… Mr Peter Hennessey [sic] – the Prime Minister [Jim Callaghan] concluded that no special action should be taken to identify the source of Mr Hennessey’s information, that his irritating articles would have to be endured, but that it would be prudent to keep a close eye on the situation to see if it proved possible to identify his source.
KENNETH STOWE, PRINCIPAL PRIVATE SECRETARY TO THE PRIME MINISTER, TO SIR IAN BANCROFT, HEAD OF THE HOME CIVIL SERVICE, 13 SEPTEMBER 1978.1
ON 16 August 2011, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary, One Hundred Years of Secrecy, which my producer Rob Shepherd and I had put together to mark the high speed passage through Parliament a century earlier of the Official Secrets Act 1911 in the middle of a war scare precipitated by the Kaiser putting a warship, the Panther, into the Moroccan port of Agadir the previous month.2 Rob and I traced the history of the statute’s notorious catch-all, section 2, which potentially criminalised the divulging of any information an official was not specifically authorised to release.
The Franks Report of 1972 noted that about 2,000 separate charges could be brought under section 2 and recommended that it should be pensioned off and replaced by a new Official Secrets Act immensely narrower in scope and directed at those areas of official information where confidentiality could be justified.3 Not until 1989 was such a substitution effected after Douglas Hurd, as Home Secretary, had finally managed to persuade a reluctant Mrs Thatcher this was the sensible way to proceed, that, as Lord Hurd put it to me in the summer of 2011, ‘you had to have something which worked and it inevitably would have a narrower scope.’ ‘That’, he explained, ‘was the argument which prevailed with her.’4
The BBC Radio 4 centenary programme contained the following exchange between myself and Lady Thatcher’s ever-direct and forceful former Downing Street Press Secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham.
INGHAM: You spent a lot of your time talking and, may I say, buttering up civil servants.
HENNESSY: Thank you, Bernard.
INGHAM: And I was astonished how much they were prepared to say but not to me. I mean the sheer hypocrisy of the whole blessed thing is revealed by your relationship with them, if I may say so. I mean they wouldn’t say what they said to you to me.
HENNESSY: Oh, I see. I was the recipient of their confidences and you weren’t about how they felt?
INGHAM: Oh yes, oh yes.
HENNESSY: Well, everybody has to talk to somebody, Bernard.
INGHAM: Why didn’t they talk to me?
HENNESSY: Maybe the beauty of your personality was lost on them.
INGHAM: No, no, it wasn’t the beauty of my personality. They were playing their own games. So much for the Official Secrets Act.5
At the time, I knew that Bernard Ingham (of whom I have grown fond), released a certain amount of heat when my name was mentioned. But not until our interview for the secrets programme recorded in July 2011 did I realise quite what it was that had so upset him and plainly continued to do so.
It was a piece of recently declassified archive, which I showed Sir Bernard before we began our conversation, which lit the blue touch paper that summer morning in the BBC’s Millbank studios – a 1980 file from the No. 10 papers dealing with leaks. In January that year, at the suggestion of Sir Ian Bancroft, Head of the Home Civil Service, Mrs Thatcher had commissioned an inquiry into the phenomenon.
Bancroft, with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, Sir Brian Cubbon, had been considering, as he expressed it to Clive Whitmore, Mrs Thatcher’s Principal Private Secretary, ‘the case for commissioning a study of unauthorised disclosures of information to the press’. Bancroft, a man of wit and charm whom I liked greatly, reckoned that
the growth of so called investigative journalism and the proliferation of lobbies and pressure groups which can readily command the attention of the media has created a climate which I suspect positively encourages disclosure by an individual who holds strong personal convictions on an issue currently under consideration with central Government and who sees a way of furthering the cause he supports without being detected. These misguided people represent I suspect a much more serious threat to the security of Government documents than those who are motivated by extremist political views.6
‘The Prime Minister’, Whitmore told Bancroft, ‘has no great hope that such a study will produce anything of value but, even so, she agrees with you that the attempt is worth making.’7
Sir Nicholas Morrison, former Permanent Secretary at the Scottish Office, was recalled to the colours to carry out the task. His report was ready by July. Sir Nick saw no plots and recommended tightening up procedures generally (‘not particularly far-reaching’, was how Mrs Thatcher put it to her Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw8).
Her press secretary, Sir Bernard, however, plainly thought the Morrison Report feeble. On 21 July 1980, he dashed off a minute to Michael Pattison, one of Mrs Thatcher’s private secretaries. ‘I have read the Leak Inquiry report’, said Sir Bernard, ‘and would merely like, at this stage, to comment on one aspect referred to in Para 6.’
The author there states:
I have found no evidence at all of any kind of subversive plot or any connecting link indicating a continuing common source or sources for the leaks.
Bernard suggested to Michael Pattison that
you may care to consider that:
• prima facie there is a continuing common source or sources of leaks to Peter Hennessy of The Times, most notably on CCU [Civil Contingencies Unit] and D-Notice matters.
Bernard went on to name Keith Harper and Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian and Michael Edwards of the Daily Mail as other recipients of regular leaks.9
The Civil Contingencies Unit, forerunner of today’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat, was located in the Cabinet Office and prepared plans for coping with industrial disputes in sixteen key industries.10 The D-Notice system (now known as the DA system) involved advisory notices from the Ministry of Defence on sensitive defence and intelligence matters, overseen by a joint press–Whitehall committee – an arrangement involving voluntary self-censorship by the press.11
Given the obligation to keep one’s helpers secret unto the grave – theirs and mine – unless they ‘out’ themselves in the meantime, I can confirm Bernard Ingham’s use of the plural ‘sources’ and Nick Morrison’s conclusion that neither ‘subversion’ nor ‘plot’ was involved either in my pieces for The Times or inside the book States of Emergency, which Keith Jeffery and I co-authored, that appeared in 1983.12
For a historian, it’s a strange feeling to find oneself part of the national archive, one’s old preoccupations frozen in the stacks at Kew. It produces a mixed reaction – makes one feel a bit old to be an item released under the Thirty-Year Rule; and to think of all the distraction that one’s pieces caused people who had quite enough to worry about without such pinpricks. I felt that particularly strongly about Jim Callaghan and his irritation at my open government crusade in the late 1970s.
I can understand the sensitivities aroused in Whitehall in the late 1970s, with trade union power at its height, the Labour government majority-less in the House of Commons and growing stress within the Labour movement, by my desire to anatomise the contingency plans for what amounted to strike-breaking. It was a concern that ran through into the early months of the Thatcher government as The Times printed my articles as a series in November 1979, when the paper reappeared after nearly a year’s shutdown due to a dispute with the print unions about the introduction of new technology.13
I’m sad, too, that my much-admired friend Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, thought the draft articles I sent the Ministry of Defence on Jim Callaghan’s highly secret deliberations on Polaris replacement in 1978–79 were such a danger to the state (on nuclear weapons matters I would voluntarily let Whitehall see such pieces in draft lest the Russians learnt things they should not know about the UK’s nuclear weapons programme). The articles did not run as written as The Times did not resume publication in time for the May 1979 general election, though a single story did appear in the one edition of the paper the management was able to print in Germany.
In the middle of the general election campaign, John Hunt minuted Ken Stowe in No. 10 that his ‘first instinct’ had been to approach informally Sir Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief of Times Newspapers, and William Rees-Mogg, Editor of The Times and my boss, to try and persuade them not to publish. But, Hunt concluded,
we could not plead national security [indicating that my reason for showing MOD the pieces was met]: and the Labour Party Manifesto itself talks about the desirability of ‘full and informed debate’ on the matter.14 I think the only argument could be made that this is a thoroughly irresponsible article and that if it is published consideration would have to be given to instructing Departments to cease to have any dealings with Mr Hennessy.15
Next to this, Jim Callaghan scribbled: ‘No. We should not try to stop publication.’16 No approach was made to The Times though I was aware of the mother-and-father of the leak inquiry John Hunt recommended be carried out in the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury,17 which later took place and turned out to be fruitless.18
My private view then – as now – was that I wished the UK to remain a nuclear weapons state. I was keen, however, on the internal debate within Whitehall feeding into the wider public discussion a country like ours must have when the nuclear question goes live (as it is again in 2012).
Away from nuclear matters, on the wider front of more open government, however, I must confess that it’s fun – and a touch gratifying – to know one had a tiny, walk-on part in the greater, longer drama of Britain getting out, bit by bit, of the corset of excessive secrecy the Edwardians’ anxieties had imposed on us for so long in the form of section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 (of which more in a moment). In fact, initially, as a young, would-be (though unannounced) Whitehall correspondent of The Times, the instinctive reaction of No. 10 to my early efforts paid dividends.
In the summer of 1974 I left the Times Higher Education Supplement, where I had worked since December 1972 with the excellent Brian MacArthur, a natural trainer of young journalists, for the Night Desk of The Times. The Times’ Home Editor, Charlie Douglas-Home, suggested I work up an area not routinely covered by the paper during the gaps between the arrivals of the rivals’ first editions and any late-breaking stories the Night Desk would have to cover.
I decided to take a crack at Whitehall. It had long fascinated me, thanks to reading Anthony Sampson’s anatomies and Samuel Brittan’s Steering the Economy.19 I’d already had a stab at it on the THES with a profile of the still relatively new Civil Service College20 and, more recently, I had set about preparing a profile of Sir Kenneth Berrill pegged to his move from being Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury to the directorship of the Central Policy Review Staff, the Cabinet Office’s think tank.21
I had known Ken as chairman of the University Grants Committee during my THES spell, and, over lunch, told him I was interested in reporting Whitehall more generally and gave him an idea of areas I might look at. The efficient Ken alerted his friend Sir Douglas Allen, Head of the Home Civil Service, even before his profile appeared in the paper. I enter the files when the sympathetic Douglas Allen briefs No. 10 on me and my intentions in a minute sent on 7 November 1974 to Robert Armstrong, then Principal Private Secretary to Harold Wilson, who had returned to No. 10 the previous March.
Allen told Armstrong that the Civil Service Department (CSD)
gathered two or three months ago that Mr Peter Hennessy might be approaching senior civil servants in order to gather material for a series of articles in the Times. The topics in which he was reportedly interested were:
a. Main trends since Fulton [the report on the Civil Service from a committee chaired by Lord Fulton published in 196822]
b. Special Advisers [then a relatively new phenomenon].
c. Dispersal of the civil service [to Scotland, Wales and the Regions].
d. The rules on senior civil servants moving out into industry and commerce.23
Allen explained to Armstrong that the CSD planned to consult the Prime Minister when the first approach was made to senior officials. This had yet to happen. In fact, I was still reading my way into the subject over those long hours on the Night Desk though I had been in touch with some senior figures about possible briefings. I had, however, asked the Oxford politics don Lord Crowther-Hunt, an influential figure on the Fulton Committee and now a Minister of State in the Cabinet Office, for an interview. It was this, the file shows, that triggered Allen’s approach to No. 10.
Douglas Allen thought I should be helped within certain ground rules – matters ‘of political and public controversy’ should be avoided and there was to be no whiff of ‘classified matters’.24 This did not find favour inside No. 10. Robert Armstrong discussed the Allen minute with Joe Haines, Wilson’s Press Secretary, and he briefed the Prime Minister accordingly on 8 November 1974.
I have discussed this with Mr Haines. We do not think that it is necessary to object to Mr Hennessy seeing Lord Crowther-Hunt (now a Minister) [in fact, the interview never took place]. But we think that senior civil servants should not be given permission to grant interviews to Mr Hennessy. The political implications of many of the matters which he would want to discuss are such that it would be better for civil servants not to be involved.
Joe Haines remarks that this is reminiscent of Anthony Howard’s project as a Whitehall correspondent of the Sunday Times in 1965, which was firmly sat on at the time.25 On this Harold Wilson has written
I certainly agree no civil servants. But why any interview at all – it seems to be ‘The Times’. Say no. HW.26
The second sentence is a touch baffling. Presumably Wilson was ruling out a Crowther-Hunt interview but as for ‘it seems to be “The Times”,’ we’ll never know what he was getting at.
As a result Robert Armstrong on 13 November 1974 sent the memo to Douglas Allen which did me an enormous service (as I shall explain in a moment). It read:
SIR DOUGLAS ALLEN
ARTICLES IN THE TIMES ON THE CIVIL SERVICE
Thank you for your minute of 7 November, which I have shown to the Prime Minister.
He would prefer no assistance to be given to Mr Hennessy by Ministers or civil servants. There should in any case be no interviews with civil servants; and he would much prefer that Lord Crowther-Hunt should find it necessary to decline the request or an interview.
R. T. ARMSTRONG.27
It was the contents of this memo that were leaked to me by two people who rang The Times’ Night Desk on the late afternoon/early evening of, I think, Thursday 5 December 1974 (one gave his name; the other did not).
As I recalled later:
Pride mingled with panic. I was new to the game. Official Secrets Act and D-notices were still a matter of awe to me. Charlie Douglas-Home had been the paper’s Defence Correspondent. He would know what to do. Charlie was somewhat taken aback – why had Wilson done it? I told him I had found an area to write about Whitehall. No. 10 had found out before my boss did and clearly did not like it. Charlie said it was magnificent and that I should hit them.28
So I did. First by writing a kind of innocent-boy letter to Joe Haines.
There turns out to have been a nice symmetry here. When Robert Armstrong and I relived this episode for One Hundred Years of Secrecy nearly thirty-seven years later, he said: ‘Harold was rather old-fashioned. I think there was a sense of outrage that a young whippersnapper on The Times should be put on to this sort of thing.’29 (I was twenty-seven at the time.)
I despatched my letter on 8 December 1974 affecting shock (some of which was genuine). It is beautifully preserved in the No. 10 file now at Kew:
Dear Mr Haines,
Three months ago I began to prepare a feature article on the civil service for The Times and subsequently approached a number of ministers and civil servants seeking ‘off-the-record’ interviews with them on a variety of topics.
Last week I discovered from two sources that a memorandum had been sent, both to the civil servants I had approached and to others, indicating that the Prime Minister would prefer that I be given no assistance in this enterprise.
Needless to say, I have no way of verifying the existence of such a memorandum. But one of those whom I had initially approached and found agreeable to participating in an interview, has since made his excuses.
I must confess to being puzzled by the matter and would be most grateful if you could offer any clarification.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Hennessy,
Home News Reporter, The Times.30
On 12 December 1974 Joe Haines forwarded my letter to Robert Armstrong with a handwritten note attached:
Mr Armstrong
Any comments?
You will notice that the phrase ‘prefer no assistance’ is almost identical to the one used in your memo to Douglas Allen.
Joe31
Armstrong replied to Haines the following day:
As you say, the gist of my minute of 13 November to Douglas Allen must have been conveyed to civil servants in other Departments and reported by one of them to Mr Hennessy.32
The Armstrong memo plainly had done the rounds widely across Whitehall. This, for me, was like winning the jackpot. I hadn’t written a word of my planned pieces in The Times and the policy-making strands of the senior Civil Service were alerted to my intentions from the highest level, and plainly some of them felt I was more sinned against than sinning. Harold Wilson did me a great service. He was the No. 1 recruiter of my network of helpers, which seven years later was to so enrage Bernard Ingham.
In the meantime, Robert Armstrong suggested to Joe Haines the line he might like to take with me:
Presumably your reply should be to the effect that civil servants are required to obtain the permission of the Heads of their Departments to give interviews to journalists; that the Head of the Civil Service was consulted by the Heads of a number of Departments, and thought it right in turn to consult the Prime Minister; and that the Prime Minister, while not of course wishing to comment or stand in the way of his proposals, did not think it appropriate that civil servants should grant interviews to him for this purpose.33
Silkily done.
In fact, Joe Haines sent me quite an amiable, almost chatty letter on 17 December 1974:
Dear Mr Hennessy,
I am sorry not to have replied to your letter of 8 December earlier, but we have had a fairly hectic time of late.
As you know, civil servants are required to obtain the permission of the Heads of their Departments before giving interviews to journalists. Clearly a number of consultations would then take place. It would not be our practice to disclose what form those consultations would take, or to confirm or deny what has been said to you. Ministers, of course, are free to talk to you if you wish, and I would have thought that on the question of special advisers, for example, the Lord President of the Council [Ted Short] would be able to help you more than anyone else. This is my personal thought – I have not suggested it to him or to anyone in his office.
Yours sincerely,
Joe Haines34
Joe later became a good friend. As did Ken Stowe, John Hunt, Robert Armstrong and Jim Callaghan (though, in Jim’s case, not before the mid-to late 1980s).
Jim, like Harold Wilson, was a traditionalist in Civil Service matters. He did not like it one bit when he discovered in July 1978 that Permanent Secretaries, including the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, would occasionally have lunch with me. Ken Stowe had alerted him that ‘senior officials were taking lunches off Hennessey [sic] in a casual way’.35 Jim writes on the memo:
The civil service has obviously been very free and easy with their acceptance of hospitality. It shall stop.36
Some stopped. Some didn’t. Others resumed lunching later.
It was a particular leak – not one of mine – that goaded Jim Callaghan into wider action on the Official Secrets Act front. After Frank Field, Director of the Child Poverty Action Group and later Labour MP for Birkenhead, disclosed in the magazine New Society in June 1976 confidential Cabinet documents about the government’s discussion on the possible abandonment of its plans to introduce child benefit,37 Callaghan decided that what was wanted was a new streamlined Official Secrets Act to replace the discredited section 2 of the 1911 statute. Douglas Allen had conducted a leak inquiry38 and failed to find those to whom Mr Field refers to this day as ‘deep throat … or deep throats’ (his helpers are alive but they still do not wish to emerge).39
The political journalists were briefed by No. 10 (I was there during a brief spell as Lobby Correspondent of the Financial Times in 1976) that this was to be a liberalising measure. I suspected not and rang Dr Bernard Donoughue, Jim Callaghan’s Senior Policy Adviser in No. 10. Bernard, as he recorded in his diary, gave me the killer phrase (which I used non-attributably) which vividly illustrated that this was not so.
His entry for Friday 30 July 1976 records:
10.30 we had a Cabinet committee on the Franks Report on Official Secrets. The PM was quite open that he wants ‘reform’ in order to tighten the law and make it more effective. Jenkins [Home Secretary] wanted something more liberal than Franks, and quoted my (original) phrase about replacing the blunderbuss with the Armalite rifle (which I gave to Peter Hennessy of the FT and now keeps cropping up everywhere).40
Callaghan commissioned a special Cabinet committee, GEN 29, to work up a new law to replace section 2. It came to nothing. He had no majority and ministers feared any attempt to legislate would lead to freedom of information clauses being tacked onto the measure in a House of Commons Callaghan’s whips could not entirely control and Jim was definitely not an FOI man.
As we have seen, not until 1989 did Douglas Hurd, as Home Secretary, pilot through the Commons a slimmed-down Official Secrets Act along Franks lines. Freedom of information won statutory form in 2000 but did not become operational until January 2005. And since 1992, thanks to John Major, we have the list of ministerial Cabinet committees regularly published by the Cabinet Office.41
Whitehall is no longer the stone-clad citadel it once was for journalists trying to write about it, though, sadly, only a few do nowadays on a regular basis. This greater routine openness is all to the good. But do I envy today’s Whitehall reporters? Not entirely. It was fun penetrating the hard old target – made you raise your game. And, thanks to the great tradition of Whitehall record-keeping in the paper days (I have serious worries about the electronic data era), the National Archives and the Thirty-Year Rule (due to come down to twenty a year at a time from January 2013), there is a heap of deferred gratification lying around at Kew.
Have I a favourite piece in the pile? If I do it’s Merlyn Rees writing to Jim Callaghan on 2 September 1977 after I had partially penetrated GEN 29, the Cabinet committee on reform of the Official Secrets Act which he, Rees, chaired. The gentle Merlyn had succeeded the polished Jenkins when Roy departed for the Presidency of the European Commission the previous year. ‘I expect’, wrote Rees to Callaghan,
you have seen two recent articles in The Times about the discussions we have been having amongst ourselves on the content of the new legislation to replace Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, and on the form and timing of our next move. Hennessy seems to be very well informed about our discussions, so well informed that he must have been briefed by somebody who has been involved in the discussions or has had access to the relevant minutes. I doubt whether this is sufficiently damaging to warrant a full-scale leak inquiry but it seems to me to create needless political embarrassment for us all, and certainly for you and me as the Minister who will be responsible for legislation on this subject, and who will have to defend it in Parliament and at Party Conference whatever decisions we reach. I should like to suggest to my colleagues that any further briefing of the media to be left to me in consultation, of course, with you.42
Wonderful. Such agony inspired by the Cabinet committee on secrecy and openness being written about in the press. The irony of it seemed lost on Jim and Merlyn. That memo was worth waiting thirty years for.
The most recent leak inquiry file of mine – or, rather, Whitehall’s – dating from mid-July 1980 to February 1981 was declassified in January 2012. Once again the subject was contingency planning for disputes that struck at the essentials of life and the question was the desirability or not of using volunteer labour as strike-breakers. Once more my good friend and now esteemed colleague on the crossbenches of the House of Lords, Robert Armstrong, was involved as Cabinet Secretary as was the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, wielding her famous blue pen and revealing her penchant for underlining:
Confidential.
MR WHITMORE [Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary] Brigadier Bishop [Secretary of the Civil Contingencies Unit] in the Cabinet Office received a telephone call this morning from Mr Peter Hennessy of The Times, to inform him that The Times would carry an article on Tuesday 18th November about the Civil Contingencies Unit’s plans for ‘the coming winter of discontent’. In this article Mr Hennessy would ‘name names’.
2. Brigadier Bishop made no comment.
3. I suppose that this means that there has been a leak to The Times of the CCU note, circulated to the Ministerial Committee on Economic Strategy, of the current state of planning for possible emergencies this winter.
4. We shall have to wait to see the article. But Peter Hennessy has taken an interest extending now over two years in the emergency planning organisation, and obviously had some source of information with access to CCU papers. When we see what the article actually says, we shall have to consider whether there should be some kind of leak investigation. But one can say in advance that this is unlikely to be a very profitable area for investigation: inevitably CCU papers have too wide a circulation among and within Departments to hold much hope of being able to discover whether and where we have a mole.*
5. I am sending a copy of this minute to the Home Secretary’s [Willie Whitelaw’s] Private Secretary.
RTA
ROBERT ARMSTRONG
14 November, 1980.43
Clive Whitmore added his comment for Mrs Thatcher:
Prime Minister
Mr Hennessy’s articles about the CCU have not only named names in the past but have come complete with photographs of one or two of the senior officials involved.
CAW
14 xi.
To the Armstrong minute and Whitmore comment Mrs Thatcher added:
Then reduce CCU papers circulation
MT
It was my article on 19 November 1980 (‘Cabinet split on use of civilian volunteers during stoppages’44) which actually triggered the leak inquiry as captured in another three-way exchange between Armstrong, Whitmore and Mrs Thatcher (complete with her underlinings):
MR WHITMORE
Thank you for your minute of 18th November about Mr Peter Hennessy’s article in that day’s Times about the Civil Contingencies Unit.
2. That day’s article was no more than gossip column stuff about Brigadier Bishop, and as such did not seem to me to justify a leak inquiry.
3. I take a very different view of today’s article, which reports Ministerial disagreements about the use of volunteers in emergencies. This follows earlier articles by Mr Hennessy on 17th and 18th July.
4. The source document for the leak on 17th July was one of the Department of the Environment’s MINIS returns [MINIS was the DOE’s Management Information System for Ministers, pioneered by Michael Heseltine as its Secretary of State] … It seems that the leak continues – though not necessarily through that channel; and I have come to the conclusion that we should now formally investigate it.
5. I am proposing accordingly to Sir Ian Bancroft [Head of the Home Civil Service]. I have spoken to him informally and I understand that he is likely to agree. I hope that the Prime Minister will agree that Ministers should be included within the scope of the inquiry.
As the No. 10 record-reviewer has noted here when he examined the file on 13 September 2011:
Paragraph 6 deleted and retained under Section 3(4) [of the Public Records Act, 1958].
I suspect it referred to Robert Armstrong telling Clive Whitmore that Willie Whitelaw would be asked to sign a Home Office Warrant to authorise the tapping of my home telephone number in Walthamstow for the duration of the leak inquiry.
RTA
(Robert Armstrong)
19th November 1980
Prime Minister,
Agree that Ministers should come within the scope of the inquiry?
CAW
20 xi
MT.45
Robert Armstrong launched the leak inquiry formally on 20 November 1980 and appointed Denis Payne of the Cabinet Office to conduct it with the Cabinet Office’s Establishment Officer, John Stevens. The Attorney General’s Office was kept informed, in case the police were to be involved (they weren’t).
Unusually, the leak inquiry form sent to those with access to the information I had divulged is included in the file (I’d not seen one before).
The attached article by Peter Hennessy from the Times of 19 November 1980 appears to reflect knowledge of matters considered at a meeting of the Civil Contingencies Unit on 30 October 1980: moreover it appears that this knowledge could not have been gained solely from unauthorised access to the memorandum there considered (CCU (80) 19), or from the minutes of the meeting (CCU (80) 9th meeting)
It has been decided in this case to conduct full enquiries under the inter-departmental leak procedure, and you are asked to be good enough to answer the questions below and to return this sheet to J W STEVENS as soon as possible
Will you please say whether you have ever met or spoken to Peter Hennessy
YES/NO
If you have:-
(i) When did you last see or speak to him? …………………
…………………………………………………………………
(ii) What did you talk about? ………………………………
…………………………………………………
…………………………………………………
(iii) Have you ever talked with him at any time about the Civil Contingencies Unit or any civil contingency matter? ……………
……………………………………………………
……………………………………………………
Did you have access to either the memorandum considered at the meeting on 30 October or to the minutes?
YES/NO
Did you communicate any information about the Civil Contingencies Unit or any civil contingency matter to anyone else
YES/NO
If so, please say to whom
………………………………………………………
Signature …………………
Name …………………(in block capitals)
Date …………………
If you need any further information before completing this sheet, please ring J W STEVENS on 233 8238.
CONFIDENTIAL
(A revised version of the inter-departmental leak inquiry procedure was amongst the papers declassified in January 2012.)46
Payne and Stevens finally reported on 9 February 1981.
5. The results obtained from the questionnaire and from supplementary questioning are now available. Of the officials who completed the questionnaire 27 had met or spoken to Hennessy at some time. Of those, 4 had had contact with him around the time of the article but none had discussed CCU matters with him.
6. The inquiries have produced no lead to the identity of the culprit or culprits, and there is no likelihood of success if we attempt to continue the investigation. Hennessy and his editor are aware that enquiries were made, and it is possible that his contacts among officials will have taken note and will be more cautious in future. It is worth noting that in addition to the normal opportunities open to a Times journalist, Hennessy has opportunities to make new contacts when he lectures at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale.47
On 10 February 1981 in a letter to Ian Bancroft, Robert Armstrong concurs with the Payne–Stevens judgement: ‘I believe that the matter has been taken as far as it usefully can be, and that no good purpose would be served by continuing with the investigation.’48
There is a charming twist at the end of the final letter in the file when Bancroft writes to Armstrong on 19 February 1981:
I am grateful for the effort which has been put into this and agree that there is no point in pursuing the enquiries further. However in the light of the last paragraph of the report, I have discussed with Brian Gilmore, the Principal of the College, whether it might be feasible to cut down the opportunities which the College provides for Peter Hennessy. There is, of course, no suggestion that these courses are the source of any of the leaks and it would, I believe, be wrong to try and freeze him out altogether; apart from anything else Hennessy is one of the few journalists who are also good lecturers [very kind!]. But Brian Gilmore will take discreet steps to ensure that Hennessy gets no more than his share of invitations, without arousing suspicion.49
The admirable Brian Gilmore, who was an excellent Principal of the Civil Service College, took steps so subtle that I didn’t notice the slightest diminution of the flow of invitations to speak. What gentlemen they all were – the discreet charm of the British leak inquiry. It was a treat to do business with them, as it was to revisit that file with Robert Armstrong during a House of Lords debate on freedom of information, archives and the new Twenty-Year Rule for declassifications on 17 January 2012. I had sent a photocopy of it to Robert and told their Lordships that it had ‘brought a frisson of amusement to both of us – a kind of bond between us after all these years’.50
Robert, now Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, responded in kind. He told the House he was
glad to be contributing to this short debate initiated by my noble friend and former adversary Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield. I say ‘former adversary’ because when he was Whitehall correspondent of The Times and I was the Principal Private Secretary at 10 Downing Street, I was required by my political masters to see that Whitehall did all it could to frustrate his knavish tricks, designed to extract information about the working of government which government would have preferred not to disclose. He collected nuggets of information with indefatigable diligence, like Squirrel Nutkin collected nuts, but, unlike Squirrel Nutkin, he always knew where he had stored his nuggets and where to find them when he needed them.
Now that the noble Lord is no longer a mischievous journalist but a learned professor, and I am a mandarin long since put out to grass, we are firm friends. I can acknowledge that, though he did not win them all, he did win more than we could have wished, and that much of what he succeeded in extracting was relatively harmless if occasionally a little embarrassing.51
After the debate we both reflected on how utterly unforeseeable it was in 1981 that we would work together on the crossbenches in the House of Lords thirty years on.
Finding one’s own spoor, however thinly spread, in the great archive at Kew is such a pleasure that it verges on a vice. The story of Whitehall and official secrecy is the Ealing comedy that was never made. Though Rob Shepherd and I, with the help of the indispensable Sir Bernard Ingham and others, certainly gave it our best shot in One Hundred Years of Secrecy in the summer of 2011.
1. The National Archives/Public Record Office, PREM 16/1858 ‘Security. Disclosure of Official Information; Francis and Younger Reports on Security and Privacy; White Paper on Official Information; Part 7.
2. For an account of the Agadir crisis see Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (Jonathan Cape, 1992), chapter 39, ‘Agadir’, pp.715–43.
3. Home Office, Departmental Committee on Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, Vol.1, Report of the Committee, Cmnd 5104 (HMSO, 1972).
4. Lord Hurd of Westwell speaking on One Hundred Years of Secrecy, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 16 August 2011.
5. Sir Bernard Ingham speaking on One Hundred Years of Secrecy.
6. TNA, PRO, PREM 19/357, ‘Security: Review of Adequacy of Leaks procedure’, Bancroft to Whitmore, 15 January 1980.
7. Ibid., Whitmore to Bancroft, 18 January 1980.
8. Ibid., Thatcher to Whitelaw, 4 August 1980.
9. Ibid., Ingham to Pattison, 21 July 1980.
10. TNA, PRO, CAB 175/36, ‘Cabinet Office Civil Emergencies Book July 1973’. I am grateful to Rosaleen Hughes for persuading the Cabinet Office to declassify this document in 2011.
11. Nicholas Wilkinson, Secrecy and the Media: The Office and History of the United Kingdom’s D-Notice System (Routledge, 2009)
12. Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (Routledge, 1983).
13. TNA, PRO, HO 322/778, ‘Relations with the Press: Open Government Issues; Peter Hennessy’s Articles on Civil Defence in “The Times”, November 1979’, Sir Frank Cooper to Sir Robert Armstrong, 2 November 1979; Armstrong to John Chilcot, 12 November 1979. My articles ran as ‘Whitehall brief’ columns between 13 and 23 November 1979 culminating in a leading article, ‘Open Planning for Emergencies’, which I penned and was published on 26 November 1979 (all nicely preserved in the Home Office file).
14. The Labour Way Is the Better Way: The Labour Party Manifesto 1979, reproduced in Iain Dale (ed.), Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997 (Routledge/Politico’s, 2000). The Polaris replacement section is on p.236.
15. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/2246, ‘SECURITY: Proposed Article by Peter Hennessy on Strategic Nuclear Deterrent’, Hunt to Stowe, 12 April 1979.
16. Ibid. Jim Callaghan scribbled his comments on the minute on 13 April 1979.
17. Ibid. Hunt to Stowe, 12 April 1979.
18. Private information.
19. Samuel Brittan, Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury (Pelican, 1971).
20. Peter Hennessy, ‘Abrasive Touch for a Silky Machine’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January 1973.
21. Peter Hennessy, ‘The Think Tank gets a man with a talent for saying what he means’, The Times, January 1975.
22. The Civil Service, Vol.1, Report of the Committee 1966–68 (HMSO, 1968).
23. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/762, Allen to Armstrong, 7 November 1974.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. Armstrong to Wilson, 8 November 1974.
26. Ibid. Wilson’s scribble is undated.
27. Ibid., Armstrong to Allen, 8 November 1974.
28. Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (Secker and Warburg, 1989), p.xvii.
29. One Hundred Years of Secrecy.
30. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/762, Hennessy to Haines, 8 December 1974.
31. Ibid., Haines to Armstrong, 12 December 1974.
32. Ibid. Armstrong to Haines, 13 December 1974.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., Haines to Hennessy, 17 December 1974.
35. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/1858, ‘Peter Hennessey’, Stowe to Callaghan, 4 July 1978.
36. Ibid. Callaghan’s comments are undated but Ken Stowe receives the minute back on 10 July 1978.
37. Frank Field, ‘Killing a Commitment: The Cabinet v The Children’, New Society, 17 June 1976.
38. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/1113, ‘SECURITY: Leak of an Article in The Times on Child Benefit Rates: Sir Douglas Allen’s Report; Proposal for Privy Councillors to examine the security of Cabinet documents’. See also PREM16/1449, ‘SECURITY: Leak of Cabinet Information on the Child benefit Scheme: Article in New Society magazine, 17 June 1976; reports by Metropolitan Police; Committee Privy Councillors (Chairman: Lord Houghton of Sowerby) on Security of Cabinet Documents; II’, ‘Child Benefit Leak – Report by Sir Douglas Allen’, undated.
39. Frank Field speaking on One Hundred Years of Secrecy.
40. Bernard Donoughue, Downing Street Diary Volume Two: With James Callaghan in No. 10 (Jonathan Cape, 2008), p.61.
41. Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p.451.
42. TNA, PRO, PREM 16/1856, ‘Security. Disclosure of Official Information: Franks and Younger Reports on Security and Privacy; Implementation of Reports by the Faulks and Phillimore Committees; Reform of Official Secrets Act; Official Information Bill; Part 5’.
43. TNA, PRO, PREM 19/593, ‘SECURITY, Leaks about Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU) to Peter Hennessy of The Times’; investigation. Armstrong to Whitmore, 14 November 1980.
44. Ibid.
45. Peter Hennessy, ‘Echoes of the General Strike in hardliners’ plan: Cabinet split on use of civilian volunteers during stoppages’, The Times, 19 November 1980.
46. TNA, PRO, PREM 19/593, Armstrong to Whitemore 19 November 1980, Whitmore to Thatcher 20 November 1980.
47. TNA, PRO, PREM 19/953, Payne and Stevens to Armstrong, 9 February 1981.
48. Ibid. Armstrong to Bancroft, 10 February 1981.
49. Ibid. Bancroft to Armstrong, 19 February 1981.
50. House of Lords, Official Report, 17 January 2012, col. 534.
51. Ibid., col. 537.
* John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had been televised to great acclaim on BBC1 during 1979 and Gerald the Mole had led to the common usage of the word ‘mole’ within Whitehall and by the press (John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Hodder, 1974)).