Lord Hennessy has mapped the British state for decades including its most secret corners – and in defining them has shaped the institutions and individuals that govern us
Just over a decade ago, HMS Tireless, one of the Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered hunter-killer "Trafalgar" class submarines, was in trouble off the west coast of Scotland. “Fire. Fire in Five Berth.” As the klaxon sounded to alert the crew that there were only three minutes before smoke circulated throughout the boat, one submariner sat on the edge of his bunk, struggling with bright yellow hosiery. These socks were not Royal Navy issue but belonged to the crossbench peer and constitutional historian, Peter Hennessy. He was on board with James Jinks to observe the "Perisher" course as part of their research for what became The Silent Deep, their history of the Submarine Service. Admiral Lord West, the former first sea lord, noted that Lord Hennessy had “gained unprecedented access all the way from able seamen to prime minister… and been made privy to details that until recently were shrouded in secrecy”.
Born in March 1947, as the cold war gripped Europe and then introduced the world to the nuclear arms race, Hennessy was a child of what Michael Frayn called the "Uranium Age". Growing up in the "shadow of the bomb" has informed much of his work on political, military and intelligence matters. As a journalist, academic, and member of the House of Lords, Hennessy has been a highly regarded expert and commentator on the civil service, government and the constitution during the cold war and after. Hennessy’s career has been sustained by "long conversations" with a star cast of civil servants and politicians who trusted him. It was Hennessy’s ability to maintain connections with them as he moved between worlds, and mastered the rules of each, that made him sui generis.
As a journalist for The Times Higher Education Supplement, the Financial Times (during a short spell in the "lobby") and The Times, Hennessy chronicled three of Britain’s gyroscopic institutions: the universities, parliament and the civil service. At The Times – where he made his name working the Whitehall beat – Hennessy approached his task like an “amateur anthropologist”, seeking to report what he called the “ecology and economy” of the senior civil service. His journalism was written for the “clever sixth former who had bags of curiosity but no prior knowledge” and resided “somewhere between the meticulousness of the historian’s fine print and the word-pictures and simplifications of the politician”. The early books that followed, such as States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking Since 1919 (1983) and Cabinet (1986), indicated that Hennessy could tackle subjects too big for a newspaper article.
His journalism was written for the “clever sixth former who had bags of curiosity but no prior knowledge” and resided “somewhere between the meticulousness of the historian’s fine print and the word-pictures and simplifications of the politician”
It was his next book, the magnificent Whitehall (1989) – still the standard work – that transported Hennessy from the newsroom to the lecture theatre. He called it the "union card" which allowed him to become a professional academic historian. The long conversations with his civil service sources that had enabled him to write it now continued in a different form, often in seminars with undergraduates on his courses in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, and as "private information" in the footnotes of the books that followed. As the Attlee professor of contemporary British history there from 1992, Hennessy was a natural public intellectual who supervised many PhD students, some of whom had worked in the civil service and others who would go on to do so. (One, Simon Case, served as cabinet secretary). At Queen Mary, Hennessy also developed a novel final-year undergraduate special subject on the British secret state in the cold war. Students analysed documents fresh from the National Archives, some released to the public through Hennessy’s own hand and those of his PhD researchers. One document, the Strath Report of 1955 which estimated the effect of ten 10-megaton Russian hydrogen bombs upon the UK, would inspire his later book, The Secret State: Preparing For The Worst, 1945-2010 (2010). Hennessy’s preoccupation with "the shadow of the bomb" was also a theme in his trilogy about post-war Britain and his memoir of sorts, Distilling the Frenzy: Writing the History of One’s Own Times (2012).
In The Secret State, Hennessy used his insider’s knowledge of the "hidden wiring" of Whitehall to unearth the deepest wiring of all. He explored what he called the “cold rules of national safety” used by the UK’s intelligence and national security chiefs during the cold war and the war on terror. These men and women addressed what Sir Michael Quinlan, former permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence and deterrence theorist, described to Hennessy as the “terrible ‘what if’ questions” about “low probability but high impact” events. In The Secret State, Hennessy travelled from the present to the past and back again. Yet in this book, he wrote with more urgency. The product of his long conversations over decades with political-military civil servants was his sense that the hidden wiring had short-circuited in the turmoil that followed 9/11. As an historian of the constitution and a believer in it, Hennessy wrote The Secret State to remind his readers of how its practitioners in the covert world had protected the nation through the nuclear age, the transition to third-world-war exercises, and beyond as they continued to “think the unthinkable”. It was his part in the post-2003 national debate which considered how to recalibrate the balance between the executive and the legislature in the application of intelligence after the failures leading up to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, The Secret State was Hennessy’s own contribution to the defence of the realm.
The "irradiated thread" that ran through the history of Britain’s civil service and military after 1945 increasingly occupied Hennessy’s interests in academic and public life. He produced The Human Button for BBC Radio 4, a documentary which took him to the UK government’s secret underground bunker in Corsham and to Northwood, the military HQ from where the order to fire would come. Hennessy interviewed the civil servants, military commanders and politicians who have coordinated the UK’s nuclear defence to understand the psyche of deterrence and its effect on them and their families. In Cabinets and the Bomb (2007), published in collaboration with the British Academy and The National Archives, Hennessy returned to the formation of nuclear weapons policy in Whitehall. The bomb was then at the heart of The Silent Deep, which revealed the origins of the submarine-based nuclear deterrent as the UK’s last line of defence in a history of the Submarine Service. It explored the policy which controlled the submarines, and the technology which drove them and their nuclear payloads. Deep under the sea, as Hennessy and Jinks explained, nuclear submarines represented the UK’s sustained belief in itself as a serious defence state whose deterrent elevated it above the constrictions that had been placed upon a once top nation in a world of changing geopolitical threats after 1945.
Deep under the sea, as Hennessy and Jinks explained, nuclear submarines represented the UK’s sustained belief in itself as a serious defence state
In recent years, Hennessy’s histories have become increasingly personal and at times autobiographical, his ethos captured by Seamus Heaney’s idea that “hope and history rhyme”. He was as influenced by great British achievements as he was the shadow of the bomb. However, he has not written with nostalgia. Nor has he let it colour his advice to the chief of the defence staff’s strategic advisory panel or to parliamentary committees or enquiries. Quite the opposite. He has been historian and horizon scanner. In his later books, his purpose has been to call upon what he calls “the intellectual compost” of his journalism and historical research and the sources – human and documentary – to breathe life into the past, and recreate what happened behind closed Whitehall doors from the briefs, the political, defence, and intelligence analyses, letters and telegrams, and the cabinet minutes and memoranda. In the process, he has tried to identify what has endured, and to act as advocate for what still could, in defence of the constitution and nation which have been at the heart of all his work. He has done so in his inimitable style, recalling detail from the past in a way that only he can, and giving weapons-grade guidance, often with a smile.
This article was first published by CSW's sister title The House magazine. Tom Chidwick runs the Mile End Institute and Dr James Ellison is reader in international history both at Queen Mary University of London