Political Commentary

Beyond the threshold of pain

Ferdinand Mount

Sir Charles Villiers, chairman of the British Steel Corporation: 'I do not think that it could be said that we were blind to the danger. I really do not see how you could say that of us. I must confess I have been wounded by that.'

Mr Eric Varley, Industry Minister: 'What I think I was disturbed about right through this whole process was the impression that had been given that I had not co-operated With this committee, that I had deliberately withheld information. . . I think perhaps that did upset me a very great deal'.

The pain is real. These are not the sham umbrages, the artificial oohs and aahs, the ouches and yaroos of party warfare on the floor of the Commons. Opponents in this struggle do not stroll out of the Chamber arm-in-arm. The wounds draw blood and leave nasty little smears in the corridors. Ministers let it be known that their backbench colleagues on the Select Committee are disappointed men, second-raters who never made office and are now only out to catch the headlines. Civil servants and steel executives complain about being interrogated by a bunch of amateurs. Senior government sources say that the Select Committee's latest report on the financial forecasts of British Steel is studded with misinterpretations, inaccuracies and even invention.

Why such pain? What is it about the BSC controversy which has so particularly abraded the sensitivities of tough public men? At first glance, the immediate point at issue seems more likely to provoke a cynical sigh than real anguish. It belongs to the Well-He-Would-Wouldn't-He class of controversy, or Rice-Davies Syndrome. The question is: when Gerald Kaufman, Mr Varley's No. 2 at the Industry Department, got up in the Commons on 22 July last year to invite the taxpayer to lend BSC another billion quid, did he or did he not give us the best available information about the appalling financial mess?

The question seems all the more academic now that the Government is coming back to the Commons for even more public money for BSC and the battle continues on familiar party lines. The Tories want to save money. Labour MPs want to save jobs. And there is open war between those left-wingers who sit on the Select Committee like Neil Kinnock and Russell Kerr and those like Eric Heffer and Dennis Skinner who accuse them of betraying the working class and collaborating with the Tories.

But all this is the normal stuff of politics. This is not why Messrs Varley and Villiers are so aggrieved, not to speak of their understrappers. What they cannot tolerate is the intrusion into the parts of their public life which they would prefer to keep private.

No politician minds discussing what he and his party did five years ago or what they hope to do next year. But the present is a restricted area. And the nearer a Select Committee gets to grilling politicians at length about policies that are still evolving and events that are still in train, the more insistently it demands to see the internal memos, options and forecasts, the more pain it causes and the more it unsettles governments and shakes ministers' selfconfidence.

For that very reason, the Select Committee's inquiry into British Steel remains one of the most exciting and encouraging political developments for years. At what seems like a single jump, it has moved from excavating the dead past to striking into quivering flesh. The cry of anguish from the victims is heartfelt. Parliament is at last beginning to use some of its available machinery to scrutinise the executive in depth and detail. And the glorious thing is that the machinery cannot be slowed down or stopped by government order. The Select Committee's supreme power is that it controls its own business. Once appointed at the beginning of a parliament or session, it rumbles on for the duration. It may pause to dig furiously over a small area or it may rush on ahead in the hope of catching the Government before it is too late to change the direction of policy. Even the little pantomime of Sir Charles Villiers and the Sergeant-at-Arms was a sign that the Committee had struck paydirt . It was not so much that it had uncovered a cover-up about the extent of BSC's losses but rather that the evidence of the inner workings of the Corporation and of its relations with the Department of Industry revealed a trail of false starts and false premises, of dithering and equivocation which demonstrated a total lack both of public accountability and of managerial competence.

Not unnaturally, the executive has rallied to protect its own. We are told that the Select Committee in pandering to the curiosities of the mob has raised Serious Constitutional Questions and that it should stop digging until these questions have been resolved. Government-minded persons — Mr Reginald Maudling to name but one — begin writing letters to The Times, the general drift of which is: 'Look here, this probing of the bureaucracy may sound all very nice and open and democratic but it could be the thin end of the wedge.' Yet is not a wedge with a thin end (luckily something often found in wedges) just what we need?

And as with all constitutional advance the question is less likely to be resolved by delicate ratiocination than by the experience of conflict or, in this case, by a Select Committee seeing just how far it can go.

The argument that if select committees were more powerful they would become publicity-hungry cabarets is equally feeble.

Sustained, detailed and often laborious questioning of a witness by half-a-dozen MPs is sometimes dull, sometimes not, but it is very rarely dramatic, certainly far less dramatic than a punch-up in the Chamber of the Commons. The proceedings are courteous, diffuse and circuitous: 'If I may return for a moment to the question'.. . 'would you perhaps care to restate your position'. . 'would it be fair to say'. . . Nor is it true that it is the chairman who makes or breaks the committee. Mr Eddie Wainwright, the chairman of the Steel sub-committee, is a bumbling Yorkshireman who makes much less impression than any of his colleagues. It is the younger MPs Tim Renton and Michael Marshall for the Tories and Neil Kinnock and Mike Thomas for Labour, who lead the questioning and forge the common inquisitorial viewpoint. And it is not true either that the party whips tend to put duds or lickspittles on select committees. The four MPs just mentioned are all clever, persistent and not lacking in conviction.

The objection that naive backbenchers fall under the spell of the committee's specialist advisers has little to be said for it, either. True, at the beginning the MPs are often pretty ignorant — as Tim Renton has admitted the Steel committee was — and may have to be guided by their advisers to interesting areas as well as briefed about the terrain, but the prolonged questioning is itself a process of education. Simply by concentrating on a subject over a long period, a mediocre MP can blossom into a competent inquisitor. It is not the individual quality of backbenchers that prevents them from effectively scrutinising the executive. It is the system which restricts them to brief, melodramatic interventions in the Chamber and which disillusions so many of those who have not secured the questionable delights of office. MPs even look different when sitting on select committees, more like bright-eyed terriers than whipped curs.

Those who resist the advance of parliamentary select committees claim to be themselves dedicated parliamentarians. Mr Michael Foot argues that a select committee creates a privileged class of MP with powers of inquisition and access to information denied to unselected MPs. If select committees become too powerful then power will drain away from the Chamber to those nominated fractions. But the reality is that a powerful and well-informed select committee actually returns power to the House. Why otherwise is the Government so desperately scared of holding a debate on the Select Committee's report on the steel industry? Because for once MPs might know what they are talking about.