O n the face of it, the government would seem to
be hypocritical in its attacks on Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoirs. After all, it is said, the Cabinet Office saw the text of DC Confidential and approved it. How can ministers now complain? It turns out not to be quite like that. In the first place, I gather, Sir Christopher could only be persuaded to submit his manuscript when faced with the threat of injunctions. In the second, he ignored all suggestions for changes made by the authorities, and went ahead. Why, then, was no further attempt made to stop him? Really because the government has very little power in these matters. The experience with Lance Price’s The Spin Doctor’s Diary taught that if you try to take bits out you only increase the value of the book. A serialising newspaper can make hay with the difference between the original and final version (‘The Story Blair Didn’t Want Told’) and, even if the law is broken along the way, it is unlikely, in matters that are so political, that a court case would be winnable for the government. Even if it did win, the accompanying publicity would more than nullify the value of the victory. So in the end it has to depend upon the honour of the author. Faced with the choice between the demands of honour and those of a large mortgage, the latter, nowadays, usually wins. One possible solution is to take away the financial opportunity. Could memoirs dependent on experience in the public service be Crown copyright, depriving the author of the money?
There is a further confusion about the Meyer case. I have seen it reported that Sir Christopher is not making any money out of all of this. But what he has actually said is that he is not taking money for the newspaper serialisations, a very different thing. Since the serialisations vastly increase the sales of his book, I do not think he is coming away from the whole enterprise empty-handed. Newspapers may be a little shy of probing all of this, since Sir Christopher is chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, and they would like to maintain a good relationship with him. But the fact that he holds this role makes his behaviour very much worse. Confidence is a key concept in newspaper dealings, and in the quasi-judicial functions of the PCC, and we know from the book that Sir Christopher breaks it when he thinks fit. What is it about the PCC job? Before Sir Christopher, we had Lord Wakeham, whose conflicts of interest (including his association with Enron) ran into double figures. It may be something to do with money. The job, which is not fulltime, pays more than £150,000 a year, and the money comes chiefly from the main national newspapers, who are always in the market for revealing book serialisations. So Sir Christopher knows which side his bread is buttered, and it is buttered pretty thick.
What about the argument that politicians can write their memoirs, so why can’t civil servants write theirs? This sounds fair, and it is certainly wrong for politicians’ books to attack or expose civil servants who can’t answer back. In reality, though, the case of the public servant is quite different from that of the politician. Because he serves, advises, obeys and does not decide, the public servant enjoys protection. He has an assured salary and job, with very carefully worked-out fringe benefits, and an equally assured and proportionally very large pension. He does not take the credit in public, nor the blame. Politicians, rightly, have none of these securities. We elect them. We put them in, we chuck them out. Their trade is one of public argument, and we expect them, within some limits of confidentiality, to explain afterwards, in public, why they did what they did. I feel very little sympathy for this government in this case: it is the first in modern British history to expose civil servants to public attack and sometimes even to blame them itself, but that does not make the Meyer book right. The people I feel sorry for are the numerous former public servants, many of whom I am interviewing for my biography of Lady Thatcher. They are excellent witnesses to history, generally much better than politicians, and some of them could have made large sums out of reporting what they saw. They did not, because they believed they should not. As a result, they are poor but honest; a condition now despised.
ABBC poll reveals exclusively that most people consider themselves Christian, but don’t go to church, and other not very astonishing facts. They are ignorant of most Christian teaching. The other day my wife was watching one of those amazingly numerous television programmes about how much your antiques and junk might be worth, called Cash in the Attic, which is put out by the BBC. Someone presented an interesting wooden panel of a person kneeling before the Ark of the Covenant with four cherubs flying above the Ark. An old note on the back of the panel mentioned the Ark. The programme’s resident expert, Paul Hayes, took a look and declared that an ark was an old bin which people once used to store corn after harvest. He said that the cherubim were ‘vultures’ waiting to attack the harvest, and that the kneeling figure was praying that they wouldn’t. On the BBC website, Paul says he is ‘very keen to demystify the antiques business’. I say to the BBC, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ‘If you give people more time to drink, they will drink more,’ says a Conservative spokeswoman attacking the liberalisation of pub licensing hours. Is that true? More people will probably drink in licensed premises, but that tells you very little about the quantity consumed, and almost nothing about the tendency to drink too much. Surely, it’s not the hours, it’s the people that are the problem — both the people who like binge-drinking and the people who like serving binge-drinkers. There is no reason to persecute everyone else because of these. The logic of the Tory argument is that if you gave people no time to drink anything, they would drink nothing. The history of Prohibition suggests otherwise.
Observation and the anecdotes of others show that this year’s local Remembrance ceremonies were exceptionally well attended. Is it just because it is 60 years since the end of the war, or have the London bombings made us think harder about our country’s safety, and so give greater thanks for those who have defended it?
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