Prominent Whitehall expert Lord Hennessy has called on civil servants working on the negotiations for Brexit to ensure that they properly store documents — especially email traffic — for future scholars to examine.
Speaking at a seminar on cabinet government in the House of Lords, Hennessy – a veteran journalist and historian who helped officials prepare for the possibility of a coalition before the 2010 election — noted that the cabinet committee set up to oversee the UK’s exit from the European Union contains representatives from ten departments, as well as Number 10 and the Treasury.
“As the work will fall between all these departments it will be very difficult to trace for future historians,” he said.
Iraq inquiry chair Sir John Chilcot calls on senior civil servants to be more "courageous"
Give top civil servants power to stop another Iraq "disaster", say ex-perm secs
Jeremy Heywood rejects call to boost civil service powers in wake of Iraq
“We need people to prepare the ground for an official history of this by saving the email traffic.”
Hennessy said preparations should begin for an official history of the UK’s exit from the European Union, to accompany the official histories of the UK’s entry.
“We need somebody to take the initiative and get the official history started — not to appoint people to do it, but have an agreement that everybody will keep things in an orderly way,” he said.
Cabinet recollections
The seminar was part of King’s College’s course on Politics and ultra-contemporary history. Also on the panel was Lord Robin Butler, the former cabinet secretary who served as a private secretary to five prime ministers.
Butler and Hennessy traced the constitutional traditions underlying the presumption that major decisions should be taken by the cabinet rather than by the prime minister or individual secretaries of state.
And they discussed the differing approach to cabinet government of British prime ministers since the First World War, a hot topic in the wake of the Chilcot report into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The report found Tony Blair had frequently sidelined his ministers in the run-up to the war.
Discussing the role of officials in ensuring that proper process was followed to support collective decision making, Butler said he had always advised prime ministers to make major decisions “through the proper cabinet machinery” because he believed it was not only constitutionally proper but secured better decisions.
“The convention that allows a perm sec to seek a direction from the minister if they think money is being wasted should be extended to inadequate procedures" – Former cabinet secretary Lord Butler
He argued that cabinet secretaries should be given a way to make their concerns public if prime ministers choose not to follow official advice on procedures, a suggestion first made by the Better Government Institute – of which Butler is a member – in reaction to the Chilcot report.
Butler (pictured below) told the seminar: “The convention that allows a perm sec to seek a direction from the minister if they think money is being wasted should be extended to inadequate procedures, so that the cabinet secretary of the day can say ‘if you’re going to have a discussion about whether we go to war or not this is the way it should be done, and if you don’t want to follow that then you’ve got to give me a direction and there it will be for the record that I’ve advised you what the proper procedures are’.”
Britain's former top official also suggested that a number of trends were making it harder for prime ministers to follow the traditions of cabinet government.
For example, the increased frequency of leaks from government, he said, undermines trust among cabinet members, while the speed of political life may make it harder for ministers to be properly briefed before a Cabinet meeting. Butler also pointed the finger at a growing tendency to have too many people at full cabinet meetings.
The former cabinet secretary reflected on the differing attitudes to cabinet government of the prime ministers he had served.
Conservative prime minister Edward Heath made use of an informal inner cabinet to overcome split in main cabinet over economic policy, Butler recalled, and would secure the support of this group before taking an issue to cabinet — an effective short-term strategy that created problems in the long term.
Labour’s Harold Wilson was more collegiate, Butler said, since his party had a more collegiate tradition, and Wilson he could only keep the government together by letting ministers talk themselves out in “long and exhausting” cabinet meetings.
Margaret Thatcher, rather than destroying cabinet government, as some have suggested, “took the constitutional view that one way or another the cabinet had to be made to endorse, to agree decisions”, according to Butler.
But her method was “not to allow everybody to say their piece but to dominate and bully them and defy anybody to oppose her”.
Her Tory successor John Major meanwhile tried to restore cabinet government, but became disillusioned by the leaks and splits in the cabinet over Europe. By the end of his premiership he avoided cabinet discussions where possible, according to Butler.
On Tony Blair — notorious for eschewing cabinet government in favour of “sofa” government — Butler said: “New Labour had been a small cell within the Labour party in opposition and it carried on like that.”
He added: “Blair’s way of dealing was to avoid any cabinet discussion at all – the cabinet was told what the government’s position was, certainly during the eight months that I was cabinet secretary.”
Butler said when he suggested that Blair hold a cabinet meeting to discuss the decision to make the Bank of England independent, the prime minister protested that the cabinet would just agree to it — but agreed to have a “ring round” to make sure his cabinet did support the decision before it was announced.