The shadowy bounds of discretion
Nicholas Henderson
DC CONFIDENTIAL by Christopher Meyer Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 301, ISBN 0297851144 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The first sentence of Christoper Meyer’s book — ‘we want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there’ — sets the tenor of his work just as it does the new diplomacy which is now said to prevail. It is the briefing that Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, gave to Meyer before he took up his post as British ambassador in Washington.
The passages of personal revelation in the book are an easy read, though at times they may make the reader squirm. Some of the arguments on Iraq, the focus of the book, are compelling: that in the lead-up to the invasion No. 10 relied heavily on the views of military and intelligence advisers, and failed to exert the available leverage (favourite Meyer word) with the USA, and that Bush and Blair did not mislead their publics by such reliance, though this does not preclude the possibility that these advisers were subjected to and succumbed to political pressure.
But the force of Meyer’s judgment is undermined by indiscretion and titillating gossip, both of which are unacceptable in a civil servant when he is writing for the public. Nor will indiscretion have helped in high-level relations between Washington and London.
US policies and advice gleaned from intimate talks are quoted uninhibitedly by Meyer. For instance, he publishes Condoleezza Rice’s remark to him that ‘Bush was much happier in the company of Latin Americans than Europeans’. He refers frequently to the opinions given him in private by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence, took him aside ‘hotly condemning the CIA for its blindness over Iraq’. Cheney is said to have been dismissive to him over Blair’s parliamentary difficulties concerning Iraq: ‘Bush and Blair would be fêted as heroes and liberators in Iraq.’ Blair’s government is condemned for having only ‘a minority of capable ministers’. Meyer describes Straw as ‘mystifyingly tongue-tied when home secretary in the unthreatening presence of Janet Reno, the US attorney general’. Geoff Hoon is depicted as nervous in Rumsfeld’s presence. They ‘resembled a pair of pandas mating’ — how did he know? Robin Cook is said to have let Meyer’s wife Catherine down badly over her much publicised children. Catherine has said, after the publication of the book, that she was responsible for the way it had been jazzed up. Shown the draft before it was finalised, she told Meyer that he should rewrite it as a woman would, ‘painting a picture’. Norma is therefore portrayed ‘serenely in bed’ when Christopher visited John Major in the early morning. From the frequent references to her in his book there is no doubt about her overwhelming influence.
The Downing Street staff showed a ‘churlish, chippy arrogance’, and conducted a vendetta against the embassy. The embassy’s relations with the FCO are said to have been equally bad. The penny does not seem to have dropped for Meyer that he may have had something to do with these bad relations.
Blair, the book tells us, looked uncomfortable at his first meeting at Camp David, ‘wearing a pair of ball-crunching, tight blue corduroys’. The pockets appeared glued to his groin so that he could not get his hands fully into them.
It is of course partly a matter of timing. A minister will be reluctant to trust his private secretary with personal confidences if he thinks they are going to be published in the near future. It would matter less if there was no question of publication for a decade or so after those mentioned are no longer in public office. It would be a poor outlook for history if nothing personal from those in authority ever reached the light of day.
Many people are asking why Jeremy Greenstock’s book about Iraq has been banned while Meyer has been allowed to publish his. Greenstock’s intended book is different in nature from Meyer’s and has not in the strict sense been banned. Taking account of the views of the FCO that publication might aggravate present difficulties, he has agreed to postpone publication, which will enable him eventually to produce something more comprehensive. Meyer submitted his text for official approval. Presumably the FCO and Cabinet offices, which act in tandem on this subject, did not think there was anything sufficiently controversial or risky to international relations in the book to justify a ban. In any case they may have thought that much of what Meyer writes is already in the public domain.
Nevertheless, the decision about Meyer’s book is astonishing, given previous governmental strictness concerning the early publication of memoirs by ministers or officials.
Following the furore over the Crossman diaries, an official report was produced in 1975, the Radcliffe Report, setting out the principles and rules governing such publications. These were both constricting and imprecise, as well as being unenforceable. Successive governments continued to be governed by them, while recognising that they needed revising, but doing nothing about it. My own diaries, submitted to the government in 1989 for approval to publish, were banned for five years under Radcliffe’s rules. When I asked for some precision on what was regarded as transgressing the principle of confidentiality, I was told that I had written about Mrs Thatcher being nervous at Chequers at the height of the Falklands crisis, as well as recording which ministers were in the inner war cabinet. Neither, I thought, was indiscreet.
A few years later Percy Cradock, a former distinguished member of the diplomatic service, who had been adviser to No. 10, submitted to the authorities his In Pursuit of British Interests. Although he had been scholarly and unsensational in his text, Cradock was subjected to delay and cutting before he was allowed to publish.
The kerfuffle occasioned by Meyer’s book and the readiness of the government to accept publication should clearly lead to some new rules on this subject. These should also be enforceable and heeded by the government. The longhallowed maxim which used to hang over Whitehall, ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’, seems pertinent today, particularly in the context of memoir publication.
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