Re: [A-List] UK state: Hutton aftermath

["Anyutka" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

  The Spectator is not usual A-List fare, but I thought this article made an
important point about the new "top people" on both sides of the pond -
journalists included, though they are not addressed here.  Reading this
brought to mind a former counsel to the Fed who told me several years ago
that "you first began to see it in the 2nd Reagan Administration, that's
when all these young guys started getting themselves into State or Defense
or Justice with the intention of staying just a couple of years, and then
living well for a lifetime by exploiting the government contacts they had
made."  I guess aging Cheney and Perle would have to be "senior" examples -
the "template"- of what my friend at the Fed was describing. Seems UK has
been similarly affected.  Ah - but all those deliciously inflated government
contracts, what a deal! -A.



The Spectator


 7 February 2004


FEATURES

The death of the Establishment

Simon Heffer says that Lord Hutton does not understand the twisters and
fixers who now run this country  If we have managed to carry this far into
the 21st century an idea of what we think the Establishment ought to look
like, we might well have settled on someone who looked remarkably like Lord
Hutton. Grey-haired, grey-suited, precise and correct, he suggests to us a
traditional education at one of our older universities, his conservative
outlook and presumptions embodying the leather-upholstered, book-lined,
port-soaked world from which we feel he should come. Although he was born on
Belfast's North Circular Road, this is indeed a Balliol man. His reputation
for integrity and honour are well deserved, and typical of one from that
strict Presbyterian Ulster background. They also typify the values of
probity and disinterestedness that we feel describe the Establishment at its
best. And, as anyone with the slightest idea of what it has taken to be a
judge in Northern Ireland in these past 35 years will know, he will also be
a man of physical courage.

After a lifetime in the Province, Sir Brian Hutton came to London at the age
of 66 and became a law lord: and those of us who know Ulster understand that
little will have prepared him in his life there for what he found here. An
insightful Irishman, looking ahead a few months ago with remarkable accuracy
to the outcome of the Hutton inquiry, made the following observations about
Lord Hutton: he had, in his long career at the Bar, shown a profound respect
for procedure and hierarchy. He was not a man to be swayed by popular
sentiment. On 30 March 1994, when he was Lord Chief Justice of Northern
Ireland, he dismissed the appeal of Private Lee Clegg against his conviction
for murder, when Clegg shot at what he thought were IRA terrorists. Private
Clegg's conviction was later overturned, to no detriment to the career of
the judge who had kept him in jail. Clegg returned to the army and was
promoted. His release in the spring of 1994 would not have been opportune
for the Major government, which was trying at the time to win the trust of
the Republicans. We can be sure that Lord Hutton had no knowledge of such
low politics when delivering his judgment, which will have been based on the
evidence - just like his judgment last week, in fact.

Nor, indeed, should we necessarily think it was relevant that in his last
incarnation as a law lord he was one of four judges who, in March 2002,
rejected David Shayler's application to offer a 'public interest' defence as
defined in section one of the Official Secrets Act. It may or may not be
right to presume that this was taken into account by those who chose Lord
Hutton for his most recent task, and that they concluded he would have
little sympathy for someone like David Kelly, and every sympathy for someone
like Tony Blair.

What Lord Hutton's findings should make us consider, however, is the man's
judgment in the wider sense of the word. Even distinguished judges cannot
entirely rid themselves of certain prejudices, however hard they try, and
however firmly they set their face against being influenced by anything
except the facts. Lord Hutton's prejudices have long been clear to those who
have watched him: the 'respect for hierarchy' and the adherence to
'procedure'. And it was clear from the tone of his report that these were
foremost in his mind when he set about examining the Kelly affair. We must
not impute motives to him, but a caricature of the thinking of someone like
him could easily be drawn.

It would go something like this: a civil servant, party to certain official
secrets, breaches his contract for apparently political reasons by talking
to the media. One media operative to whom he speaks misinterprets or
embellishes something he hears and makes it the basis of a report in which
he impugns the integrity of the Queen's First Minister. He eventually admits
his mistake, though claims it was an error merely of degree. In the ensuing
competition between the journalist, working for an organisation that appears
to be slapdash in its procedures, and the Queen's First Minister - a man
who, like Lord Hutton, has sworn the Privy Councillor's oath, for heaven's
sake - there can be only one outcome.

And, indeed, there was. And the more one thinks of why this was so, the more
one realises that had Lord Hutton not harboured a view of the English
Establishment formed during his time at Oxford in the early 1950s, and
frozen during more than 40 years in the socially more moribund society of
Northern Ireland, the report he issued would have been very different. We
cannot dispute that he was right to find errors in the conduct of Mr Andrew
Gilligan and his masters; but we must dispute his utter failure to alert
himself to the real nature of those who govern us. How, otherwise, can it be
explained that this man with his regard for 'procedure' should have regarded
it as entirely acceptable for the government to tear up the procedures for
disciplining a civil servant, and to name him publicly? And let us not
forget, too, that this is the same man who castigated the BBC for its own
failure to have proper procedures for controlling Mr Gilligan and then for
cleaning up the mess afterwards.

The assumptions that Lord Hutton appears to have concerning Mr Blair and his
colleagues are reminiscent of that world John Betjeman saw passing with the
death of King George V: 'Men who never cheated, never doubted'. As has been
pointed out continually since the publication of his report, judicial
inquiries have always had an unfortunate habit of reporting in favour of the
government that appointed them - and long before the modern venal world of
politicians, too. How else did Lloyd George avoid having his political
career ended in 1912, after he engaged in insider dealing in Marconi shares,
or after the Maundy Gregory 'honours for sale' scandal of a decade later?
The thing is, however, that until recently the likes of Lloyd George were
extremely rare, and their keen acceptance by the old Establishment quickly
put them beyond fatal criticism.

When the Establishment closed ranks in decades past, it might not have been
right and it might not have been defensible, but it was understandable.
Judges by and large knew, or believed that they knew, the men whose actions
they scrutinised. They had been at school with them, at university with
them, in the army with them, and met them at luncheon in their clubs and in
the evening at smart salons. They would take a view - and it would not be an
entirely inaccurate one - that these were men who were not in it for
themselves. Most had come to politics late in life after a successful career
elsewhere. They had independent means. Many had been decorated in battle and
shown coolness under fire. We know from the accounts of Churchill down that
they got a kick from the recognition that they received for what they did,
and they ended up laden with honours. The Establishment's members knew each
other well enough to appreciate that there was a genuine ethic of public
service, and a reasonable level of honesty. And, if the rules were broken,
the penalty was severe, immediate and without parole - as just about the
most honourable Englishman alive, Jack Profumo, would tell you.

That is fairly close to what Lord Hutton seems to understand by the
Establishment. It is nothing like what those of us who write about politics
for a living now perceive in those circles. Much of what the new
Establishment does - so much of its code of behaviour, so many of its
members - is as divorced from the traditional idea and the traditional
values as it is possible to be. For a start, this Establishment lies without
a second thought, in order to preserve its hold on power. It doesn't always
get away with it, such as when Mrs Blair used the No. 10 press machine to
deny her commercial involvement with an Australian con man, or when Peter
Mandelson had to resign twice for forgetting to tell certain important
truths. It got away with it through Lord Hutton, who believed, contrary to
the blatant evidence, that there had been no underhand strategy to name poor
Dr Kelly.

This new Establishment is packed with people who have willingly surrendered
their principles in order to hold ministerial office. Serving the public
seems very much a secondary consideration to having an interesting,
well-paid job with a chauffeur-driven car. Just count the number of
ministers - Mr Blair among them - who happily fought the 1983 general
election on Labour's manifesto, which included unilateral nuclear
disarmament, leaving the EC and nationalising large swaths of British
business. Look at the ones who used to be student revolutionaries,
anarchists and syndicalists. Just look at those who have never had a job in
the private sector, and who therefore have no room for independence. More to
the point, just examine the innumerable acts of prestidigitation,
sleight-of-hand and downright lying that the government has engaged in with
the public. And just ask the BBC and, indeed, any newspaper about the
relentless and shameless bullying that Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson
and others engaged in to ensure that the best possible gloss was at all
times put on the actions of a government that felt it should be portrayed as
wise and infallible.

Nor, like its predecessors, is this a group of people who play by the rules
or accept responsibility. Ministers avoid Parliament at all costs. Matters
that ought to have been subject to a full inquiry, in the public interest -
such as the Kosovo expedition, the Iraq war or the foot-and-mouth outbreak -
are swept under the carpet. And when something goes wrong, the old maxim
that civil servants advise but ministers decide is discounted. If a civil
servant can be found to take the blame, he is blamed. So bullied and so
careerist are the higher ranks of the Civil Service that they make little or
no protest at this. The prime purpose of our rulers is to smother dissent,
stifle criticism, intimidate the media and dismantle any part of the British
constitution that impedes them in that activity. This is about power for the
sake of power. This Establishment is no longer at the apex of a social order
and a nation, but entirely apart from it except when, parasitically, it
feeds off it. That, Lord Hutton, is what the Establishment you have just
whitewashed is really like.

It is always provocative to make such comparisons, but there is a parallel
here with how Hitler hoodwinked President Hindenburg from January 1933 until
the old soldier's death a year later. The stiff, correct Prussian simply
could not begin to imagine the sort of tricks that the Nazis were getting up
to, nor would he have comprehended their wholesale refusal to play by the
rules. Hitler well knew this, and Hindenburg's unknowing service to him as
head of state was that he allowed the Austrian corporal to get away with
murder through ignorance rather than complicity. Now, in a government run by
lawyers, the new Establishment understands all too well how recourse to the
judicial inquiry can help them appear whiter than white to the public, and
to maintain their hold on power (though the public, to its credit, does seem
to have seen through this, with Hutton being by way of the last straw).

Of course, the Major government did something similar with the Scott inquiry
into arms to Iraq. Despite taking infinitely longer than Lord Hutton to
ponder his conclusions, and despite having a reputation as something of a
progressive, Sir Richard Scott nonetheless produced a similar
industrial-sized vat of whitewash. But then the Major government was in
prototype what this administration is in a de luxe version: composed of
careerists, unattached to principle and not above deceit and duplicity when
it came to staying in office. The new Establishment cuts across party
politics. It is about a conspiracy of those in power to stay in power and
uphold the impregnability of their high offices. It is as well they can rely
on the unwitting help of some of the older members, who do not realise how
the rules have changed. The electorate, we must hope, are a little more up
to date.

Simon Heffer is a columnist on the Daily Mail.
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