Where angels fear to tread

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

Serious discussion of constitutional change in England is bound to be inhibited by the fact that we have no Constitution. Everything is judged by precedent and there can be no prece- dent without initiatives somewhere along the line. As the priest said who christened my daughter, there always has to be a first St Daisy. Perhaps it is for this reason that we are so sensitive about attacks on what we are pleased to call our constitution, just as legless men are said to wince with pain when someone treads where their corns would normally grow. The only solid criterion by which we may assess an adjustment in the administrative system is whether or not it increases the efficiency of the government process without threatening to in- fringe further such civil liberties as remain.

Until Mr Wilson announces the exact com- position and brief of his new parliamentary and political Committee of the Cabinet, nobody can judge its likely effect. Various suggestions have been made, all of which include Messrs Wilson, Jenkins, Stewart, Crossman, Callaghan, Pearl and Mrs Castle. It seems most unlikely that such an important minister as Mr Healey will be excluded. Sources closest to the Prime Minister have suggested that the new Com- mittee will consist of the first ten in the Cabinet 'pecking order' plus the Secretaries of State for Wales and Scotland. This would include such oddities as Mr Shore and Lord Gardiner, while excluding Mr Crosland. But there is no reason to suppose that the Prime Minister really knows better than anyone else, since all these things have to be settled by negotiation, and no fast decision need be reached until 23 April, when the Cabinet next meets.

At present, it is hard to see that the invention of the Parliamentary Committee can have any significant effect whatever. In the process of decision-making, nothing has ever depended upon Cabinet votes but upon the political weight of the individual ministers concerned. Cabinet Committees of the past have relied on unanimity and, traditionally, any Cabinet minister dissenting from the decision could refer the matter to a meeting of the whole Cabinet. We are told that this right will now be restricted. Nothing important can emerge from that. Mr Willie Ross used to bore everyone's pants off by 'reserving his position,' as it is called, on any issue which remotely concerned Scotland, but it never did him or the disgruntled Scots any good.

It has been said that the creation of an official 'inner Cabinet' in addition to the unofficial one which already exists—consisting of Mr Wil- son, Mr Jenkins, Mr Crossman, Mrs Castle and Mr Stewart—will undermine the principle of Cabinet responsibility. Even if the principle of Cabinet responsibility were something for which we would all be prepared to lay down our lives, this is simply not true. Cabinet respon- sibility, in so far as it exists at all—the Cabinet, one must remember, has no legal existence— embraces not only all decisions taken by the full Cabinet, but also those taken by Cabinet Committees and decisions taken in each ministerial department which never come to the Cabinet's notice at all

To suggest that these Committees will now be

able to make more decisions is equally mis- leading. They already reach as many as pos- sible. Even if decision-making were a desirable activity in itself, regardless of the quality of the decisions reached—and the Prime Minister sometimes gives this impression, possibly be- cause he is aware of his own chronic indecisive- ness—nothing has been done which will either alter their nature or speed up the process. As a matter of fact, such decisions as are now re- ferred to the full Cabinet may well be slowed down under the new proposal to meet only once a fortnight. Mr Wilson can scarcely in- tend to abandon the doctrine of Cabinet re- sponsibility. We would have Cabinet ministers publicly attacking the decisions of other Cabinet ministers in a twinkling.

To illustrate the way in which decisions are reached one might take as an example the Common Market—possibly the only issue of any importance which has been decided by the present Government since neither devaluation nor withdrawal from East of Suez count really as decisions but rather as happenings. Mr Brown, the moving spirit behind the idea, approached Mr Wilson, who referred it to a meeting of the full Cabinet. Observing a cer- tain amount of division, Mr Wilson referred it to an ad hoc Committee, composed of those ministers whose departments were directly con- cerned. Oddly enough, this included Mr Jay who was then at the Board of Trade, but ex- cluded Mr Jenkins, the most deeply committed of all Marketeers, who was busy in his role as a swinging young Home Secretary.

When the matter was referred back to the Cabinet, Mr Jay's dissenting report was not allowed to be presented on the grounds that it differed on matters of fact, whereas dissenting reports are only allowed to differ on matters of opinion. It appeared later in a Sunday news- paper but was not able to influence Cabinet deliberations. After four full meetings of the Cabinet, Mr Wilson declared the general con- sensus to be in favour of a formal application, in spite of four root-and-branch dissenters in Messrs Ross, Peart, Jay and Marsh. These four continued to meet for some time afterwards, as a kind of counterbalance to the Common Mar- ket Committee, which, with the Committee on Rhodesia, looks like becoming a permanent feature of the political scene. The new Parliamentary Committee will be different for many reasons. In the first place, since it will manifestly be Wilson-dominated, its decisions will have no greater or lesser im- portance than a decision by Mr Wilson himself; and since Wilsonian decisions are a somewhat elusive quantity, this means, in effect, that the Committee will exist merely to rubber-stamp decisions reached previously—on the telephone and in furtive snatched moments away from the public eye—within the unofficial Inner Cabinet.' In the second place, it will not be preceded, as all other Cabinet Committees are, by a meeting of the permanent heads of the departments concerned. This represents a com- plete reversal of Mr Wilson's early practice, which was to see ministers only in the presence of their civil service advisers.

All the signs are that the new committee will

concern itself only with the political impli- cations of administrative decisions—in terms of electoral popularity as well as party cohesiveness. It is possible that new decisions

will emerge at these meetings, and also that decisions reached elsewhere will be subjected to political scrutiny. In this it will at least be an advance on the old unofficial political com- mittee, made up of Mr Wilson, Mr Crossman, Mr Silkin, Mr Shore, Mr Kaufman and Mrs Williams. To this extent, so far from being a usurpation of Cabinet authority, it will mark a restoration of it. Ministers left outside will have no less influence than formerly, while those inside will have more.

But a more accurate title than 'Parliamentary Committee' might be 'Committee for Winning the Next General Election,' since this, I suspect, will be its real purpose. This is the one issue which will unite all its members; and since, as I have suggested, the true balance of power in- side the Cabinet is already determined by mat- ters quite outside the power of any re-shuffle to alter, this is the most plausible explanation for the whole manoeuvre.

Originally, Mr Wilson wished to formalise his own unofficial inner Cabinet. This would have been a response to Mr Brown's criticism of 'the way this Government is run' while at the same time a means of securing his own position. However, when the composition of the inner Cabinet became known—it would have excluded both Mr Callaghan and Mr Healey—the Prime Minister was not allowed to get away with it. So instead we have this alternative and larger Committee, meeting in the greatest secrecy with no official records, whose existence may well act as a unifying force inside the administration. Clearly, the next general election must be in the minds of all our leaders from time to time, and one can quite understand that Mr Wilson might be unhappy to think that they were discussing it behind his back.

In this context it is fascinating to see a new alignment spring up—between Mr Jenkins and Mr Crossman. No doubt they have much in common, and are attracted to each other by their intelligence and wit. Above all, they share a certain dignified pessimism about the future which is in marked contrast to Mr Wilson's in- curable optimism. Between the two of them they represent a formidable alliance, with Mr Jenkins carrying the entire right wing of the party and Mr Crossman's support, such as it is, encroaching on the Prime Minister's own territory on the left. It would be over-sensa- tional and certainly inaccurate to describe the two of them as plotting against Mr Wilson at present, but they share an enthusiasm for the idea of staying in office, and they both doubt Mr Wilson's ability to bring about this desirable end without a certain amount of assistance. Perhaps, too, Mr Jenkins was beginning to ex- perience the loneliness of supreme power; it would be hard to imagine a more stimulating or convivial person than Mr Crossman to share it with.

Whatever the reason, we will soon have a pyramid-shaped power structure, with the Cabinet sitting firmly astride the party, the new Committee for Winning the Next General Elec- tion sitting astride the Cabinet, the unofficial `inner Cabinet,' which still includes Mr Wilson, sitting astride the CWNGE, and the even newer Dynamic Duo, which does not include Mr Wil- son, sitting astride the inner Cabinet. All of which was brought about by fate, rather than by constitutional innovations.