TUESDAY 2 JUNE, 1998

SIR BERNARD INGHAM

  20.  You were employed by the taxpayer clearly, were you not, but not to protect an action by the Tory leadership.
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  There would have been a lot of taxpayers who would have complained bitterly if I had not actually made sure that she could get the message over.

Helen Jones:  I should think they would have been devastated, but if that sort of thing——

  21.  Would it not be incorrect to say you were employed by the Prime Minister?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  No, I was employed by the Civil Service, by the Government.

  22.  I just wanted to clarify that.
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  I was appointed to the Prime Minister's office.

Mr Bradley:  Nevertheless you were actually employed by the Civil Service.

  23.  If that sort of thing is going to happen—and we accept that inevitably in modern politics it will happen—would it not perhaps be better to appoint someone who is not a civil servant to fulfil the role of a press officer to the Prime Minister or to another senior Minister? What do you think are the advantages or disadvantages of bringing in people from outside the Civil Service?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  You will have to judge it over the full term, I think, of a person's operations and I am perfectly happy to be judged over the full term of my operations against the norms and conventions of the Civil Service. Indeed, I am more than content, bearing in mind the way in which for the first three years I was in Number 10 politically active civil servants systematically leaked my meetings to The Guardian. Politicisation is not exactly new in my experience, but it is only criticised when those in prominent positions behave in that way. There was a heck of a lot of leaking as I recall throughout the 1980s and 1990s by civil servants to The Guardian usually, it seemed to be. The common route seemed to be The Guardian and then on to Robin Cook.

  24.  Reds under the bed at Number 10, you are telling us?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  No, they fell off a bus, I am sure, these documents. But do not let us get away with the idea that I was the sole politicised person in that time. There are a lot of other people infinitely more politicised than I was.

  25.  If that is the case then might we be better abandoning altogether the idea that this role ought to be fulfilled by civil servants and accepting that it would be better if Ministers brought in their own press officers with them and everyone would know they were political appointees and that they had a political as well as governmental role to fulfil.
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  Well, let us judge it over a period of time.

  26.  I am asking you for your view?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  I think, and I thought I said at the beginning, it is better to have a civil servant with experience of the media and experience of the machine and knows how to live and work with the machine.

  27.  Sir Bernard, just on that last point. This was a situation which had arisen and you were all well aware that there was going to be a problem of some kind in relation to Mrs Thatcher that she was——
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  No-one was actually aware that there was going to be a problem.

  28.  I thought there might be? It was pretty obvious.
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  Well there could always be when you have an election.

  29.  So there had been discussions beforehand as to what was going to happen. Why did you not just say to her: "Look there is going to be a problem here. Why do you not get someone in to sort this out for you on a party political basis?" She must have had the odd special adviser running around on the political side who could have handled it?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  What should this person have done that I could not do as a civil servant?

  30.  You could have stood back?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  There was nothing that prevented me from going and trying to make sure, as a civil servant, that there was a microphone there.

  31.  You could have stood back and left it to the——
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  Of course I could have stood back and left it and had chaos with the media.

  32.  But not if there had been somebody else there to take over?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  The media had deadlines. I wished to avoid this chaos. I sought to do so and what is more, any intelligent civil servant would have done so.

  33.  What I am suggesting is that an intelligent civil servant would have said: "This is not a matter for me. Bring in your special adviser to sort this out"?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  No, they would not. Not in those circumstances. No.

  34.  Let us go on to another point. I am very interested in the new legislation that is coming forward about freedom of information and I wondered if you had any contacts with other governments and press officers in countries where they operate freedom of information systems, for example Sweden or America? Did you have any official or non-official contacts with such countries?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  Well, I knew the press secretaries to the Presidents in the United States. I must say that in my experience freedom of information did nothing to increase the respect in which the Press Secretary was held in the United States. Some of the treatment of the press, I would not have put up with it, but some of the treatment in the White House press briefing room was quite frankly disgraceful in my view. And yet here you have a nation with freedom of information. To the best of my knowledge freedom of information in the United States has not improved the respect in which the Government is held.

  35.  I do not think that is necessarily the point.
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  That surely must be the point of it.

  36.  It is not the respect in which the Government is held; it is rather the opposite perhaps. To keep out or to decide independently what information is available to see whether or not the Government is actually doing the things it has said it is doing efficiently. Are you in favour of the new freedom of information legislation?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  I think it is rather interesting and I am in favour, I am congenitally in favour—contrary to what a lot of people think—about more openness in Government. I wish the civil servants that I had to cope with were also of a similar view, but the traditional position of all bureaucracies when they are in trouble is to clam up and say nothing and make life difficult for press secretaries.

  37.  Did you do anything when you were in post to try and promote the freedom of information concepts? I know there were some attempts under the previous administration to have some slight form of openness. Were you involved at all in trying to persuade the Government or trying to set a culture whereby that might be the way forward?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  I did not advocate a Freedom of Information Act as such, but I spent every hour of my living day working as an information officer trying to get more information out of the stone, rather like blood, in order to try and improve the information that was available. Government information officers do rather like to have the weft with which to weave their spell and that is information. What is more, it is reliable information and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to open up the system. I must say, however, that I am very sceptical about the effect of a Freedom of Information Act on the media. The media, by definition, is not interested in that which is freely available. They are bored with anything that is freely available. What it wants is that which is not available; it wants the secret.

  38.  You have to work at freedom of information and one of the concepts of freedom of information is to change the culture of secrecy within departments?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  I am all in favour of that.

  39.  For example, when we went to Dublin as a Select Committee, we heard that they were actually training civil servants in a new culture in the same way that in Sweden they have an existing culture where the civil servants do not hang on to every last piece of information, but make it available unless there are very good reasons for it. Are you saying that in your experience in dealing with departments and the civil servants in departments that you had grave difficulty, even in your position, in getting information out of these departments?
  (Sir Bernard Ingham)  Yes.