POLITICS

Methinks the Attorney-General doth protest too much

FERDINAND MOUNT

By now, Mr Justice Powell must be feeling a little like His Lordship in Hilaire Belloc's 'Obiter Dicta', who rises energeti- cally to protest against yet another prece- dent:

I've strained all my powers For some thirty-six hours To unravel this pestilent rot.

At which the whole Court rises and sings in chorus: Your lordship is sound to the core,

It is nearly a quarter to four.

We've had quite enough Of this horrible stuff And we don't want to have any more!

We have heard a great deal about how foolish Sir Robert Armstrong's evidence is making Mrs Thatcher look and about how mischievously Mr Kinnock is behaving. But I am bound to say the lawyers don't look much better. The much praised Mal- colm Turnbull is hamming it a bit and wasting a good deal of the court's time, while, as for Sir Michael Havers, he looks to me increasingly like an Attorney- General in a well-made play of the old sort — somewhere between late Pinero and early Rattigan. He is such an agreeable cove, his conviviality so splendidly undim- med by his massive heart operation, that it seems unkind to draw attention to his behaviour which is, well, somewhat thes- pian, not to say histrionic.

In the Westland affair, it will be recalled, he took the most frightful umbrage on behalf of his junior, the Solicitor-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew. Never had anything quite so appalling happened as the leaking of the latter's opinion, and unless a leak inquiry was held instantly he would have the police into Downing Street.

In the MI5 affair last week, he was equally indignant that he should be thought to have advised the Government to prosecute Peter Wright and not to prosecute Chapman Pincher — a decision in which he had taken no part. Sir Michael seemed to have little objection to his decisions or advice or lack of advice being made publicly known. He just wanted the newspapers to get it right, and he was furious with Sir Robert and Mrs Thatcher's office for misleading them, intentionally or unintentionally. And he let it all hang out and had to be calmed down by the Prime Minister.

Which only shows, in a backhand way, what this column has been arguing all along, fortified by Professor Edwards's work on The Law Officers of the Crown: that there is no unique confidentiality attaching to the opinions of Law Officers. Nor should there be. The legality or otherwise of government actions is of consuming public interest. It does, how- ever, mean that the whole Westland ker- fuffle was utterly bogus. But then I expect you knew that already.

The latest storms seem to me just as phoney. Why was Sir Michael Havers not asked to attend the Prime Minister's meet- ing which took note of the decision not to prosecute Mr Pincher? Because the proofs of the book had been obtained by illegal means? Perhaps. But also, since the secur- ity services were not eager to prosecute and their estimate of the damage done to national security would be vital to any prosecution, there was not much point in bothering him. It would be peculiar to expect the Attorney-General to attend every meeting in Whitehall which decides not to take legal action. After his dotty and doomed application to the Irish courts for a ban on an English spy book, requests for his advice may be less frequent anyway.

Nor is the inconsistency between the Pincher and the Wright cases especially suspicious or murky. There is an obvious distinction to be drawn between a book written by a journalist and one written by a former official who has signed the Official Secrets Act.

Even if Mrs Thatcher has made a com- plete horlicks of the Wright case, her purpose is honest and entirely defensible: to scare the daylights out of intelligence officers and make them obey the rules. A better deterrent, it seems to me, would be to pay them larger pensions and make it clear that those pensions would be forfeit the moment they breathed a word to anyone about their MI5 work.

Rules . . . that seems to me to be the keyword and the one which always draws Mrs Thatcher into the thick of these matters. For I think there is a sort of consistency to be found in her approach to secrets and spies — and it is one which the intelligence world hates because it spells death to their anarchic habits as surely as Paraquat to dandelions. Even in the GCHQ embarrassment, the best defence of Mrs Thatcher was that the clear, uni- form rules of conduct she wanted for Cheltenham were not consistent with trade union membership. Everyone else was hoping for an agreeable fudge. Ditto with Blunt. It he could not be prosecuted, he could at least be exposed in a full statement to Parliament. Ditto with Wright. He had broken his oath by talking to Pincher. He was about to break it again by publishing under his own name. No matter how many thousands of miles away he might be, he must be punished.

Old-school clubmen unite with open- government addicts to denounce this approach as unworkable, literal-minded and lacking in nous. On the contrary, it seems to me precisely the sophisticated, knowing attitude towards the intelligence service which leads to collusion and even- tually to corruption. President Reagan's embroilment in the arms for Iran/ Nicaragua scandal illustrates this thesis so perfectly that one can only stand awestruck before this truly monumental Sistine Chapel among blunders. If the Iran enterprise had had to pass anywhere near the usual channels, it would not have lasted five minutes. The damage that it would do to amost every aspect of US foreign policy would have been too painfully obvious. This leads to my first axiom of secret operations: most such operations become clandestine because they are too silly to be undertaken in the normal way. The brisk and immediate consequence of playing by the rules is that the intelligence- gatherers are downgraded to their proper importance. They lose their place at court, their privileged access. The purpose of removing the Joint Intelligence Committee from the Cabinet Office and placing as its chairman a new and publicly named Direc- tor of Intelligence Services is not to enable a bunch of publicity-seeking MPs to ask him a lot of idiotic questions (and MPs of all parties have this week shown them- selves hopelessly incapable of playing any such part); it is to dislodge the spooks from under the politicians' feet and move them out where they belong, somewhere be- tween the Road Research Laboratory and the Highlands and Islands Development Board. They will do far less harm there and might actually contribute to a clear appre- ciation of the Soviet military threat and the dangers of internal subversion. At present, they are simply a `scandalum' in the original sense, a cause of stumbling.