Last week, I went to a party in No. 10 Downing Street to relaunch its official website. In his speech of welcome, the Prime Minister said something quite bold. Because of Freedom of Information (FoI), he explained, officials and ministers are increasingly reluctant to put on paper what they actually think. He is right. If you know that your views may suddenly be released early to the wider world, your confidence, in both senses of that word, is undermined. So you express your views orally (which means that they can never be part of wider, formal discussion within government), or not at all. As with so many efforts at open government, the effect is perverse. Toiling away at the Thatcher papers in the government archives, I am often struck by the frankness of internal communication in the 1980s. Policy disagreement is strong and clear, which proves that some trust existed. Mr Cameron says he is trying to set an example by writing what he thinks on the memos he receives. That is good, both for government and for history, but it is one thing for the boss to take that risk, another for the underlings.
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Part of the reason for a higher level of trust was technological. Mrs Thatcher was the last Prime Minister never to see an email while in office. Her papers were collected and filed according to a simple principle which anyone can understand — these are the papers that landed on her desk. Obviously, they were quite widely copied within government, but on nothing like the scale or with the speed of emails. The old principle of filing cannot be followed now. Anyone who tries to write about Tony Blair as I am writing about Mrs Thatcher will have far too much material about what does not matter and far too little about what does. The history of how we are governed in the 21st century will be far more chaotic and obscure than that of the 20th.
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This affects not only history, but also actual methods of government. In his new novel Uncommon Enemy (Simon and Schuster), Alan Judd — this paper’s motoring correspondent, among his many talents — has his hero Charles Thoroughgood return to MI6 (now, fictionally, the Single Intelligence Agency) from retirement: ‘The change in record-keeping was striking. The old paper system, rigid, cumbersome, labour-intensive and tedious, had been enforced by middle-aged women in registries who mercilessly pursued careless young officers for failing to sign off minutes, complete contact notes or file telegrams. Often needlessly duplicated, it had at least the advantage that it always told the story … narrative disappeared when files went electronic.’ Charles’s chief, the last of the old school, says, ‘We have become an intelligence service which no longer knows what it knows, and has no way of recovering what it once knew, which is a slow suicide.’ Modern government’s lack of institutional memory has technological causes, but its effect is anything but modern: in the exercise of real power we are reverting to the capricious habits of a 17th-century court.
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A letter (‘Dear Customer’) arrives through our front door from the Post Office, offering ‘Important information for your business’ (we aren’t a business). ‘We are very conscious of the tough economic climate you and your customers are facing’, it says, ‘and we are committed to helping you plan ahead. As such, we wanted to let you know about some important price changes that are happening in 2012.’ They are not allowed to say what these changes will be, because Ofcom has not yet completed its ‘public consultation on the new regulatory framework for postal services’. Perhaps a similar delicacy prevents them from saying that the ‘changes’ are increases.
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One must count one’s blessings, and one of mine is that I no longer edit a newspaper. It is such a difficult job nowadays. One has to pretend to be interested in ‘media ethics’. One has to appear at the Leveson inquiry, like poor Paul Dacre on Monday. An even greater difficulty is that it has become much less clear what one ought to give the readers. Last week, the Times filled its whole front page with a splash saying ‘Save Our Cyclists’ and followed it up the next day with a second, ‘The cyclists’ revolt’. Perhaps I am just rebelling against the priggery of the cycling lobby — it would be so much braver to run a campaign called ‘Save Our HGVs’ — but is this really what the front pages of quality newspapers are for? I really don’t know the answer, and nor does anyone else.
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The Annual General Meeting of the Rectory Society, which I chair, heard a really magnificent speech at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, last week by Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Although of Jewish descent through his Ephrussi mother, de Waal’s father, Victor, was Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986, and Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral before that. Edmund’s poetic and funny talk was about what it is like to grow up in such ancient places and in a clerical family. One day, Edmund related, the Chapter invited his father to sit for a portrait. Victor agreed, on condition that he could choose the painter, his fellow Viennese refugee Marie-Louise von Motesiczky. Her condition was that no one should see the portrait before it was unveiled. The unveiling ceremony in Canterbury was a formal affair, with Archbishop Robert Runcie pulling back the red curtain. As he did so, it became clear that she had painted Dean de Waal as a rabbi.
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My thanks to readers who are sending examples of Radio 3 vacuity. The email is letters@spectator.co.uk. The address is ‘Radio Twee’, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. The winner gets a DVD of Handel’s Serse. When I switched on last, I heard a listener explaining at some length how she had been converted to opera by listening to Madam Butterfly nine years ago. That was the sum of the musical information conveyed. She did not remember who had sung the role.
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