POLITICS
Pop go the secrets in the parliamentary lobby
FERDINAND MOUNT
Yet another traditional way of life with its warm kinship network, its shared rituals, its esoteric taboos — is under threat from a harsh, uncaring modern world. I refer of course to the parliamen- tary lobby, and in particular to its daily meetings with Mr Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher's press secretary. Actually I refer at my peril, since that dear little booklet, Lobby Practice, bound in limp maroon rexine and cherished ever since it was first put in my hand nine years ago last Michael- mas, makes it clear that 'members are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held', let alone who attends them and what is said at them. Indeed, the existence of the booklet itself is an equally dread secret, as are all the rubrics it contains: 'Do not "see" anything in the Members' Lobby . . . . Do not run after a Minister or Member . . . . Do not crowd together in the Lobby so as to be conspicuous . . . . NEVER IN ANY CIR- CUMSTANCES MAKE USE of anything accidentally overheard in any part of the Palace of Westminster.'
What mad recklessness, you may won- der, leads me to break these Masonic injunctions? Surely one risks the most frightful penalties -- electrodes applied to sensitive parts, peltings with old volumes of Hansard, round-the-clock readings from the collected speeches of Sir Geoffrey Howe. The only hope lies in the fact that I have crawled through the breach in the lobby's defences already blasted by its own doyen, Mr Ian Aitken, who last week wrote about these meetings in order to explain why he, together with his Guardian colleagues and the correspondent from the Independent, will be boycotting them in future unless they are held on the record. This past week, in a somewhat nervous response, the 150 members of the lobby have voted for an inquiry into its estab- lished practices, but against any change in the rules forbidding direct quotation or attribution.
The reformers face an uphill task, since secrecy is the lifeblood of the trade, parti- cularly for evening-paper journalists who, from a single briefing at No 10 or in that odd little Westminster attic chamber reached by a winding stair, can instantly distil the political mood, lay bare the menace behind some seemingly anodyne piece of news, whip up a Major Storm from some minor spat. These arts would be less easy to practise if Mr Ingham appeared before the cameras twice daily instead. For his part, Mr Ingham — like some of his predecessors, such as Sir Tom McCaffrey, who did the same job for Mr Callaghan believes that much of value would be lost if prime ministers were not able to convey their views informally and without being held to account for them. The public would be worse informed, not better, they say, and, in any case, unattributable briefing would continue (a somewhat contradictory argument) but on a less satisfactory selec- tive basis — as happened with Harold Wilson's 'White Commonwealth', a group of favoured lobby men regularly invited to No 10 and Chequers to be fed with titbits.
This is mostly malarkey. The titbits that cannot be said out loud usually turn out to be self-serving ripostes to or insinuations against the Minister's own colleagues. The more dignified defence of non-attribution — that Ministers must be free to fly kites and float ideas which have not yet hard- ened into policy commitments — is also unsound. Kites thus flown tend to be torn to shreds on the thorn bushes of the vested interests. Publishing a Green Paper is a much more effective means of softening up the ground for new ideas.
As Mr Aitken says, the present row is, if not exactly a Big Bang, at least a loud pop in the debate about freedom of informa- tion and secrecy in British public life. But it is also, I think, something rather subtler and obscurer, to do with the relationship between Parliament and government.
Lobby journalists have an intimate, womblike relationship with Parliament. They live in its warm airless corridors and recesses, they take nourishment from its innumerable licensed premises. Some of them scarcely see the light of day. As a result, they understand Parliament and its members. They are quick to detect the slightest nuance or hesitation or implica- tion. When a great parliamentary row or scandal surfaces, such as the Westland affair, they are brilliant. And it is West- land, not inflation or unemployment that remains for them the political saga of the day — or was until the Jeffrey Archer Affair, or Non-Affair, as the case may be. (This column took a jaundiced, not say sniffy view of Mr Archer's appointment at the time, so perhaps it is best to keep mum now and try not to look too smug.) Viewed from the lobby, the world of government, by contrast, seems alien, im- personal, rather boring. Politics is what happens inside the Palace of Westminster, the cockpit of the nation etc.
There is a curious symbiosis between MPs and lobby men, not a mutual admira- tion society exactly, but a certain commun- ity of interest. From time to time, one reads laments that the power of Parliament has declined, that MPs today are mere lobby fodder, and that the lobby has become the lapdog of Downing Street. None of these accusations is true. Both Parliament and the parliamentary lobby remain extremely powerful, like two big cats, now rather long in the tooth, a trifle mangy and sometimes comatose but still capable of slapping down intruders or usurpers with a single blow of the paw.
The list of Parliament's achievements in recent years is formidable, if largely nega- tive. MPs can claim credit for successfully obstructing reform of everything from the House of Lords to the Sunday trading laws. About the only thing they can claim to have started is the Falklands War. The list of scoops and disclosures secured by the lobby is pretty impressive too. How much any of them has to do with the traditional duty of Parliament — to control the purse strings—is more debatable: But we should not be too quick to sentimentalise the past. By the 1860s, Bagehot had already con- cluded that the House of Commons 'has long ceased to be the checking, sparing, economical body it once was. It now is more apt to spend money than the minister.'
Ministers find it hard to overcome their terror of the chamber that bred them. They tend to interpret their responsibility to Parliament as not only prime — which constitutionally it is — but also exclusive which it isn't. Bolstered by the belief that it is easier to sell a tricky policy to the lobby journalists, who will have little specialist knowledge of or interest in the subject, they find themselves dragged down im- mediately away from the policy's merits, into the 'political implications' — e.g. how many marginal seats will the policy risk.
I suspect that many a Minister would do better if he made a rule to explain his intentions on the record and outside the adversarial atmosphere of Parliament as often as possible. Good government is weakened by succumbing to the secretive embraces of the lobby — who are of course a first-rate bunch of chaps.
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