Not one of us
Andrew Brown
The Right to Know: The Inside Story of the Belgrano Affair Clive Ponting (Sphere £2.50) We know now that he was not one of us, but it is still surprising to discover he was several of them: the book is written in at least three voices. The first is that of the civil servant as analyst and brief- writer. This tells the lucid, concise story of what the Belgrano did and when; and of what Mr Heseltine did when he found out about it. It is all good stuff if one is interested. I felt, while reading, that I understood what all the fuss had been about, though it doesn't seem worth the trouble of remembering. The second voice is that of the civil servant as a frustrated manager — that Ponting who was given an OBE for assist- ing Sir Derek Rayner, and whose great, ultimately futile efforts to cut the Navy down to some reasonable size might be said to have affected the future of the Falklands far more than the General Bel- gram) ever managed to. As a criticism of the civil service from within, it deserves attention; and I should guess that the frustrations of the civil servant as manager Contributed far more to Ponting's decision to end his career than did the friistrations of his role as a policy maker. This third voice is the least eloquent, but suggests the most interesting ideas. The policy makers are the creatures of whom Ponting-the-manager so eloquently com- Plains, but as a successful and ambitious manager he was promoted to become a policy maker himself. It would appear from this book that senior civil servants judge their ministers on their competence as managers, who carry out the unfailing Policy of every department — to exert
itself at the expense of all the others.
On the other hand, the civil servants judge each other by their success in formu- lating policies: in the first place, policies that suit the department; in the second place, policies that suit the minister; and in third or fourth place, policies that suit the government as a whole, or the public. This may sound like an attempt to be either clever or heretical, but in fact some such order of values is implicit in the function of any civil service. Either it is staffed by people too stupid and ignorant to see what are the real choices facing the government — and what use would that be? Or you have a service staffed by people intelligent and well-informed enough to be some use. These people will have opinions of their own. They will also have more and better information on the subject in question than the minister. If he knew', he would not have to ask them to find out. Now what the minister wants is a brief summary of the pertinent facts; and this cannot be col- lected without some idea of what is perti- nent and why. Such an idea need not be explicit; everything one hears about the civil service suggests that it is not. That does not make it any less powerful.
These arguments are not meant to dis- credit the ideal of an impartial civil service, which remains worth striving for. But it resembles the ideal of telling the truth, which is likely to mislead us if we think we have attained it.
Reading Ponting's account of the crucial discussions with Heseltine and Stanley after the truth of what happened to the Belgrano became apparent, and when they had to decide whether to tell Dalyell what they had themselves newly discovered, I find that the arguments about the constitu- tional position of civil servants all seem curiously irrelevant. No one seems to have
thought of themselves in those terms when the decisions were being made. They were all together in the business of deciding what had to be done.
Such a description of events suggests the theory that Ponting ponted out of pique, because his advice had been rejected; but that is, I think, to oversimplify the situa- tion. Ministers and their civil servants can only work closely together if all of them know the rules which determine the sort of decisions that they can take. To be 'one of us' has several connotations. It is a state defined by the acceptance of shared assumptions — one of the most important being that we are all winners: hence anyone who becomes a loser, as Ponting did, can no longer be one of us. But just as civil servants are quite rightly assumed to realise that some administratively possible options are closed to every government for political reasons, it seems reasonable for ministers to take into account the con- straints under which the civil service oper- ates. Civil servants are enjoined to be loyal to their political masters, yes. They are also enjoined never to lie to parliament. The MoD instructions on answering par- liamentary questions do say that even the smallest mistake in an answer can gravely damage the reputation of the minister and his department. I do not know if they have been updated since the Ponting affair to take account of the damage which even the smallest accuracy can cause.
This is not to argue that he shouldn't have been sacked. He should have been; fully expected to be, and thought it just. The Official Secrets Act is another matter. Here we have two civil servants married to each other, who return home in the -evening.
`How was your day?' asks Mrs P; and any honest reply will put them both in breach of the Official Secrets Act. I know nothing about the home life of the Pond*, but I would be astonished if they managed to conduct it legally.
It may be that Mr Justice McCowen's view of the Official Secrets Act is the correct one. Certainly we should all be grateful to him for putting it so clearly, so that everyone can see it emerge, green, hungry, horrible and plain, from the undis- tinguished egg of civil service loyalty. But sufficiently senior civil servants do have a responsibility to the Public Accounts Com- mittee distinct from their responsibility to, the minister; and they can demand of him a clear directive if they wish to absolve themselves before the committee. This certainly weakens the doctrine that civil servants are solely responsible to their minister.
Perhaps they ought to be, where policy making is concerned. But the civil service is now largely an administrative body. It spends other people's money; it runs the DHSS, the prisons, the Jobcentres and all those other unattractive places, which, since they are unattractive we prefer not to think clearly about. The taxpayer pays for this fastidiousness.
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