Politics
Journalists prefer secrets
It is embarrassing to be proved wrong so quickly and completely. Last week I wrote that Mr Michael Heseltine had been set back in his career by the Ponting scandal. On Monday, he had the greatest triumph of this Parliament and perhaps the first really warm support that he has ever received from Tory MPs.
' Two things had not occurred to me. I had not imagined that Mr Ponting's be- haviour, odd though it obviously was, could have been quite as self-contradictory and ludicrous as Mr Heseltine's revelations proved. I had also not believed that Mr Heseltine, who had previously been so protective of information on the grounds of national interest, would be ready to pro- vide so much of it to justify himself. The store of government records was plundered ruthlessly wherever it discredited Mr Pont- ing; memos and minutes which the Gov- ernment would have insisted to a court must be kept secret in the interests of the state were laid before MPs with a generos- ity which should have impressed even Mr Des Wilson. 'National security' gave place to personal survival.
Which is not to say that Mr Heseltine did not deserve to survive. Mr Ponting had betrayed his trust spectacularly and com- prehensively: Mr Heseltine was entitled to get his own back. Mr Heseltine had been sneaked on, and his party was happy that he should take time to reveal the sneak's sneaky ways. After Mr Heseltine had finished, no Labour MP had much to say for Mr Ponting; indeed, several of them were quite pious about the evils of leaking. In a straight contest between Tarzan and the Islington Buddhist, the result was what I ought to have expected. And although nobody loves Mr Heseltine very much, nobody seemed very sorry that Mr Ponting lost.
But nothing that Mr Heseltine said altered what is supposed to be the sub- stance of the row. He did not prove that the Government had not misled the House of Commons. What he managed to create was an atmosphere in which no one, except Mr Tam Dalyell, any longer cared very much about the whole episode. Labour made no show of trying to destroy the Government. Mr Denzil Davies made a good-natured, easy-going speech, and MPs settled down to a comfortable evening.
It may seem shocking that such a tremendous row could so easily exhaust itself. When Mr Kinnock and Mrs Thatch- er were writing billets-amers to one another last week, they were scribbling as if their lives depended on it. This week, Mr Kinnock contents himself with a few mild suggestions that the Government has not been as frank as he would like. The engagement has been inconclusive.
Surely this could not have been so, however, if the subject of the row had been really serious. If public opinion believed that the sinking of the Belgrano was as grave an error as, say, Gladstone's failure to save General Gordon, then any conceal- ments, hesitations, misstatements would be dragged across the floor of the House of Commons until the wretched men re- sponsible were ruined. The Commons knows how to pin a major public error on a major public figure. Even this Labour Opposition knows how to do it, but it cannot, as it were, make brickbats without straw.
The Ponting row does not matter, in the end, because it is a row about secrecy and not about politics. Politicians do not really like such rows, because they know from their experience of government that secre- cy is inevitable. All organisations have their secrets. Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post had secrets as well as the White House. Big organisations whose doings are of interest to the outside world have more secrets than small organisations whose affairs nobody cares about. This does not mean that it is not worth reform- ing the laws about secrecy: only that secrecy will remain a tool of government.
It would be nice to think that if secrets could be known, politics could be under- stood and right reason could prevail. It is more exciting for a journalist to 'reveal', rather than argue, relate or explain. But the main practical use of secrets to govern- ment in free countries is to win only ephemeral advantage. It is important for a minister that no one knows his planned reform before he has won the necessary Cabinet support for it. The prime minister cannot make his Cabinet changes easily if everyone knows what he intends too far in advance. He lets slip some secrets to test the ground: he reserves others so that he can prepare it to his own advantage.
These secrets can make the difference between political life and death, but they cannot conceal any t*nd of policy for very long. The main difficulties that confront governments stare us in the face, and governments' methods of responding to them are almost equally visible. No secrets mask the great problems of the past 40 years — inflation, unemployment, the role of the unions, the provision of welfare, law and order, our links with Europe, Amer- ica, Russia, relative economic decline, absolute growth in prosperity, taxes, schools, drains. We know how govern- ments have tried to confront them incomes policies, medium term financial strategies, employment laws, social secur- ity rethinks, police pay increases, detente, Trident, going into the EEC, not going into the EEC, tax cuts, tax increases etc, etc.
And we can know more than the out- lines. If we want, we can find out the detail. We can read the Bill, and the White Paper and. Hansard and the official statis- tics. We can draw on all the unofficial and independent sources of information which abound. Even in secretive matters like defence, we may not know precisely when cruise missiles will go for their exercises from Greenham Common, but we do knew that they are cruise missiles and not soph- isticated agricultural equipment behind that wire. We can find out about the military capability of the missiles and what part they are expected to play in defence policy. Even the men who live off secrets: the spies themselves, often get more useful information from studying technical knit- nals in a public library than from bribing the sommelier at the best club in Vienna. Of course, few of us do want to know the detail. Even those who receive housing benefit or family income supplement, let alone the rest of us, probably do not etlinY learning how it works or wondering how it might be reformed. I, for one, have never considered for a moment which of the five different measures of money growth is really the most accurate. Not my bag, you know — need to keep my mind free for the Great Issues. Journalists, being people who respond more to human demand than administrative necessity, particularly dis- like these practical, semi-technical ques- tions of politics. Would proportional repte" sentation be better with an alternative vote or the single transferable vote? Should it involve a 'list system'? Don't know: dont care. But if PR were introduced, the answers to these questions would make all the difference to its effectiveness. This is a large part of politics: it is quite understand- able that journalists prefer secrets. So if this or any government is to be confounded, it will be done by a failure s° comprehensive (a huge rise in unemploy- ment?) or so sudden and dramatic (the collapse of the pound?) that neither the voter nor the expert in the field will believe in the government's competence. It will not be because a sink of iniquity is ex- posed, but because a mess becomes 5° large that no one thinks that the have the ability to clear it up. At present; Labour knows that it cannot present itselt as more competent or even more attractive than the Government. So it tries, rather indiscriminately, to uncover secret deprav- ity. But is there any secret about what i5 wrong with this Government? present lot
Charles Moore
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