly created Department for Economic Affairs — seen by some, including Brown, as the first step towards depriving the Treasury of its hegemony over modern British government. Dear to Brown’s heart (and part of his tactics for putting his department at the centre of the news and national politics) was the drawing up of a National Plan: a commanding blueprint for Britain’s economic, employment, business and industrial strategy, under Harold Wilson’s Labour government.

It took ages to draft the National Plan. There were consultations with the TUC and the CBI, and endless argument about the text. The CBI refused to endorse it. Nobody recounts whether (at a country house near Sunningdale) George Brown, leading the small-hours crunch meeting to try to salvage the Plan, had drunk too much as was his habit; but we do know that he suddenly stormed out of the meeting shouting that he was about to tell the Prime Minister to resign and call an immediate general election, blaming the CBI.

‘Come back!’ shouted the CBI representatives — and gave in. Exultant and tired, if not emotional, Brown departed clutching his allconquering National Plan, to share his ministerial car with two senior officials, back to Westminster. The Austin Princess broke down (they always did) miles from anywhere. Brown went berserk, yelling at his driver, who snapped, ‘I’m a member of the TGWU too, Mr Brown,’ while Brown’s officials searched for a phone box to requisition another government car. Brown lost his patience and ordered them to discern in the phone book, in the dark, the numbers of local taxi firms; then lost it completely and flagged down a passing car, a Mini driven by a man with a red beard, accompanied by a blonde in pink trousers. He told them he was on vital government business and ordered them to divert from their destination (Chiswick) and take him straight to Parliament Square, repeatedly barking at them to drive faster. They dropped him at Westminster.

‘He was halfway up the stairs,’ writes Paterson, ‘before he realised he had left the precious, top-secret National Plan on the back seat of the Mini.’ The patriotic driver with the red beard returned it before morning.

There were no repercussions. Nor, surprisingly, were there when (according, I think, to John Colville, Winston Churchill’s assistant private secretary) a senior official lost papers relating to D-Day during the war.

Here my information is third-hand, and I shall be pleased to be corrected, but apparently the papers were found in the street in Whitehall by a cleaner, who demanded to see the First Sea Lord — no less — finally handing them over to officials. Churchill was told at once. He declared that they were unlikely to have been seen by Germans, and he didn’t want anyone disciplined.

The Prime Minister spent the rest of the war trying to get the cleaning lady an honour, starting high, but finding that every time he put her name on a list it was removed by officials. He lowered his sights, descending finally to the British Empire Medal, for which, as part of his 1945 resignation honours, he recommended the inclusion of her name. It was removed again. Poor lady.

As I write, news emerges that a laptop computer holding sensitive files (which it is said should not have been kept there because they related to defence and extremism) has been stolen from Hazel Blears’s constituency office in Salford. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer minister.