Boris’ bonhomie masks the government’s Kafkaesque secrecy

In 1996, I was an investigative reporter working in the newsroom of The Independent. There was great excitement because the report of the four-year long Scott inquiry into the sale of arms to Iraq was due to be published. I’d covered the entire affair since the beginning, when the directors of a Coventry specialist machine tools manufacturer called Matrix Churchill were prosecuted by Customs and Excise for exporting weapon parts to Iraq without permission. The trial collapsed when a former minister, the late Alan Clark, admitted he had been “economical with the actualité” about what he knew regarding government licences to Iraq. Tory ministers had relaxed the ban in 1988 without telling Parliament. When they were later challenged, they told Parliament there had been no change.

The ensuing political storm over the misleading of Parliament resulted in the judicial inquiry conducted by Sir Richard Scott, a Lord Justice of Appeal. Finally, his findings were to be made public. We were told that publication would mark a first – the report and support documents would be available on CD-ROM. We sent a bike messenger to Whitehall to get the disks. When we inserted the disks for the documentary evidence into the computer, there was the occasional piece of text, then nothing. Great swathes had been blacked out, redacted, for “security” reasons. I recall sitting in front of a screen and clicking and clicking over mostly blank pages.

In my mind I could see an official, a character like Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Minister, chuckling away. They were, literally, having a laugh: proudly raising the bar on transparency, being seen to apply the latest technology, and in fact, disclosing barely anything.

Clark was himself only adding a personal twist to the phrase used by Sir Robert Armstrong, the then Cabinet Secretary, in the earlier Spycatcher legal action who said he was being “economical with the truth” in his evidence aimed at trying and preventing publication of a former MI5 agent’s memoirs.

The reason Scott laboured for so long was that he could not extract from government departments the documents he required. It was not a surprise: the Ministry of Defence had not passed on to Customs and Excise the shift in policy; the security services would not share what they knew with anyone. The Economist commented that “Sir Richard exposed an excessively secretive government machine, riddled with incompetence, slippery with the truth and willing to mislead Parliament.”

In his report, Scott described the nature of government thus: “The main objectives of governments are the implementation of their policies and the discomfiture of opposition; they do not submit with enthusiasm to the restraints of accountability … governments are little disposed to volunteer information that may expose them to criticism … The enforcement of accountability depends largely on the ability of Parliament to prise information from governments which are inclined to be defensively secretive where they are most vulnerable to challenge.”

That defensive secrecy extended to publication of the 1,800-page report and management of the immediate aftermath. Not only were sections heavily redacted but we were sent a “press pack”. It contained only the few positives in the report. For the largely Conservative-supporting media that had not followed the affair closely and had tight deadlines to hit, this was manna from heaven – they put up the selection of quotes and so it appeared as though the government had been cleared. Only proper scrutiny proved this not to be the case – by which time the story had already aired and people were mentally moving on.

Ministers criticised were given advance copies and instructed as to how to defend themselves. The person charged with leading the Opposition response was the late Robin Cook. He was given just two hours to study and digest the million-plus words – he was supervised throughout and not allowed to make copies – ahead of the Commons debate on Scott’s conclusions.

Cook did a brilliant job. Labour, though, was scuppered. Sir John Major, the Prime Minister, announced that a vote “against” the government would effectively be a vote of “no confidence” while a vote “for” would be clearing ministers of any blame. Not surprisingly, Major’s wielding of the baseball bat worked – the government carried the day, albeit by the narrowest of margins: 320 to 319.

It was a squalid episode. Twenty-five years later, we like to suppose this is a very different time, of transparency and openness. That, certainly, is what this government wants us to believe. We’re touchy-feely now; everything is within limits; ministers and officials seemingly put great store by wishing us to know. The current Prime Minister loves to be regarded for his bonhomie, for being on the side of the people, for his straight-talking.

The reason I returned to Scott was the publication of another report, this time by openDemocracy.

Just mention of that name may provoke sneers among readers of a Tory, government-cheering persuasion. This, though, is not a left-leaning document. It’s an examination of this government’s record in preserving secrecy. It shows that just 41 per cent Freedom of Information requests were granted in full – the lowest proportion since records began in 2005. Some 13 per cent received late replies, the highest number since 2009. Worst offenders in both categories, partial and delayed, were the Cabinet Office, Foreign Office and Department for International Trade.

The report details what can only be described as Kafkaesque behaviour – this in sharp contrast to Boris Johnson’s public persona. Last year, for example, the Tory MP, David Davis, asked for details of research carried out by polling companies commissioned by the Cabinet Office and paid for out of taxpayers’ money which may have been used to give the government a “political advantage”. It was on subjects like public attitudes to Brexit and the UK Union. Davis’s request was refused, on the grounds that something relating to policy formulation was exempt. Then, right before the time limit for reply, a new, different reason was given, which was that to provide an answer would take longer than the 24 hours remaining under the Freedom of Information Act. The official watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, or ICO, said the switch, while “most unsatisfactory” was technically permissible, Davis was kicked back to square one, to begin all over again, some eight months after lodging his plea.

The study describes the working of the “Clearing House”, the Orwellian-sounding unit run by the Cabinet Office, that monitors information requests deemed to carry “high political sensitivity” or of “significant wider interest” from journalists and campaigners. What’s clear is that the unit’s role is hands-on and wide-ranging, drafting departmental replies – including requests for information on the Grenfell tragedy and the infected blood scandal – and contributing to ICO appeals and complaints.

One tactic much favoured by the Johnson administration is “stonewalling” – simply not supplying an answer at all. This has been deployed repeatedly in relation to COVID-19. One researcher wanted copies of invoices to the NHS from private health companies under the contracts struck between the firms and government to use their hospitals during the first wave of the pandemic. His suspicion was that many of the beds were not taken up – that was my impression, also, based on what I’d seen and heard in relation to my local private hospital in South-West London. The NHS blanked him. Between 2016 and 2020 says the ICO, stonewalling was used 116 times by public bodies, on 40 occasions by the NHS.

Even if answers are given, they can be delayed. Government departments repeatedly claim “public interest” as a reason for not replying on time.

Johnson governs by polling and focus groups. They determine his priorities. In which case, he should know that a poll of 2,000-plus people conducted by Savanta ComRes shows that 73 per cent of the public believe government transparency is important for the health of UK democracy. It’s not a left thing: 83 per cent of Tory voters are more likely to believe it is important, compared with 76 per cent of Labour supporters. The suspicion must be that this is one area where, for once, he will not be swayed by public opinion and instead he will choose to continue to nod in the direction of Alan Clark.