decision making in foreign policy: learning from history

Decision Making in Foreign PolicyFCO Historians & Oxford University Press Learning From History Seminar

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Foreign & Commonwealth Office Decision Making in Foreign Policy

Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy 21 February 2013

‘Our Historians bring academic rigour, unbiased analysis and institutional memory to this organisation, and, along with our research analysts and economists, they represent the intellectual hub of the organisation’. The Rt Hon William Hague

Contents

Introduction 3

Speakers and chairs: short biographies 4

Introductory remarks 6

• Professor Patrick Salmon, FCO Chief Historian 6

• The Rt Hon Jack Straw, MP 7

Panel 1 - The 1968 decision to withdraw British forces from East of Suez Chair • Sir Geoffrey Adams 9 Speakers • Gill Bennett 9 • Sir Kevin Tebbit 11 • Lord O’Donnell of Clapham 15

Decision Making in Foreign Policy: Six Moments of Crisis FCO

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Panel 2 - Foreign-policy decision making Chair • Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield 27 Speakers • The Rt Hon Lord Butler of Brockwell 28 • Sir Lawrence Freedman 32 • Sir Stephen Wall 35 • The Rt Hon Lord Howell of Guildford 38

Reception

• Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield 47


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Introduction

1. This seminar organised by FCO Historians in collaboration with Oxford University Press was based on Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy published by OUP in February 2013. This book by Gill Bennett, former FCO Chief Historian, shows the complexity of the decision-making process by examining six key decisions, from sending British troops to Korea in 1950 through to sending a task force to the Falklands in 1982. Each decision is set in the context of what ministers could have known at the time, and the competing pressures on them from domestic, economic, personal and political considerations as well as those of foreign policy. The rationale is to reflect on lessons to be drawn by foreign and defence policy makers in Whitehall.

2. FCO Historians have been organising Learning from History seminars to support the FCO Diplomatic Excellence and First Class Foreign Policy work agenda, offering a long-term, policy-relevant perspective on current international issues.

FCO Historians


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Speakers and Chairs

Sir Geoffrey Adams is a member of HM Diplomatic Service, and will take up his new post as HM Ambassador at The Hague later in 2013. He has served as Consul-General in Jerusalem, 2001-3, Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, 2003-5, and as HM Ambassador in Tehran, 2006-9. He was Political Director of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2009-12.

Gill Bennett was Chief Historian of the FCO, 1995-2005, and Senior Editor of Documents on British Policy Overseas. She is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, and A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was part of the research team working on the official history of the Secret Intelligence Service (2007-10). Her publications include The End of the War in Europe (ed., 1996), A most extraordinary and mysterious business: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 (1999), Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (2006) and Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (2013).

The Rt Hon Lord Butler of Brockwell was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, 1988-98, having previously served as Private Secretary to Prime Ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, Principal Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, 1982-85, and Second Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, 1985-87. On retirement he became Master of University College, Oxford, and in 2004 was appointed to chair the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. He is a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and of the Parliamentary and Political Service Honours Committee.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies and Vice-Principal at King’s College, London, Honorary Director of the Centre for Defence Studies and a member of the Iraq Inquiry. He has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the Cold War, as well as commentating regularly on contemporary security issues. His publications include Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (2000), The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (3rd edition 2004), Deterrence (2005) and The Official History of the Falklands Campaign (2005), and an Adelphi Paper on The Transformation in Strategic Affairs (2004). A Choice of Enemies: America confronts the Middle East, won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature.

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield is Attlee Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. He spent his early career as Whitehall correspondent for The Times, the Financial Times and the Economist. Lord Hennessy is the pre-eminent interpreter of the British constitution, cabinet government and intelligence communities. His many previous books include Cabinet (1986), Whitehall (1989), Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992), The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (1995), The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (2000), The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2002), and Having It So good: Britain In The Fifties (2006). His most recent book is Distilling The frenzy: Writing The History Of One’s Own Times (2012).

The Rt Hon Lord Howell of Guildford was Minister of State in the FCO from 2010-12. He held several ministerial posts in Edward Heath’s government, 1970-74, and was Secretary of State for Energy, 1979-81, and for Transport,1981-83, in Margaret Thatcher’s government. From 1987 to 1997 he was Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and was Opposition Spokesperson for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 2000-10. His publications include The Edge of Now (2000) and Out of the Energy Labyrinth (2007).

Lord O’Donnell of Clapham was Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service from 2005 until his retirement in 2011. He joined HM Treasury as an economist in 1979, and served as Press Secretary to the Prime Minister, 1990-94, UK Executive Director at the International


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Monetary Fund and the World Bank, 1997-98, Head of the Government Economics Service, 1998-2003 and Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, 2002-5.

The Rt Hon Jack Straw served as Foreign Secretary, 2001-6. He has been MP for Blackburn since 1979, and also served as Home Secretary, 1997-2001, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, 2006-7, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, 2007-10 and acting Shadow Deputy Prime Minister in 2010. His autobiography, Last Man Standing, was published in 2012.

Sir Kevin Tebbit was Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, 1998-2005. He joined the Ministry of Defence in 1969, and served as Assistant Private Secretary to the Secretary of State, 1973-74, specializing in nuclear strategy from 1976. In 1979 he transferred to the FCO and was posted to NATO, 1979-82 and 1987-88, Ankara, 1984-87, and Washington, 1988-91. He became a Deputy Under Secretary of State in the FCO in 1997, and Director of GCHQ in 1998. He is a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI.

Sir Stephen Wall is currently the official historian of Britain and the European Community. Volume II, From Rejection to Referendum, 1963-75, was published in 2012. As a member of HM Diplomatic Service, his postings included HM Ambassador to Lisbon, 1993-95, and UK Permanent Representative to the European Union, 1995-2000. He was also Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, 1988-90, and to the Prime Minister, 1991-93, and Principal EU adviser to the Prime Minister and Head of the European Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, responsible for coordinating official advice on EU issues, 2000-04. In 2004-05 he was Principal Adviser to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the senior Roman Catholic Archbishop in England and Wales. He is also the Chair of the Council of University College, London. His book A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair was published in 2008.


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Introductory remarks Professor Patrick Salmon

Chief Historian, FCO

Thank you very much for coming, and welcome to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. My name is Patrick Salmon. I am the second person to hold the title of FCO Chief Historian: the first person to do so was, of course, Gill Bennett. It is her work—and specifically her new book, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy—that we are celebrating today. This afternoon’s event is the latest in a series of Learning from History seminars that we have been running in the last three years or so, in order to, as we see it, offer the Foreign Office a long-term and policy-relevant perspective on current foreign policy issues.

However, it is a very different seminar this time. It is a very special occasion because it is also the launch event for Gill’s book, which is being published by Oxford University Press. We have worked closely with OUP and they are generously funding the reception after the seminar; I am glad that many of our friends from OUP are with us today. While I am thanking OUP for their support, I must immediately take the opportunity to thank my colleagues here at the FCO for all the work they have done. Although it is invidious to name anyone in particular, Tara Finn and Umar Khan have both done an awful lot, while the mastermind behind the whole event, as most of you realise, is Dr Isabelle Tombs, so thank you, Isabelle.

In a few minutes, I will hand over to the first of our distinguished guests, the Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, who was the last of the many Foreign Secretaries whom Gill served during her more than 30 years at the FCO, and with whom she worked closely on many issues. Jack will have to leave quite early, but he will have time at least to speak first and maybe listen to a little bit of the discussion.

Before handing over, however, I will read a message from our present Foreign Secretary, who cannot, unfortunately, be with us today, the Right Honourable William Hague:

‘Thank you all for coming to take part in this event. I am sorry I cannot join you. I want to congratulate Gill Bennett on the publication of Six Moments of Crisis, which I look forward to reading myself. Gill has made a huge contribution to the Foreign Office as our Chief Historian for 10 years, a contribution that continues with this book. We faced some significant crises in our first few years in Government, especially the interlocking crises of the Arab Spring, and 2013 looks set to produce even more, with the ongoing conflict in Syria, Iran’s nuclear programme and the Middle East peace process, so there is a lot we can learn from Gill’s book.

That is partly why I am placing much greater emphasis on history in the FCO. Our historians bring academic rigour, unbiased analysis and institutional memory to this organisation, and, along with our research analysts and economists, they represent the intellectual hub of the organisation. I am delighted that we have our Historians now back in the heart of the FCO, in the restored Home Office library. They have contributed historical material for countless speeches, and last year they dug out original copies of the original treaty that created the Durand Line, so that our diplomats could present them to President Karzai of Afghanistan. I will continue to consult them and to use their great abilities very frequently. We must retain, develop and profit from their expertise and in that spirit I thank you all for coming to the FCO today.’

Now, without further ado, I will hand over to the Right Honourable Jack Straw.


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The Right Honourable Jack Straw, MP

Thank you very much indeed. I too would like to congratulate Gill on a brilliant book. As Robin Butler said, if I may quote Robin, ‘it is a page-turner, and you don’t stop’. I apologise for the fact that I am going to have to have to leave at 14.45. I have this day job, Member of Parliament for Blackburn, and I have to get the 15.30 train from Preston.

I. An Absence of Memory

When I joined the Home Office as Home Secretary in 1997, I sought some information about things that I knew had happened in the past, but I was not certain about. I asked for the archivist, or historian, to come and talk to me about this. It turned out that in a previous round of cuts, the archivists and historians had been dispensed with and there was no memory. What I then had to do was to go in for a subterfuge, which was this: there is a brilliant library in the House of Commons, which is not only a library but also a research service. There is one rule, which is that serving ministers may not make requests to the library. I was desperate for this information so I asked my Parliamentary Private Secretary to ask a rookie backbencher to put in this enquiry. Very quickly I got the full historical record that I wanted, but it is an illustration of an absurdly short-sighted set of cuts that occurred right across the domestic Civil Service, which have led to an absence of memory.

Happily, that has not been the case in the Foreign Office, and—like William Hague—I was determined to ensure that Gill and her team were properly resourced. Whether I succeeded I am not entirely sure, but anyway I did my very best to recognise that without a memory this place was almost nothing. I see this book not just as a terrific read about six moments of crisis inside British foreign policy, but as a celebration of the work and the importance of the historians in the Foreign Office.

II. Predicting the future and accountability

Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. One of the problems that political decision makers face, but I suspect others do too, is the simple truth that you are making decisions forward. You have to make a decision about one matter alongside all sorts of other things that are happening at the same time. You are bereft of an ability —which is possessed in this country by journalists—to look into the future. You are never certain exactly what is going to happen. Inevitably, because you cannot see into the future, unlike these journalists, your information is imperfect, so you do your best. You make a decision and you move on. Years later, for one reason or another, there is then a forensic examination of a decision that you took one afternoon. Hours—days—are spent forensically examining this decision making to see whether you got it right or wrong

I think that is important, because there has to be accountability for decisions and we have to learn from them. However, what is lacking currently in the culture of journalism we have in this country—and to a degree the culture of historians as well—is an understanding that contextualises the decisions as they were taken and tries to place the historian or the journalist in the shoes of the individual making these decisions. I do not see this, and Gill echoes this in her book, in any sense as an excuse for one’s own particular failings, or the failings of my class of politicians, which of course are legion, because we are human beings; we have feet of clay. But it is kind of absurd to think that any individual would have had a whole day to think about that particular issue. They would have had probably three minutes to think about it, and there will have been plenty of other things going on as well.


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III. The Golden Rules

That brings me to Gill’s two Golden Rules, which come back through the book like a sort of drumbeat. Golden Rule one is that it is ministers who take decisions. That is true. I have nothing but scorn and derision for politicians or ministers who claim that they did not take the decision. This is self-evidently true in foreign policy, but it is also true in domestic policy as well. Of course, there are plenty of decisions that are delegated, which is rather a different point, but the crucial decisions, especially decisions of war and peace, are made by ministers and by nobody else.

The second Rule is that those ministers always think about more than one thing at a time. This is absolutely true. It may be the decision about whether you go to war on Iraq, but meanwhile you have also got about a hundred other things going on at the same time which you have to balance. People question me about what I was dealing with, crucially, in the first six months of 2002 when, as it were, the ground was being laid for the Iraq War, and some key decisions were made. Well, it was not Iraq. Iraq was one of the key issues, but the issue which was completely preoccupying myself and most of the office was not Iraq at all, but India, Pakistan, and the possibility that those two countries were about to embark on a large-scale conventional war, which could turn into a nuclear war. Getting across that sense is of profound importance.

IV. End of Empire

The other remark I want to make about this book comes from the experience of someone of my generation. I can remember in primary school in 1951, the teacher pointing to a map on the wall and talking about what was pink. It was a pre-1947 map, and he did not bother to burden us with the fact that a big chunk of south Asia was no longer pink. We were brought up with a sense of Britain’s imperial role: our island story was what was available and what was given in the church library. Very poignant particularly, and Gill charts this brilliantly in the first five chapters in this book, Six Moments of Crisis, is the trauma that the United Kingdom, as well as the governing classes, was going through in having to adapt to Britain’s changing role. Above all, this ambiguity, as well as this anger, about the role of United States, knowing that we had to stay close to it—and that comes out very strongly in Gill’s analysis of the decision by the United Kingdom Government to put a brigade of our troops into Korea—but also how cross and irritated we were by the duplicity of the Americans, who had spent many years undermining what they saw as our overt colonialism only to replace it by their, as it were, covert imperialism, and doing it for less than entirely honourable motives. Those tensions and the echo of Suez—which, as I actually write in my book,1 lay behind a lot of the decisions over Iraq—are all, I think, absolutely fascinating.

The only one of these crises where I had, as it were, at least a seat in the stalls but not on the stage, was the Falklands. Again, in retrospect, that looks like a very straightforward set of decisions that Margaret Thatcher made, that would ensure we tanked the Argies, she would be seen as a supreme leader and would, a year later, be able to tank the Labour Party as well. I can remember it did not feel like that at all at the time on 31 March and 1 and 2 April 1982: that extraordinary half day House of Commons session where (on a motion for the adjournment, by the way, not a substantive motion) we decided to go to war. I think Gill brings out very acutely just what it feels like. It is actually quite frightening, sometimes. As Gill says over the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher knew that if she failed to act, she could be done for; but also she knew that if she acted and it was a failure, she would also be done for, so what do you do? The fact was that when it started—for sure, there was a Task Force despatched—people were actually rather unclear that this was going to end up with a major war.

1 Jack Straw, Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor (London: Macmillan, 2012).


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V. Conclusion

My final, closing point is this: that alongside some really serious scholarship, there is material in here that I think is just wonderful. Thank you, Gill, for including these things, which I never knew. My favourite vignette is on page 20, where in a discussion about challenging communism it says this: ‘John Lewis employees’ (bearing in mind what a sacred place John Lewis now holds in our lives) ‘faced dismissal if they would not sign an anti-communist declaration.’ Now, I never knew that, but I am going to ensure that a wider audience does. Thank you very much.

PANEL 1: The 1968 decision to withdraw British forces from East of Suez

Sir Geoffrey Adams, KCMG

My job, ladies and gentlemen, is simply to introduce the author, as we must call her this afternoon, followed by Kevin Tebbit and Gus O’Donnell in that order. Each is going to speak for up to 10 minutes, to introduce this part of the afternoon’s events, and then I think there should be about three-quarters of an hour for questions and answers, which I will chair. Before I do that, I just want to say two things. The first thing is a warm thank you from all the current practitioners, of which I am one, in this building. Thanks to all of you for coming. Thank you particularly to Patrick Salmon and the Historians for all the work they do. They should know how much it is valued by us as well as by everyone else.

The other thing linked to that I wanted to say, was simply to confirm what has been said already by Patrick and others, which is the importance of history to diplomacy as it is practised in this building. Jack Straw has just said something that struck a real chord with me: ‘Without a memory, this place is nothing.’ I think we might paint that up in large letters somewhere. It is absolutely true, as you have heard from the current Foreign Secretary, whose Parliamentary Private Secretary is in the room. He, like his predecessor, encourages us strongly to use history for policy-making, and ideally to learn from it. I see this seminar as part of that mission. I just wanted to make that point from the perspective of the current practitioners.

Without further ado, it is over to Gill.

The decision to withdraw from East of Suez, 1968

Gill Bennett, OBE Thank you, Geoffrey. I would just like to thank everybody here for coming. Thank you very much in particular to Jack Straw for making the time to come and speak to us beforehand, because I know he has got to dash off. I am extremely grateful to him, to all the speakers and to everyone here.

I. East of Suez and beyond

I chose the 1968 chapter to focus on for our first panel this afternoon, because, of all the six in the book, I found it in some ways the most powerful, even though at first glance it might seem to have less contemporary resonance than some of the others. For example, the chapter on the application to join the Common Market, as it was then called, or the Falklands, are both issues, as you are all well aware, that have a great deal of contemporary resonance at the moment. It is true


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that the nuclear debate and defence are still very much hot topics, but it was not that that really caught my eye. It was the question of Britain’s world role, to which Jack alluded, and the fact that the particular decision to withdraw British forces from East of Suez, and by extension from the Middle East, by the end of 1971 actually seemed to go against the normal rules, if you like, of British foreign policy, which had been more or less followed since the Second World War. The first was basically to fit in, on the whole, with what the Americans wanted. As Jack said, the decision to send a brigade to Korea was very much that. The American Government really did not want us to withdraw from East of Suez, or certainly not in that short timeframe.

The second rule was to maintain Britain’s global role. Now, although it is true that the Government still considered Britain a global power, even after the decision to withdraw from East of Suez, nevertheless having no permanent forces stationed East of Suez was, in fact, a major contraction of previous obligations. That was a change, together with the idea of keeping out of the war in Vietnam, not acceding to American requests to give any more practical help, although of course Harold Wilson was involved in mediation.

Harold Wilson seems to me to be the absolutely key figure here in this episode. In fact, when working on this chapter I was lost in admiration for the way he handled the whole thing, because it seemed to me the way he handled the Cabinet was absolutely masterly, politically. The way he sent Roy Jenkins in ahead to fight the battles, slipping in at the last moment with the decisive argument, and being the one who would, if necessary, make a small concession—but always ending up with what he wanted in the first place. It seems to me that that the way that Harold Wilson handled this gruelling set of Cabinet meetings was really an absolute master class in politics. Eight meetings in 11 days—I think they lasted for 32 hours—is a lot for any Cabinet. After all, we were not at war at the time. But Wilson was determined to press on, getting to the end, and the process was in fact very productive.

II. Suggested themes

Figures of continuity

I would like to suggest a few themes that perhaps members of the seminar might wish to discuss later. One issue relates to Harold Wilson as a figure of continuity. He had, after all, been a minister in Attlee’s Labour Government after the war. Indeed, George Brown and Jim Callaghan had also been junior ministers, but Harold Wilson had actually been a Cabinet Minister, and he is a great figure of continuity. There are other figures of continuity in this book, in particular Alec Douglas-Home and, indeed, Harold Macmillan. I think it is interesting to explore what difference that makes, when you have ministers in a Cabinet who have done it before. It may not be the same job.

Working effectively in adversity

Secondly, I would like to allude to the observation made by Barbara Castle in her diary during this gruelling set of meetings in January 1968. She said: ‘Perhaps we really only function as a Cabinet when we have failed and further retrenchment is necessary. If we only spent a quarter of our energy, time and cohesiveness in working out a strategy for success, we should be in a very different position now.’2 It seems to me that is an interesting comment, which one can see at points echoed in Alastair Campbell’s diaries when they are talking about the Blair Government, sometimes saying ‘When we are up against the wall we work really well; why can’t we do it when we’re actually supposedly on a roll?’ I think it would be quite interesting to explore that a bit further.

2 Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1964-70 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 353.


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Engaging the public

The other point is the question of engaging the public. Richard Crossman noted in his diary how surprised he was that at a time when Britain was really up against it economically—and after all this series of Cabinet meetings is embarked upon to meet demands from the International Monetary Fund in the aftermath of devaluation of sterling, which for some ministers had been a major humiliation—actually, the public seemed to like it. They liked to see the Cabinet meeting eight times in 11 days. They liked to feel that everybody was getting stuck in, even though things were bad, and of course, it spawned odd offshoots like the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign and so on. Crossman noted in his diary that the increased publicity did not make people say, ‘Well here’s a fine mess you’ve got us into,’ but actually increased public engagement. I thought that would be something interesting to talk about as well.

No single issues

I am very glad that Jack liked my two Golden Rules. They may seem simplistic, but any of you here who give talks to students and others will realise that they are by no means taken as read. There are lots of people who think it is not ministers who actually do not really take decisions; but a lot of other people. On the basis of all the work I have done in my career, I do not believe that, and I wanted to make that clear. Also, on the question of how much any minister in any Department has to deal with at one particular time, one might say it is extraordinary that ministers manage to get anything done at all. Obviously they are exceptional people, and that is why they can, but I do think it is important that everybody understands that there are no single issues.

I used to give a talk to postgraduate students about one week in the life of Ernest Bevin in December 1945, based on his engagement diary. The entries said only, for example: ’10 a.m. Spanish Ambassador’; there was no detail. But I would go through the diary and say, ‘Well, actually, he saw the Spanish Ambassador at 10 and this is what the issues were, but at 11 he had to see the Polish Ambassador, and these were the issues then, and at 12 he had another appointment, and in the afternoon he was flying to Brussels . . .’ And this was in 1945. If you think what it is like now, with 24/7 media and travel and so on, you can imagine how much more difficult it is.

III. Concluding remarks

I think foreign policy does engage everybody in the country, so I think it is important that as far as possible people understand just how hard it is to do. There are a lot of people here, of course, who have far more direct experience of making policy than I do: I can only write about it. Thank you.

Sir Kevin Tebbit, KCB, CMG Thanks very much. First, let me say Six Moments of Crisis is a fascinating book. It is a wonderful read for anybody who is at all interested in not only the sweep of history it covers, but actually the intricacies of decision making at Government and Cabinet level. Full of praise: I have read it, and if you have not yet, please do.

Secondly, I have no idea why I have been asked to speak on this. It is unsettling, actually, because I am not quite that old. I mean, I joined the Ministry of Defence in 1969 when the decision had already been taken. I realise that I was of a different generation, that of the baby boomer period who grew up in the sixties, who protested against things like the Vietnam War or the Colonels in Greece, or the French Government with 1968 revolutionary fervour. For those of us from that generation, of course, this was a sort of natural thing. We did not think a great deal of it.


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My essay for entry into the Civil Service was ‘Does the Commonwealth have a future?’ In my essay, which I think came fourth in the whole competition, I said that it did, it had a wonderful future–but that was because I was a sort of imperial historian by then. For most people of my generation what happened in 1968 was a relatively natural occurrence, and it was not a big deal. It was the people who had to take the decisions that had the problem.

Remember, theirs was a wartime generation. The people who took these decisions had been born in an Empire. They were there when we still held India. Harold Wilson had resigned over prescription charges in 1951, and here he was in 1968 introducing them again. For the people of that generation, these were huge decisions to be taking. For those of us who were just joining government at that stage, it was relatively straightforward.

I. Contextual observations

A little bit of context: the withdrawal from East of Suez did not seem a straightforward decision at the time either. In 1971, I travelled with the recently-retired Commander-in-Chief Far East, who was a Four Star British Air Force Officer until about 1970, I think. We flew all the way down to Hong Kong, where of course we still had RAF Kai Tak and our Hong Kong obligations. On the island of Gan, in 1972, we still had 800 Air Force people servicing this route all the way up and down. Mainly retreating, of course, but it was still very active. Even after this, we fought a very bloody little war in Oman. As for withdrawal from the Middle East, we still did a great deal there in 1972-73. I was mortared in Salalah, which is in southern Oman, in 1972, so it did not really feel as if we had withdrawn that far. We had put in place the Five Power Defence Arrangements in the Far East to cover our withdrawal, which was quite a clever arrangement. We gave up RAF Butterworth, for example, in Malaya; handing it over to the Australians.

We gave up our staff in Singapore. I met Lee Kuan Yew in 1972, and he said, ‘I am very, very angry. When my constituents used to write to me and complain about low-flying aircraft, I said: “The day you should worry is not when you hear them but when you don’t hear them anymore.”’ Again, at the time, it did not seem quite such a radical step, but obviously it was. After the decision had been taken, basically we were no longer evident, not only in terms of troop presence but in terms of carriers. Until this period, the UK was the presence in the Indian Ocean. The Americans were not there. They stopped at the Philippines, quite interestingly, at Subic Bay, because of Vietnam as well. The UK always had two carrier task forces in the Indian Ocean. It was more or less a British sea, which is difficult to imagine now, so the 1968 decision was a big change.

II. Over-extended and over-budget

‘Something must be done’

It looks as if the decision ought to have been quite straightforward. After all, we had the huge devaluation crisis, the economic crisis in 1967 which Gus will focus on, so it was pretty obvious that we were over-extended and had to do something. There was a Defence Review in any case and it was agreed that we would withdraw by 1972 from our obligations, although in terms of the Gulf and Middle East it was not so clear. So why was there such a fuss? All this really did was advance that withdrawal to 1971, and in fact there was a deal done anyway which meant that it was towards the end of 1971 rather than the beginning as was originally proposed. There was quite a long time anyway for the decision to take effect, and quite a lot of time to put in place things like the Five Power Defence Arrangements. Nevertheless, it was hugely difficult, and looking through this history one cannot help trying to find analogies–false ones, probably; not models, but analogies–in terms of today’s political scene. You cannot help finding comparisons, it is always fun. When you look at the quality of the people taking the decisions in this book–Wilson, Brown,


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Callaghan, Healey, Jenkins–you ask yourself: do we have people of that calibre today in the political environment? I simply ask the question.

The need to cut

Secondly, there are a lot of strange things in this episode that ring true. Whenever you have a spending problem the Cabinet are always united about the need to cut, but each individual spending minister fights to the end to preserve his own bit of the budget. It is always the case. You see this very classically in this example in 1968, with Healey and the Foreign Secretary–and indeed the Commonwealth Secretary–fighting all they could, fighting rearguard actions, saying: ‘Well, we need to bring in the Americans and consult them further . . . we need to do a tour to the Far East and consult around to make sure this is acceptable.’ All they were talking about was a year’s difference, but even so it caused a furore in political terms.

Cuts across the board

It is interesting, as well–I cannot help throwing this out–that when they realised they had to cut, they cut across the board. It is easier if you have to make domestic savings at the same time as you are making foreign policy savings, because that makes the pill much more palatable all round. Nothing is off limits. Harold Wilson, of course, was the man who had left the Cabinet over prescription charges in 1951, but actually imposed them in 1968. A man who did that will find it relatively easy to insist on the withdrawal from East of Suez according to a timescale. Incidentally, they also cut the aid budget at the time when they had to cut other things. I could not help thinking of the analogy there.

Equipment consequences

There are lots of issues that are redolent of today. One is that whenever you have to take a really drastic defence decision, you tend also to have to associate it with a big equipment decision. That is the way defence is: big projects with long lead times. The equipment decision on this occasion concerned the F-111 Fighter Bomber. We had already cancelled the TSR-2; we had already decided we could not do it alone as a UK programme, and decided to have an American version, the F-111. Now we decided we could not do that either. Actually, the real effect was that never again would Britain have fixed wing aircraft operating from aircraft carriers. That is the real equipment consequence of this decision. These big political decisions about defence, security and foreign policy usually involve a big bit of equipment as well, and that was certainly the case on this occasion. Because the figures are so large, they are the ones you can use, if you are a shrewd Prime Minister, to bring home the implications of what the cost penalties are.

III. Factors affecting Harold Wilson’s management of the decision

The Americans

Why was it possible to manage the issue as well as Harold Wilson did and get a result in those circumstances? Firstly, the Americans were unusually manageable at that point, because they had just made domestic savings themselves. They had cut back quite a lot on their expenditure in Europe, for armed forces in Europe but also in things like foreign investment and bank lending to non-Americans. This made it a little easier for Harold Wilson to say ‘Well, if that’s what they are doing for themselves, we are just following suit. We have to take similar measures at home, and that includes our presence in the Far East.’


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Public opinion

Secondly, his management of public opinion was, I think, very shrewd. Before 1945, what people have called ‘the three Ps –public opinion, propaganda and politics–did not intrude hugely on taking decisions about defence and security, but they certainly did after 1945. The management of this was very clear. Firstly, Vietnam was an unpopular war, and people asked why we should continue to be as embroiled as we had been in global policing roles. Secondly, what it is not actually in Gill’s book but was part of the decision, after the Indonesian Confrontation had ended in 1966 (which of course threatened Malaya and Singapore, and the idea of the Communists moving up), it was much easier to take these decisions than it would have been earlier. I do not know if the 1968 decision could have been taken, or rather I am not sure that the 1967 Defence Review could have happened the way it did, had Confrontation still continued. But the ending of the Indonesian confrontation, which not many people think about these days, did make all of these things much easier to do.

The Chiefs of Staff

I have talked about public opinion. That was very cleverly managed, and most of it was against staying East of Suez. There is some discussion in the book about the armed forces, and an interesting comment from Denis Healey, saying ‘I sometimes felt that I had learnt nothing about politics until I met the Chiefs of Staff’. There are also comments that the Chiefs just wanted to continue to serve in warm places and have a comfortable life, all of which is sort of partly true. My own experience of the Chiefs of Staff is that I admire them hugely, and it is not as simplistic as all this.

I would say that in 1967-68, the Chiefs of Staff were very big beasts indeed. In a sense, if you served in one of the three services, you did not know anything about the others. These were big, separate silos–three times as big as our armed forces are these days–and they were very powerful men. In 1972 or 73, I remember the new ADC of the Chief of Defence Staff walking in to the private office of Lord Carrington, holding a tray with a cup and saucer, milk, two sorts of sugar and cream saying ‘We keep taking this in to Lord Hill-Norton and he keeps saying “Fool! Take it away.” We don’t know what we’re doing wrong. What do you think?’ We looked at the tray, could not see anything wrong with it. Everything was there, all of the options, so we sent the poor guy back in again to Admiral Lord Hill-Norton, and he had to say: ‘We want to get it right for you but we don’t know what’s wrong, sir.’ And he said, ‘Fool! I always take it in a fluted cup.’ Now, that is the sort of people you were dealing with. These were pretty frightening animals. The Chief of Defence Staff used to send his staff to the lift shaft–irrespective of Lord Carrington, who was only the Secretary of State for Defence and Chairman of the Conservative Party, but irrespective of that–in order to hold the lift, physically, for Lord Hill-Norton to go into it, even if it meant the Secretary of State could not use it. This was the sort of power these guys had. These little anecdotes are often more powerful than anything else in bringing home just how difficult these individuals were.

To their credit, the problem that all Chiefs of Staff find–and this is true still today–is that they generally find that they are called upon to deliver armed forces capability at short notice, when everything is required right then by politicians who do not understand that in order to generate the spike of military capability, you need to sustain a high level of training and capability, logistics and all of that. It is like an iceberg: only a little bit of it shows above the water, but you need to sustain what is underneath the water. That is the real reason the Chiefs of Staff get so upset about the 1968 decision. According to the book, the Chiefs of Staff seemed disinterested in the politics and were only interested in their own people. That is probably how it seemed at the time, because they were not interfering. They already had a 1967 Defence Review, and had already accepted it. I always find this idea of the military looking after themselves despite the political reality more simplistic than things are in reality. In practice, there is always a bit of ‘The Army likes to keep up its numbers because it likes to keep up its numbers.’ Of course, that is true, but broadly speaking the Chiefs of Staff are people who try to do their duty, but actually do have to sustain a large infrastructure in order to be able to meet the requirements of the moment.


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IV. Conclusion

There were difficult pressures and problems in 1968. The Americans were at a stage where they could be managed; the situation in the Far East was a lot calmer than it had been (absent Vietnam, which was special and pushed in the direction of withdrawal anyway). But even though it was possible to do this, remember, all that was at issue was bringing forward slightly a decision that had already been taken. Even doing that was extremely painful and difficult, and the government only managed to bring withdrawal forward slightly from the date originally intended. British forces did not leave the Gulf that quickly; they fought another war in the south of Oman, still going in the early seventies, up to the mid-seventies. So we retreated pretty slowly from Empire, but this was probably the most important and painful stage.

Baron O'Donnell, GCB Like Kevin, I have wondered why I have been asked, since most of my career was in the Treasury, but I have worked it out: basically, I was at the centre of the key crisis (which Gill has left out of this book) when England was struggling for championship in Europe. This was of course 29 May 1968, when Manchester United beat Benfica for the Champions League Cup, for those that do not know. After extra time, so it was a bit of a crisis.

I. The Treasury and Foreign Policy

Learning from History

I suspect I am here because of the Treasury. I want to look back on some of the lessons from this excellent book and think about the broader aspects for Cabinet, and for the economics underlying the foreign policy. First of all, the fact of doing this in the context of history, picking up what Jack was saying earlier, and learning from the past, I think is hugely important. When you look at the Treasury recently, during the financial crisis, I think one of the things we realised was we had hardly any staff who had lived through a recession. There were certainly very few who understood about financial crises. I remember explaining to some younger Treasury staff about what the liquidity trap was: this was something we all learned about, but actually it started to get written out of economics lectures at macroeconomic level, as some of them went through their training. It is very important.

Cabinet meetings

Learning from the past is massively important. What can we learn from this 1968 episode? First of all, let us start with Cabinet; as Gill said, eight Cabinets in 11 days. That is quite something: seeing Robin [Butler] there, it is not something I can imagine either of us would have particularly welcomed, eight Cabinets in 11 days. It is very interesting that we have the records from all of those, and that is, in itself, a real strength of the British system: that we actually write this stuff down; massively important. Now, when you look at what is in the book, what struck me were some of the descriptions of these meetings. ‘Sulphurous,’ is one; ‘grim’ was another; and yet the minutes have this wonderful objectivity. It is a great, sensible discussion. I commend the people that were writing this up and making sense of it all, because these were very hectic occasions. There is a late night meeting where they had been over in the House and Harold Wilson brings them back to meet in the Cabinet Room. I have been wondering, and I do not know the answer to this: was the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, there for that meeting? It is recorded, so I presume he was. Does this mean he was always on hand late at night? ‘What kind of a life is that?’ I say to myself. And there is a question mark, seeing Peter Hennessy there: how different might it have been if the Freedom of Information Act had existed at that time? There we are–I leave that in the air.


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Wilson’s Cabinet handling

One day the Cabinet Secretary’s notebooks will emerge on all of this, and that will give us another insight. It was very important, I think, for Cabinet government, that Harold Wilson managed his Cabinet in a certain really elegant, manner, getting things done. The issue that I want to talk about in more detail is the whole devaluation issue. There had been lots of discussions for many years about this whole question of how you manage economic policy with a fixed exchange rate, and how do you end the stop-go crisis that it caused. Wilson worked it out with his Chancellor in the end, and they came to Cabinet in 1967 with a decision that they were going to go for devaluation, having opposed it for quite a long time before. The way Wilson managed Cabinet through this period, and through the whole question of moving out of East of Suez, and then in the end really cleverly got it down to a heated debate about the timing (which to be honest is neither here nor there), and then giving a little on that, I thought, was just, as Gill said, a political master class. If you read this book in conjunction with what I regard as one of the best biographies, Ben Pimlott’s book on Harold Wilson, you get a fascinating read-across as to how Wilson managed these things. Obviously, as a person who regarded himself as an economist, it is really interesting for me, looking at how he managed the politics.

Prevailing economic models

Let us get on to the economics, because you have to ask yourself: ‘Why did this debate about getting out of East of Suez come up in the first place?’ Of course, the prevailing economic model of the time said that the response to stop-go was to devalue and deflate. That is what we were all taught. I was teaching economics at the University of Glasgow in the 1970s, and this was the model. You devalued, you deflated and at the same time, because you wanted the nominal devaluation to become a real devaluation, you had to control prices somehow, so we had incomes policies as well. The theory at the time said you have got to make space for exports; you have to deflate the economy and reduce domestic demand. That is why you had the argument for cuts: £800 million worth of cuts. Are these big cuts? 3.5-4% of public spending. It is not very much, actually, but it felt like it, and ministers were doing some big things. The school leaving age, the prescription charges; these are some big political shibboleths that were going, and similarly on the foreign policy side.

Public spending

When I looked at the numbers, I thought (this is what you get when you ask an economist to talk about it): ‘So, what happens to public spending?’ £19.3 billion, £22.3, £22.7, £25.2–I am beginning to sound like Gordon Brown doing a Budget speech–those are the numbers for public spending. It carries on rising. It certainly goes down a little as a share of GDP, but are these really dramatic changes? They are the kind of numbers that you would regard as not going to make much difference, macro-economically. It is quite interesting when you get to defence spending and talk about making these sorts of cuts, I am sure the first response would have been: ‘It is not going to save any money.’ I remember every single defence discussion I have had has been on the lines of, ‘If you make that cut, we are going to have to bring the troops back here. It is very expensive to house troops in the UK.’ You get all these sorts of arguments, roughly: ‘Whatever you do, you won’t save any money on defence,’ and that is it.

II. The impact of history

Next generation learning

What struck me, and I think what we need to remember in looking at these periods of history, is the need to explain it to people that have not lived through it, that is to the next generation. Explain and, as Jack said, contextualise. When I looked at the defence numbers as a share of spending,


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compared to health and education, and contrasted that with where we are now, the difference is enormous. Defence swamps health and education in the period we are talking about, absolutely swamps them. When you look at it today, health and education are far more important than defence. So it was a world where we had a very different set of public spending priorities. Things do change over time, and so you can understand why some people were looking at the numbers and saying, do we really want to do this? In the light of where we were in 1967-68, did it make any sense for an economy that was in difficulties?

Now, you say, is this relevant to today? Well, come on. In 1967-68, we are talking about an economy where there was a problem of growth and unemployment. There was a big balance of payments deficit and a need to cut back on public borrowing. What has that got to do with today? I ask you! So, I think it is really important that we do learn these lessons of history, and that we look at the processes that we were going through.

Inheriting crazy policies

Again, when you look at the way spending reviews are done, you do come away with a feeling that (a) they are done very quickly; and (b) without asking whether we get a really good zero-based analysis of precisely how we should allocate this total amount of public spending. Are we doing some things which are really crazy? I mean, there are always crazy policies. Governments have crazy policies, and you inherit crazy policies. There is what economists call a great hysteresis in policies: when you have gone somewhere it is very difficult to change back, and you inherit things. I wish we had a way of trying to reduce that amount of hysteresis.

I am getting to a more general point. Let me give you a current example: winter fuel payments. There you are in Spain, on the Costa Brava, getting your money paid directly into your bank account. What a wonderful policy that is! During an election campaign, a Prime Minister is asked, ‘Are you going to keep it?’ and they say ‘Oh, of course I’m going to keep it. It’ll lose votes if I don’t.’ I just think that there should be some way of being able to really confront some of the big issues, and look at how you might reallocate spending.

The effect of public opinion

In 1967 devaluation actually created an opportunity. As Gill said, it is very interesting how public opinion was quite behind the need for some tough decisions to be made, just as I think when the Coalition Government came in, there was a kind of public feeling that ‘Yes, this deficit is big and needs to come down.’ Remember the Labour Government’s budget was for the deficit to be cut in half in four years, so everyone was already contemplating big reductions. It is very interesting that the public were behind that. Of course, the public are behind things in general, but are not as aware of every specific thing. As I listen in the House of Lords to the debate about the welfare changes, I try to cost each individual contribution. Members say: ‘We can’t hurt this lot, we can’t hurt that lot.’ It is a House without a budget, and those speeches are very expensive.

III. Tough choices

Government has to make tough choices, and I think one of the lessons I got from this book was that in times of crisis it does allow you the focus, to actually start doing some really big things. Now and again, you really need that kind of stimulus from outside, to change some of the things that have accrued and have got out of kilter. I think the whole point about our foreign policy in 1968 was that it had got out of kilter with our ability to finance ourselves in a world where our relative economic performance was pretty appalling. At the time, we were going through a period where we had not really thought very hard about growth, and there were lots and lots of economic policy mistakes.


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IV. Conclusion

I really commend this book. Actually, it leads me to a question: if the Foreign Office puts on an event like this and makes use of history, shouldn’t the Treasury follow suit?

Discussion

Sir Geoffrey Adams

Thank you so much to all three panellists for their brilliant and fascinating remarks. Thanks to their discipline, we now have 34 minutes for discussion and debate. What I propose to do, if the panellists agree, is to take three or four comments and questions from the floor, and then invite the panellists to comment or respond if they wish. I would ask that you identify yourself when you speak, just in case not everyone in the room knows who you are. Secondly, please be as brief as possible, because that will allow time for more people to speak?

Patrick Wright (Baron Wright of Richmond)

I would like to make a comment very quickly, based on four aspects of my career. The first is that I was Private Secretary, with Robin Butler next door, to Harold Wilson and then to James Callaghan, dealing, in my case, with foreign affairs and defence. I really just want to comment on Gill’s remark reminding us that Harold Wilson was an ex-Cabinet Minister. Can I remind you that he was also an ex-Civil Servant? He had been a Civil Servant in the war, a point which was sometimes slightly sensitive for him, when Jim Callaghan reminded us all that he had been in the Royal Navy. To comment on Harold Wilson’s handling of his colleagues, it was very remarkable to me, and the same was to some extent true of Jim Callaghan, that he was very rough with his friends and very lenient with his opponents. I say ‘opponents’ because Wilson made it very clear to us in the office that he was strongly in favour of a ‘yes’ vote in the Referendum in 1975, though he did his best to conceal that from his colleagues. He was very rough with close friends like Merlyn Rees, and particularly rough with Roy Jenkins, but very lenient with Benn, Foot and Barbara Castle. To comment on what Kevin Tebbit said, the arch anti-EEC man was Peter Shore, who revelled in imperialism. I have seldom heard such imperialism as emerged from Peter Shore.

The second aspect of my career was that I was the last Deputy Political Resident in Bahrain, therefore responsible for deputising to Geoffrey Arthur for the withdrawal of our forces. Just a reminder, because we have heard quite a lot about how Harold Wilson handled the withdrawal from the Gulf, but of course it was the Conservative Government that decided to reverse that policy, sent a Junior Foreign Office Minister, Goronwy Roberts, to the Gulf to tell all the rulers, to their delight, that we were not going to withdraw after all. A few months later he was sent out again to the Gulf–I think it is one of the more remarkable bits of political bravery that I remember–to tell the rulers that we were withdrawing after all. Remember that it was the Conservative government who took that decision.

A comment on diaries, moving forward to my time as Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS) in this building, when John Major became Foreign Secretary. He came to the Foreign Office from the Treasury, and although I am not in any way belittling the horrendous decisions that he had to take as a Treasury Minister, he was faced on his first day as Foreign Secretary with diaries that contained eight calls in one day from foreign ambassadors, foreign ministers, whatever it was. He was appalled at the fact that we either gave him too little briefing, because simply there was no time, or that we gave him too much and there was no time to read it. He really found it very


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bemusing to become Foreign Secretary and inherit a horrendous diary. I say inherit, but of course he carried on having a horrendous diary for the rest of his time as Foreign Secretary.

I think that is really more than enough. Can I just pick up on Gus’s point about the lack of experience in the Treasury, on the liquidity trap? When I retired in 1991, half the Diplomatic Service had known nothing other than a Conservative Government. This is not the time to go into the problems of the relationships between ministers and civil servants, but there is no doubt at all that a party that is in power for a long time leaves an inheritance of suspicion that all the public service are crypto-Tories or crypto-Socialists, whichever it is.

Jonathan Sinclair, FCO

I would just like to ask a question about collective decision making and crisis. You talked about eight Cabinets in 11 days. Gill, I am afraid I have not read your book yet, but it immediately reminded me of a book I have read, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the succession of meetings that took place in the White House, all documented and recorded in the Kennedy tapes. I wondered whether there was something about the wisdom of crowds: whether the decision-making process was honed by crisis, or by the fact that there were a lot of people in the room.

Peter Hennessy (Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield)

It is very pleasant and very rare to hear nice things said about Harold Wilson, because it has not happened for a while in the historical trade. Tony Blair said this in a public interview as Prime Minister. He said ‘I couldn’t go on; I didn’t want the old model of Cabinet Government, because Roy Jenkins had told me all about it, you see, in the old days. He said under Wilson they went on for days, and I wasn’t going to have that.’ So Tony Blair was able to use this classic example of collective Cabinet decision taking, which you rate so highly, as an alibi for something he did not want to do anyway. It blew back in a malign fashion, in the days when Robin [Butler] was trying to get him to be slightly more collective than his instincts told him to be. Is that right?

Robin Butler (Lord Butler of Brockwell)

A lot more collective.

Sir Geoffrey Adams

Thank you very much. Are there any other comments that panellists would like to make on what we have heard so far?

Sir Kevin Tebbit

It gives me the opportunity to praise one of the really interesting insights, I think, in Gill’s book, which is about Harold Wilson’s technique in managing Cabinet. It is worth buying the book just for this. Remember, Wilson learnt his trade from Attlee; this is a most important point. Peter Hennessy [Attlee Professor of Contemporary History] will appreciate this–I am saying it just for his benefit. Firstly, you must have complete mastery of the subject, and it was quite clear that Wilson had thought these issues through more than any other individual in the Cabinet. Secondly, don’t talk too much–very much an Attlee trait. Do not expose too much surface. Thirdly, cultivate the group personality of the Cabinet, which I thought was a very interesting comment. If it is efficient and right-minded, that is what you do. You do your best to modify it if it is not.

It is very interesting, a very sharp contrast to Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. The tactic Wilson employed throughout these meetings was to count the voices at each stage of the debate,


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but not to attempt to express consensus or a majority view. He knew that it was finely balanced, and so instead of inviting a war before he needed it, he kept discussion going and going and going, trying to get one more on his side. If you have seen the film Lincoln and watched how he did it, it is very similar to the way they were getting the votes for the Anti-Slavery Bill: gradually, painstakingly, working it through until he knew he had got his majority. It is a fascinating insight, I think, into a masterly use of Cabinet Government and, I think, part of the rehabilitation of Harold Wilson. Another example was Stephen Wall’s second volume [of the official history of Britain and the European Community], which explains Wilson’s real motives over the EEC negotiation.

Gus O’Donnell (Lord O’Donnell of Clapham)

Just a couple of comments in response to Patrick’s thoughtful points. First of all, the relationship between ministers and civil servants: I cannot help but shamelessly put in a plug here. I am doing a BBC Radio 4 series on 5 March and 12 March, at 9 a.m. on bureaucracy. I strongly recommend it! One of the people that I interviewed, I actually interviewed him this morning, was John Major. Your comments about John Major were interesting in that he had only had one year as Chancellor, remember, before he came to the Foreign Office, and I think he only changed interest rates once. I think coming to the Foreign Office was a big step.

Also, what Patrick Wright and Jack Straw said about ministerial diaries. I cannot help thinking that actually we should be questioning ourselves here. Why, on day one, does a Foreign Secretary have to see so many ambassadors, actually? He was probably presented with that diary; I am not so sure that is a good use of his time. I think we fill up ministers’ diaries far too much. I would love them to have more thinking time. Interestingly enough, if you try to give them more thinking time it gets filled up. That is part of the problem–you leave a gap and then somebody else, as Robin [Butler] will know, or the Party will move in: ‘We’ll have a reception for these MPs, because they’re being a bit of a pain in the neck,’ etc. You try to keep thinking space, but it is one of the hardest things in the world.

Interestingly, as well, how do we reconcile the view that ministers just do not have enough time with the fact that junior ministers have nothing to do? There is something going wrong here, and it really goes to the heart of the way we pick ministerial teams. We pick the Secretaries of State, and we do not pick a team. Actually, if there were a team in a department, curiously enough, they could delegate more, I think, and they would trust each other a bit more. Then we might be able to create some time for thinking. I think this whole crisis thing in 1968, and Harold Wilson using his time through these Cabinets, was a way of getting the Cabinet to where he thought was the right place. It took him a long time. He used the time to do that, which was his way, or one way, of doing it. Tony Blair had a slightly different way of doing it but in the end, because you do not get so much engagement, you do not get so much buy-in from your colleagues. I think that is the price of that different style.

Sir Stephen Wall, Chair, UCL Council

I am one of the guilty people, I guess, since I was John Major’s Private Secretary in the FCO. I recall it more vividly when I worked for him in No 10. I was constantly being told by the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, that I had to allow only 20 minutes for x or y foreign minister, or even a visiting Prime Minister, to pop in to see John Major. Now, anybody who has been a Private Secretary knows–particularly for somebody like John Major–that 20 minutes is always going to be an hour and 20 minutes, but I agree with Gus. This is a very trivial comment, but I was reminded when Gill was talking about Ernest Bevin, that my late father-in-law, Norman Reddaway, worked for Ernest Bevin, who clearly did have a technique for dealing with importunate requests. He was asked to see the Ambassador of Guatemala, who wanted to talk about Guatemala’s claim to what was then British Honduras. Bevin said to my late father-in-law: ‘Gootermalia? Gootermalia? Never �eard of it,’ and that was the end of that.


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Gill Bennett

I just want to comment on a point Jonathan [Sinclair] raised. Of course, there were Cabinet meetings, but also there were a great many other meetings going on in the margins. For example, on the defence side, there was an inconclusive Cabinet meeting and Denis Healey was told to go away and see if he could find the same amount of savings in another way, if he wanted to try to save the F-111 contract. There were then almost wall-to-wall meetings in the Ministry of Defence. The same applied to other Departments, as you can see from the various diaries. Tony Benn for example, went off to meetings with the Nuclear Planning Group, in between these Cabinet meetings. It is not so much the number of people in the room but an absolute concentration of effort over a period of 11 days, not only Cabinet meetings but a huge focus of effort by everybody in that room; because, of course, as Kevin said, they were all trying to protect their area, and all trying to make an argument. The Cabinet meetings are, if you like, the tip of the iceberg. I suspect it is not dissimilar from what you are talking about with the Cuban Missile Crisis–different personnel, different system, clearly, in this country, to the United States, but the effect is the same.

Vernon Bogdanor, Research Professor, King’s College London

As Kevin Tebbit said, Wilson was in the Attlee Government, and the decision we are talking about in 1968 was a reactive one to things that had gone wrong, the failure to devalue earlier. Now, the Attlee Government devalued [in 1949], but Wilson had been very ambivalent about it. In the mid-sixties it had not seemed to be such a great success, because there had not seemed to be scope to increase exports to make it a success in a full employment economy. Wilson would have remembered the world policy of the Attlee Government, which again was in reaction to the 1930s. Gus said we did not have the money to sustain this world role, but that had been the argument used in the 1930s for not building up the Singapore base, for not strengthening our position in South East Asia, and it had led to disaster. Ministers were learning lessons from history; the question is whether they do not tend to learn the wrong lessons from history.

I think we should not be too nice about Harold Wilson, because 1968 was a reactive decision; a decision that was forced on him. I think one American diplomat said of British foreign policy in the post-war period that with the exception of Churchill, most British ministers took the view in foreign policy that they had to accommodate their position to one set by others, and that was a mark of a declining power. Wilson was trying to get away from that, by getting us into Europe. Did he undertake any sort of reappraisal that we were no longer a worldwide maritime power, perhaps, but a European power? I think he did not, and that seems to be a criticism of him. Secondly, on the question of the cuts and public opinion, Kevin Tebbit and I are of the same generation. I think Wilson did destroy the idealism of a whole generation, which thought that the Labour Government would have a new purpose in politics in the sixties–to be able to regenerate society and the economy. It did not do so, and that began the whole process of distrust in political leaders, I think. A great contrast there to the Attlee Government.

Keith Simpson, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary

I think I am the only representative here of the ‘rough trade’ in Whitehall. I am a PPS, not a minister. I look after the drinks trolley in the ministerial office. But when I had a real job I was a military historian. I was a SPAD [Special Adviser] at the Ministry of Defence in the 1980s, so like Alan Clark I had a sort of side view of politics. If I could just pick up on two or three things. Gus O’Donnell talked about the idea that it would be better if you could build ministerial teams. I could not agree with him more, but of course as he knows, reshuffles are not done like that. Even the best laid reshuffles are always blown off course almost straight away when a Secretary of State says he does not want to move, or sadly he has to announce that he is going to stand down because his wife is seriously ill. There were reshuffles, at least one, I think, under John Major, where a minister phoned up after the reshuffle and said, ‘Nobody’s mentioned me one way or the other.’ I think he had to be given appointment in the Treasury.


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The second and more serious point is the whole business, and the Professor just touched on it, about memory in history. Certainly the comment Kevin Tebbit made about whether current ministerial teams or shadow ministerial teams have that depth of experience–I think we are in danger here of an element of nostalgia. I think back to when I was a SPAD, with the formidable Sir Michael Quinlan as Permanent Secretary [of MOD]. I look at current Permanent Secretaries and I think, ‘Who are these people in comparison to Michael Quinlan?’ I think the thing about collective memory is very, very important, and the collective memory of the current Government is actually, in political terms, Ken Clarke. If you speak to the Chancellor he will tell you that in discussions, even with Civil Servants sitting in the room, Ken Clarke will talk about a decision made in the early 1980s which he remembers only too well and he was involved in.

The problem with history is that it may not actually be relevant to the decision that you are about to make. One of the things I think came out in Gill’s book is the fact that your personal experience of something that took place 10 or 15 years ago, or your reading of history, can frequently be wrong. The most obvious example she brought up was Eden, thinking that Nasser not only was another Mussolini but that he wanted to re-enact history and what he saw as a failure in the 1930s. I think that we have to be very careful on this, and I am ultimately sceptical about whether ministers under enormous pressure really think about the lessons learned. I mean, do they have time? Does Whitehall produce lessons learned? The Ministry of Defence used to, in a very narrow sense; the Iraq War Inquiry will eventually be published by the time most of us are in residential homes, and will literally be a piece of history, but you could argue that at least a précis of it should have been produced perhaps earlier on, and there is just a chance that a minister might have read it. I will conclude by saying that certainly the current Foreign Secretary, and I think at least one other minister, will read Gill’s book. If nothing else, as the Foreign Secretary has made clear–and, to be fair, I know, Jack Straw as well–that they appreciate history. Let us just make certain that if there are lessons, they are the right ones, because–as Balfour is alleged to have said: ‘History doesn’t repeat itself. Historians repeat each other.’

Mark Tokola, Minister Counselor for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy

I wanted to say I was rather flattered by Jack Straw’s accusation of American duplicity in foreign policy, because that implies some level of intentionality, or even skill. It is much better than the charge of thoughtless bumbling, so I am pleased. My question is, in the 1960s or even early seventies, was the opinion of media important? Were the editorials in The Times, or the Manchester Guardian or The Telegraph influential?

Sir Geoffrey Adams

Let us take one other point from the floor, but that was a direct question which needs an answer from our distinguished panel.

John Tolson, Ministry of Defence

My question is: We have gone around the process, we have gone around the people; perhaps this is one of those crises that was not really driven by economics, and there was not really anywhere else to go? I would be interested particularly in a view from Gill about what Whitehall was briefing about at the time; whether it included the deliberations of the JIC, whether what ambassadors were reporting really had any impact on all of this, or was it something that did tend to be ignored?

Sir Geoffrey Adams

Would you like to take those points, because in a sense they go together? It is about the influence of the media or these other sources of information on decision making.


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Gill Bennett

Certainly Harold Wilson was extremely sensitive to the opinion of the media, and of course he had had a major row in 1967 with the Labour Party and with parts of the media over the D-notice affair, which had to do with the breach in the newspapers of the Official Secrets Act and had caused a major upset in relations with the media. One of the things you see around these Cabinet meetings in 1968 is that Wilson was always saying ‘don’t talk to the press’ to his Cabinet colleagues. ‘We don’t want any leaks, we don’t want anybody saying anything about these meetings,’ unless it has been passed through his office and been signed off. He was very concerned, but I think he was more concerned about public opinion of the Government as a whole rather than the decision, if you see what I mean. That is my interpretation of it.

My feeling all along –in fact, this feeds in to what John has just said–is that there is no doubt that Harold Wilson had hoped to avoid devaluation, but then it became inevitable. My feeling was, reading the papers, that once it was inevitable he decided, if you like, to turn a threat into an opportunity. He decided that this was a good opportunity to say: ‘Let’s put aside what we thought we could do, and let’s really try to do something different.’ Now, I appreciate Gus’s points about the financial numbers being perhaps less important than they might have been, and of course Tony Crosland made that point in Cabinet. Nevertheless that is not how it felt at the time. You can see all the time that Harold Wilson was just going to do it, just going to drive it through. He got Roy Jenkins to go away and draw up the scheme, and then he was determined to push it through. Wilson did not actually care what anybody said.

Yes, ministers did listen to the Chiefs of Staff and the JIC; they had representations from Lee Kuan Yew, they had very strong representations from local British representatives, both military and diplomatic, none of whom liked the idea of withdrawal from East of Suez. They all argue that it should not be done, but if it were done it must be delayed. Personally, I do not think that made any difference at all to what Harold Wilson thought. He was prepared to compromise in Cabinet in order to get everybody on side and get the decision taken, but I do not think there was ever any serious consideration to changing what he had decided to do.

Sir Kevin Tebbit

I am picking up Vernon Bogdanor’s point: it would be very nice to have thought that the 1968 decision was seen as some great shift of British interests; a recognition that, in the Far East, we could no longer be as extended, and we really ought to focus on Europe. This was linked to our second application to the EEC, and was seen very much in the context of our European destiny. I wish I could have read that in the book, but I did not. You are absolutely right. I did not get that sense of vision, I just saw people having to pick away at their existing interests. We could no longer afford to do that without really having an alternative vision in place.

When you think about it, the cost of keeping the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) in Germany was the equivalent to the balance of payments problem as it went through, year on year. You could argue that Britain ought to have been saying ‘We are making this huge, massive effort for Europe. Surely we should see our destiny in Europe,’ but we did not. At the time, that was to do with NATO, which was about the United States and the Soviet Union, and we still saw ourselves as a global player. 1968 was a retreat from part of that globalism. It was not about what we would have liked to have thought it was about.

I think Harold Wilson was pushing this through, as Gill said, very much on a specific issue. He thought, ‘I am fed up with the Americans. In Vietnam, they are wrong. I have done what I could to broker peace, but it’s gone wrong. They’ve done stuff to us anyway: they’ve pulled money out of Europe. They’re getting paid their foreign exchange costs for the troops in Germany, we are not.’ There is a bit of ‘I am damned well going to do this, and I am not going to listen to anybody else.’ I


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think Wilson was a great tactician, in the way he got the decision out of Cabinet, absolutely brilliant, but I do not necessarily praise his vision.

Gill Bennett

If I could add one tiny little thing there: one thing I did discover was that at Christmas 1967, Harold Wilson had a discussion with President Johnson in Australia, when they went to Harold Holt’s funeral. There is a definite change after that, and I think–and this may not be right, but it is my impression from the papers–that he had almost squared the decision with Johnson. Johnson asked Wilson to still act as an intermediary, when he went to Moscow, on the Vietnamese issue, to talk to the North Vietnamese. I think Wilson said, ‘Look, we are going to do this. You will not like it, but we are going to do it anyway,’ and I think Johnson agreed, and that made Wilson relax.

Gus O’Donnell

On the point about strategy, I think it is very hard to get governments to sit down and talk about strategy. You talk about these eight Cabinet discussions: would it not be wonderful if there was, as I think Barbara Castle inferred, as much time devoted to what the overall big picture was? Very rarely will you see a Cabinet go there. Occasionally they will have an off-site meeting on strategy. Of course, if there is a strategy (remember Wilson’s white heat of technology), then remember also that when we are talking about all these cuts, the thing that was not cut was Concorde, that brilliant economic success!

Secondly, on learning the lessons from history and the devaluation discussions. Stephen [Wall] will bear me out on this, because I was thinking about when we were in Admiralty House together, the ERM was falling apart and we were using about a billion an hour on foreign exchange reserves. When you look back to the devaluation discussion in 1967: decision made in Cabinet 16 November, announcement 18 November. Estimated cost between the two periods, 1.5 billion, in the money of 1967-68. Did we learn the lessons?

Sir Geoffrey Adams

I think we have time for one last round of comments from the floor and then one last round of comments from the panel.

Robin Butler

I wanted to make a comment on the question about whether the press mattered. The point I would like to make about that is, yes, the press mattered, but in a completely different way to today. It was the editors that mattered then. They were the ones that, in Harold Wilson’s time, you used to go after. You did not try to dominate tomorrow’s headlines, which is the utterly energy-sapping and demanding thing politicians find themselves having to do today. One of the things I remember very clearly in the Treasury, and Gus will remember this, the Press Secretary was a Grade 5. He was an Assistant Secretary, who had time to write novels as well. On the whole, the whole purpose of the press secretary was to not put out stories to the media, rather than–as today–to put them out.

One thing that I vividly remember, which is worth recounting, was Harold Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd coming back from their visit to Moscow in 1959. When they got to Northolt there was one reporter at the bottom of the steps, who stepped forward and said: ‘Prime Minister, I am from the BBC. Have you got anything to say about your meetings with Mr Khrushchev?’ The visit was a big event. Harold Macmillan clearly had not thought about any answer to this question. He looked over his shoulder to Selwyn Lloyd and said: ‘Er, Foreign Secretary, have we got anything to say about our meeting in Moscow?’ And Selwyn Lloyd, who had not thought about it either, said, ‘No, I


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don’t think so, Prime Minister.’ Harold Macmillan: ‘No, nothing to say.’ And the BBC reporter said, ‘Thank you very much, Prime Minister.’ Absolutely true.

Professor Patrick Salmon, FCO

I was just thinking about vision, or the lack of it. I think I am right in saying that 1968 was also the year of the Duncan Report on the foreign service, which actually was in tune with the times because it said that Britain should have an area of concentration in its diplomacy, which was basically western Europe as far as I remember, and North America. In a way, the thinking on that level was paralleling the decision making, but the Duncan Report is probably the least useful of all the reports that had been made on the Foreign Service in the last few decades. In fact it was only a few years before Europe was only one part of our preoccupations, and it would have been crazy if we had reduced our diplomatic representation in the same way that our military commitments were being reduced.

Professor George Peden, University of Stirling

Just a quick point for Gus O’Donnell, who mentioned that the 1968 figures do not suggest huge change. Is it not the case that what is hard for the Treasury, is to prevent the figures going up all the time? To achieve even a modest reduction for a year or two required a huge change in policy in 1968. Related to that, ministers were given a pretty clear choice. They were told, I think, in effect, by the Treasury, you either give up the nuclear deterrent or BAOR or East of Suez. That is what the Treasury is about: giving ministers choices, and forcing them to make them.

Sir Stephen Wall

One of the factors about the decision in 1968, and Gill mentions it in her book, is of course that in November 1967 General de Gaulle had vetoed Britain’s second application to join the European Community. The government in were faced with a situation where they were desperate to find a way round de Gaulle’s veto, but insofar as that was possible, what they were dependent upon was the goodwill and co-operation of Germany, which simply was not available to them. The speech with which George Brown, as Foreign Secretary, launched the British application at the beginning of 1967 is entirely a speech about Britain’s place in the world. It says in explicit terms–which was always Harold Wilson’s view–the economic arguments are very finely balanced. The reason for being in the EEC was that this is the way in which Britain can continue to exercise influence in the world. That was absolutely the basis on which they made their application.

Catherine Royle, FCO

I am currently serving in Afghanistan, so listening to a debate about lessons of history is particularly apt, because clearly we have learnt nothing about how to deal with Afghanistan. One of the things I wanted to say was that I worry our successors sitting here in 20 or 30 years’ time will not be able to have a conversation like this, because we just do not keep the records well enough. That is really quite a worrying development. It is something we constantly tell each other we ought to do something about, but we have rather failed to do. Sitting here listening to this fascinating conversation has brought it back to my mind that we ought to have another go at it.

Sir Geoffrey Adams

Thank you very much, and an ‘amen’ to that from me. Unless there is anybody else, shall we go in reverse order, starting with Gus? Any final comments you would like to make?


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Gus O’Donnell

Just on that point about records, I could not agree with you more. There is an interesting question about the move to digital, and I remember doing a whip-round among all the Perm Secs to get the money to ensure that our digital archive is preserved, because I certainly did not realise quite how fragile our digital records are. We have now spent that money, and hopefully a national archive will be guaranteed. Of course, you can only keep the records that have actually been kept in the first place. I am not going to have my rant again about Freedom of Information (FOI), but I think it has changed the mood, and that is really bad news. There we are; that’s life. On the other things, George Peden is absolutely right: it is always a fight to control public spending. When you look back at the share of GDP of public spending, it was around 45% in 1967-68, about where it is now. So it was big, and they had to bring it down. One of the things that is really missing from this debate is how to solve the other end of this: how to increase the growth rate, looking at the kind of fundamental discussions about the state of the economy and all the things that were wrong with it in the 1960s, which would take a long time to go through. Interestingly, for a Cabinet which had a lot of people who would classify themselves as economists–probably more than we have had for a very long time, actually–people who were actually teaching economics earlier in their careers, the economic policy does not really stack up in any way, I am afraid.

Sir Kevin Tebbit

When you read this book, I think that there are fascinating analogies. There are lots of opportunities to compare and contrast. I myself do not actually believe in the idea that there are models, let alone really clear lessons. One of the interesting things that come implicitly out of this is about defence reviews. We are always doing defence reviews. They are always well done, in respect of ‘Try to do a review for the next 10 years, or several years hence, to give stability, because armed forces need long-term planning’ and all of that. Yet the 1967 Defence Review? Revisited immediately-hardly was the ink dry on it. Look at our own, more recent review, actually. The 2010 Defence Review is already being actively reviewed; the 1998 Defence Review, that I was heavily involved in, although I think it was a good one, we were busily revising it and changing it by 2001. Defence reviews are always done with the expectation and intention of setting the future for the next 10 years. What that actually does is make it easier to get agreement at that particular moment to the decisions, because if you do not like it you think ‘Well, I might be able to fight again’. That is what happened in 1968. A lot of people tried to reopen that through this debate. What seems certain is that defence reviews never last very long, and I suspect that may well be the case in our current Defence Review as we go through this year.

Gill Bennett

I would just like to say briefly that both Gus and Kevin said they did not know why they were here. I think we know exactly why they are here. But it was a very deliberate decision, as well, on the part of the historians; although, as we have said, Harold Wilson drove the 1968 decision through for political reasons, it was a decision in which economics and defence played an absolutely key part. It is very appropriate, I think, that we have had those different perspectives discussed. And of course, I agree that we need to keep records.

Sir Geoffrey Adams

That concludes this session. I want to thank all of you, first of all, for your brilliant, insightful and often funny comments from the floor. I want to thank all three panellists for their extremely helpful comments, but can I particularly, on behalf of all of you, thank and congratulate Gill Bennett, because without her book we would not be here. Thank you very much indeed.


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PANEL 2: Foreign-policy decision making

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield

Welcome back. My name is Peter Hennessy. I have the honour of chairing the next session. I would like to share a couple of thoughts before we get going. One of the forgotten stories of the 1967 devaluation is that if we had not had it, this building would have been torn down and replaced by a 1960’s effort. Thank God for devaluation.

I have always been hugely keen on occasions like this because I am not quite a lessons-of-history man, but I am almost. I am a Mark Twain man. History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. We have already seen that very vividly from the first session, which was terrific.

I am delighted to have been asked to chair this session today for a number of reasons: partly because I am a great admirer of Gill’s and have been for a very long time. I am also hugely grateful for what she and her colleagues here have done, not just for my students, but students, plural. It is greatly appreciated.

I am also very keen on William Hague’s emphasis on the uses of history. I was in the Locarno Room, as so many of you were, when he made that speech in 2010. I remember–because Ivor Roberts was too well bred to ask himself–putting in a request that valedictory despatches should be restored because of the pleasure they bring to you insiders and, when they leak, to many thousands of us as well. I am not sure that has happened, but I cannot complain really, because William has done wonders for history.

Six Moments of Crisis is a terrific book. It has so many strengths, and I will say a little bit more about it at the party. Among its many strengths is not just the natural gift that Gill has for context and background, but also that it is not just about wars; it is dealing with General de Gaulle, which nobody ever managed to do, apart from Madame de Gaulle. It is the mixture of crises which gives it its special strength and value.

I am glad Charles Moore is here, Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, because before I sit down and introduce the colleagues I just want to quote a chunk from Mrs Thatcher’s–as she then was–evidence to the Franks inquiry in October 1982. Unlike the Chilcot Inquiry, Franks was held completely in private. Under the 30-year rule we have just had the transcript. Mrs Thatcher’s evidence is like a film script in many places. It is the most extraordinary document. Towards the end, the great Oliver Franks says to her: ‘Do you think we can learn from history?’ And Mrs Thatcher says, ‘I think you are very foolish if you do not’. Amen to that.

Collective decision-making in Foreign Policy

The Rt Hon Lord Butler of Brockwell

The subject of this seminar is the generic one– not any of these particular incidents but what they tell us about foreign policy decision making in general.

I first want to join in the congratulations to Gill. I am afraid she may take this as an insult. Her book, from my point of view, has something in common with Alan Clark’s diaries. When I picked it up I thought, ‘I’ll just scan through this quickly to get enough sense of it to take part in the seminar’, and, as with Alan Clark’s diaries, once I started reading it I did not put it down until I had


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finished it. I thought I was a terrific read. Of course, it was also grist to my mill, because it is all about the virtues of collective decision-making.

I. Collective Decision Making

Decline

As Gus O’Donnell and Peter Hennessy said, one of my greatest criticisms of the Blair government was what I felt was the decline of collective decision-making. I always believed that the British system is very strong in this respect. The best decisions are hammered out on the anvil of the collective experience and perspectives that you get amongst senior politicians around the Cabinet table.

Virtues

I plead three virtues for collective decision-making. One is that it prevents you from overlooking that little aspect of the decision, which may be in the Ministry of Agriculture or elsewhere, which would otherwise be overlooked if you have not discussed it collectively, and which can trip up the whole decision. Those things happen.

The second is that decisions do benefit from having the perspectives of people who are not dealing with the issue day to day, but have a wider political experience. When you are grappling with a problem, you can get too close to it. When I think of some of the decisions that I saw made in government that were subsequently regretted–the banning of the trade unions in GCHQ, the announcement of the decision to close 34 pits announced on one day without any ameliorative measures to accompany them, for example–those were decisions that did not come to Cabinet because they were considered too sensitive. I believe that the experience of other ministers around the table could have alerted the government to the dangers that they were going into and avoided the mistakes.

The third virtue is that it keeps people bound in and the team together. The episodes which are outlined in Gill’s book do bring out vividly the various, many-sided things that people around the Cabinet table with different responsibilities and different experience bring to bear. I really do think that those are an important aspect of the best decisions, even if–as is illustrated by the eight Cabinet meetings and so on described–it can be a pretty agonising process.

II. Personal Experience

As far as my direct experience was concerned, I think like most people in this room I was too young to be directly involved in any of the decisions in this book. The nearest I came to it was becoming Principal Private Secretary at Number 10 at the end of the Falklands War, while the Franks inquiry was going on and seeing the aftermath of that.

I was Cabinet Secretary during the first Gulf War, and was then responsible for setting up the machinery that supported ministers in the decisions and the conduct of that campaign. Then, finally, I did the review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction following the Iraq war, which enabled me to read the Cabinet papers pretty closely about what happened in the lead up to that war.

III. Proactive and Reactive Crises

When one looks at the six moments of crisis in Gill’s book, there are differences between them. Perhaps the most general difference is that some are responsive, i.e. what you do if you suddenly


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find that the Argentinians have invaded the Falklands overnight, and some are proactive, where the government itself is taking the initiative. That is true of Operation FOOT and true of the first application for membership of the EEC.

But all the crises have a mixture of both elements. Some are more responsive and some are more proactive, but even the proactive ones are responsive to something, and the responsive ones have an element of initiative about them; they are not purely reactive.

IV. Influence

Ministerial

One of Gill’s two rules is that decisions are always taken by ministers. That is particularly emphasised in the book because what she takes as illustration are Cabinet meetings, which are only attended by ministers. Of course, officials are influential on the input that the ministers make to those meetings. Ministers are guided by a lot of things: their interests, their party responsibilities, their official responsibilities, their own personal history, but they are also influenced by the discussions they have had with their officials. One of the telltale bits in that is the East-of-Suez discussion, where you see Burke Trend’s hand coming into it from time to time, keeping ministers’ toes to the fire. There is quite a lot of official influence happening behind the scenes.

This leads me to an anecdote. This is a true story. When I was still in the Treasury, reasonably young, I found myself sitting next to Nico Henderson at a dinner–always a very entertaining experience. Nico said to me, ‘You guys in the Treasury: what do you do when your ministers do not accept the departmental line?’ I said, ‘We do our very best to persuade and advise them and so on, but if in the end they decide differently, we regard it as our responsibility to carry out those decisions as conscientiously as we can.’ He said, ‘That is not what we do in the Foreign Office. If we find a minister who does not accept our departmental line, we wait until we get a minister who will.’

Now, there are people in the Foreign Office here who may be able to comment on that, but I suspect there is a little element of truth about it and in the difference between the departments, partly because the issues of foreign policy that the Foreign Office deals with have a longer shelf life and you can afford, in some cases anyway, to wait a little bit longer.

Prime Ministerial

The role of the respective ministers, and particularly the role of the Prime Minister in these–they are described as collective decision in Gill’s book and so they are–is different; the Prime Minister is more than primus inter pares. All these decisions certainly demand the assent of the Prime Minister, and usually the Prime Minister is the moving spirit. The only one that I think is a real exception to that in the book is Operation FOOT, which starts with the Foreign Office. Heath gets drawn into it and assents to it but was not the moving spirit. I take it that with the application to the EEC, Macmillan had really made up his mind and he was the one who led it.

In that context, I just want to add a coda to what was the paean of praise about Harold Wilson in the first session. I had a particular insight into the crucial week leading up to the EEC referendum in 1975, because I happened to be the Private Secretary on duty over the final weekend. As Patrick Wright said–and I agree–it was quite clear to us in Number 10 that Wilson’s objective from the beginning was to keep Britain inside the EEC but to find a way of holding his Government together. He had the Eurosceptics: Shore, Foot and Benn, and he had the Europhiles: Callaghan and Jenkins.


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Wilson’s long-term device was the referendum and the agreement to differ, but not to disclose which way he was going to advise people to vote. Naturally, both sides of the dispute wanted to get him to jump their way. It will be remembered that he said all this was going to depend on the renegotiation of Britain’s terms of membership, which was going to be decided at a Dublin Council. The weekend before, he entertained Helmut Schmidt at Chequers. In this case–Patrick may correct me–I do not think there is any record of what Schmidt and Wilson decided, but I am as sure as I can be that they agreed at that meeting what changes Schmidt was going to support Wilson in getting in the terms, and they seemed quite ambitious.

At the Cabinet on the Thursday before the Dublin summit–and this certainly is recorded in the minutes, Wilson said, ‘Unless I can get these rather ambitious targets I am going to recommend that the British people vote “no”’, and this gave great satisfaction to the Shore-Foot-Benn axis. It may have been the Friday night, but I think it was the Saturday night–it was when I was on duty–Wilson made a speech to a body called the London Mayors Association, who quite clearly had no idea of the role that they were playing in this great saga, at which Wilson said, ‘I am going to Dublin. My aims are these, and provided I get them, I am going to recommend the British people say “yes”’.

As I say, I was on duty over the weekend, and some very indignant Foot/Shore/Benn rang up and asked what right he had got to say this. I said, ‘Well, if you refer to the Cabinet minutes it will show that he said that if he did not get these terms, he would advise the people to say “no”, and I think you will agree that the corollary of that is that if he did get them he would advise them to say “yes”’. That, indeed, was quite clearly the tactic. He went to Dublin. Surprise, surprise, he got the terms and he came back and then he said that he was going to advise the British people to say “yes”. And the rest is history.

That was one of the two moments when Patrick and I were his Private Secretary–because by then Wilson was past his best, to be honest–when I just thought his political footwork was staggering. So, since we have been talking about that, I just wanted to add a little coda to that story. Incidentally, his wife, Mary Wilson, still alive, aged 96, lives two blocks along from us, and she said to me the other day with a great glint in her eye, ‘You know, I voted no’. She said it was the only time she ever voted against Harold. What he could do with the Cabinet he could not necessarily do inside his own household.

Personal influence

We must not discount the power of the Prime Minister. In these discussions the Prime Minister is absolutely crucial. Of course, the power of personality can change issues. We have talked about political tactics, but not about the power of personality. Margaret Thatcher showed that the British tail could occasionally wag the American dog. Her comment during the first Gulf war: ‘This is no time to go wobbly, George’, I think definitely had an influence on the Americans.

V. Historical Lessons

I agree with those who say there are no real lessons of history because history never repeats itself, but my goodness, you are better informed, more likely to have a broader perspective, to have things in proportion, if you know history. I think it is really important that decision makers should know as much history as possible, even though it would be unwise for them ever to apply the history to precisely the situation that they face.

VI. The British system

The Cabinet and the Cabinet Committee structure is important to good decision-making, and the UK is traditionally good at it. The coordinating role of the Cabinet office, Cabinet committees and of the JIC is something that is admired. Stephen Wall will know about this. The ability of the British


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Government to reach a collective decision quickly on EU issues is very much admired in the EEC. Similarly, when faced with a difficult foreign-policy critical problem, departments in the British government are very good at getting together and putting forward supporting information.

Gulf War decision making

As I say, I was Cabinet Secretary during the first Gulf war and we did put together–and I think Gordon Barrass may have been part of this–a structure where the Assessment Staff started at four o’clock. The JIC then met at six o’clock, permanent secretaries met at eight-thirty, went back to departments, arranged for briefing of their ministers and then the War Cabinet met at 10, in time to reach decisions, which if necessary could be given to the lobby at 11. That was a bit of machinery that worked very well and I think that the British are pretty good at that.

Iraq War decision-making

One of my principal criticisms in looking at the process that led up to the Iraq war was that this British machine was not used. We said in our report that a lot of very good official papers were prepared. None of them was ever circulated to the Cabinet, just as the Attorney General’s legal advice was not circulated to the Cabinet. So, the Cabinet was not as well informed as the three leading protagonists: the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. There were a lot of PowerPoint presentations, which is not nearly as good, because you cannot consider or think about it in advance. I think that was deliberate, and it was a weakness of the machinery that underlay that particular decision.

VII. The value of experience

Two final observations: I was amused by Keith Simpson’s contribution that we old men always think that our successors are callow, but I think it is actually the case that the leading members of the Cabinet now are younger than they used to be. They have small children; they do not have the range of experience and background that people in the post-war Cabinets did. I think that does matter. It is not crucial, but it matters. It should make them feel all the more that they want to be well-briefed and informed of history, of background–for example the background in Iraq, the formation of Iraq going back to the First World War, the likelihood that it would splinter into warring groups and there would be insurgence, which I think they were not sufficiently aware of, though I know very well that the Foreign Office was.

We have to remember, of course, that Members of Parliament are very often part of all-party groups before they come into government and have a good deal of exposure to foreign policy issues, but it is not quite the same as having had earlier direct ministerial experience. I think the machinery ought to be put in hand. Politicians would be wise to try to do this.

VIII. Historical advisers

That leads me to my final point, which is the importance of having historical advisers. I congratulate the Foreign Office on having kept their historical advisers. I think it is a deep mistake that other departments have not. I was very excited by going to a meeting of the History & Policy group a few years ago, in which one of their proposals was that every department ought to have a historical adviser, not because that historical adviser could answer every question but because they could put the people in the department who were advising in touch with those historians and academics who could. That still needs to be done and it would reinforce our arrangements very much if it did. I am very glad that the FCO has not made that mistake.


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Sir Lawrence Freedman

First, my tribute to Gill: Gill was always very helpful to me when I was an official historian, a position I was appointed to by Robin Butler. The great thing about Gill’s book is that it humanises policy making. These are real people making decisions. My own favourite chapter is Operation FOOT, because I knew so little about it and it was quite a revelation. I remember the headlines at the time. What is probably most interesting about it–and Robin has made the point–is that it was unique in the sense that it was an initiative. It was a problem, but the control of the whole thing throughout was managed by the Government, rather than it being in a responsive mode.

Now, unlike everybody else, here I am not a practitioner. I have written an official history; I am doing an inquiry, which I will happily give to Keith Simpson in his retirement home! Please keep in mind that what I say now may or may not be part of the final Chilcot report. I am not going to refer to Iraq specifically; I am going to talk generally. I would point out that although I am the academic here, I have been involved in running a university for about 10 years and that gives me probably more executive experience than most people going into Cabinet. A lot of the lessons or the descriptions of organisations at work are generic: they are not particularly unique to politics. Anybody who is trying to run a large organisation finds themselves facing these issues and I am sure Stephen Wall at UCL would recognise that as well.

I. Characteristics of Crisis

Inability to predict

There are some generic points about a crisis: First, you are engaged in something without knowing the ending. This point was made before, but it is so true. The great advantage of the historian is you know what happened. The problem for the practitioner is they have got no idea how this is all going to end. They have expectations about how it will end up; they will tell themselves little stories about how one event will follow another and take them to exactly where they want to be; but really they do not know.

Linked factors

Secondly Gill’s book makes crystal clear– it is one of her lessons–that there is always so much else going on. The linkages between different issues are often critical to how they are resolved. One of the reasons that some people are very good at crises is that they understand these linkages. They know how you can do a deal on one side that will give you an opening on another. It is not just that their minds are packed with lots of different things, but that they know how to use the opportunities that these different strands of policy open up to them.

Thirdly, another thing about a crisis is that you can clear the diary. Everybody assumes you are so busy as you try to focus on issues and events which can become all-consuming. So people feel they should not clutter you with trivia and other things. I mentioned to David Omand that Frank Cooper said to me about MOD during the Falklands: ‘Actually, there was very little we could do. All the action took place at night. I would get up in the morning and I would get a briefing; I would be told it had gone very well or very badly and we would say “Oh good”, or “Oh dear”, and we would go into the mandarins’ meeting, but actually there was not a lot we could do. The South Atlantic was a long way away; we were trying not to micromanage events. I caught up with an awful lot of work because nobody bothered me.’


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II. The limitations of strategy

So crises are a bit different. One of the themes that came through from the first session is about the particular role that a crisis has in foreign policy making. In one quote Gill has Barbara Castle bemoaning, ‘If only we had had a proper strategy in the first place we would not be having a crisis.’ Of course, it is true that a crisis to some extent is a failure in strategy, but the fact that we have so many crises is an illustration of the limits of strategy. It is why strategy is such a frustrating business. One of the things that academics and commentators, and people who have been in office but are now out of it, need to be careful about is constantly bemoaning the lack of strategy. There are good reasons why strategy is very difficult and why we need a much more modest view of what strategy can achieve.

III. Knowledge considerations

One thing you have to remember as a historian that it is not just that people do not know how this story is going to end: they do not know a lot of the things they could have known if only they had looked harder or were not caught out by having insufficient clearance. I can say this about the Iraq Inquiry and as an official historian: historians have an overview of government that nobody had at the time. You can see what was going on in parallel, and it is a wonderful privilege. But you have to remind yourself all the time that while a document may have been sent to a minister, they may not even have looked at it, and, if they did, they might not have taken in what was said. They may have taken in one sentence or a few bits. You have to be a very curious person to make the effort to go and find out a bit more about what you really should know rather than rely on someone else to tell you.

Even running a university, which is full of people who think they know everything, the role of anecdote–what somebody said to you at a dinner party or a corridor conversation–is as important as the best research analytical paper, because that is how a lot of business takes place. Somebody tells you something that sticks in your head. However much you know that it is totally unrepresentative, that it should not be taken that seriously, that it came from a particular point of view, and all of those things, it sticks in your head anyway and shapes the way the issue is understood. The frustrating thing when you look back is not only, ‘If only they knew then what we know now’, but ‘If only they knew then what they could have known then but did not take the effort to find out or nobody pushed it to them’.

IV. Framing the issue

We come to another point, which is the importance of framing. One of the things about a crisis is that the way you thought an issue was framed does not work anymore, and you have to reframe it. That is why crises are exciting, because you have a chance to redefine the situation, redefine what the big issues are. The reason why those who can see the situation with clarity can do so well in a crisis, is because they can say, ‘This is what this is about’ and impose this new frame on others.

There may be a number of possible frames. Take the example of the Falklands: was this an issue of colonialism; or an issue of declining grandeur; or was it about self-determination? One of the important things about the Falklands decision-making was the understanding from the start that this had to be an issue of self-determination. Anything else was going to leave our international position vulnerable, and the domestic political position vulnerable. It worked. By understanding that that was the way the issue had to be played, not about Britain’s standing in the world and so on, it wrong-footed a lot of the opponents and was a way of countering the colonial argument.


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V. The uses of strategy

Let me just say a few words about strategy. My point about strategy is that people insist on presenting it as if it is driven by objectives: there is a vision where you have to get to and strategy is about getting there. Yet in practice, strategy is about getting to the next stage from where you are at the moment. That is how it happens. Kevin Tebbit was talking about defence reviews and so on. They never last very long. It does not mean to say that they are worthless; they are very useful for getting to the next stage even if you do not get to the stage after that. It helps to have a view as to where you would like to be at the end, but no serious strategy is driven by an end point. Strategies are always driven by a diagnosis of the problem you are facing at the time, and what you are going to do about it.

Secondly, most strategy in international affairs is not about how this country manages its external relations. In the first instance it is about getting consensus amongst your own government about what to do. A lot of what we have been talking about with Wilson’s tactics, or Blair’s quite different approach, is about how you move your own government. Autocracies do it differently and they make mistakes, often for that reason. Strategy has to be about accommodation of your own people, and then your allies, often in order of importance, and then finally you worry about the opponent. You may worry about your opponent first, but what you think to be the best way of dealing with your opponent may not be very useful if you have lost all the earlier battles on your own side. This is why the output of government often seems a bit incoherent and not as strong as outsiders would like. There is a perfectly good reason for this: the output, even if it is a strategy. has had to be negotiated. That is one reason why strategy documents are so dire normally, because they are negotiated. We do not have national defence strategies anymore because that would be about how you deal with other countries and other wilful beings. You deal with themes: with pandemics and terrorism and proliferation and so on, but that is not strategy; it is a best policy. It does not have the dynamic element that strategy has.

VI. Historical Lessons

The last question: does history provide lessons? The line that is emerging probably is the right one. The lessons of history can be terribly misleading. The belief that if you just mention Munich you have said everything that needs to be said about trying to negotiate with an opponent, as if there had not been 78 years of foreign policy since then, does not refer to a true lesson of history. Instead it is shorthand for why you object to a particular policy at a particular time.

What history can do is lend judgment. It allows you to draw from experiences other than your own and incorporate those. There is a wonderful essay by Isaiah Berlin on political judgement, which is one of the last he wrote, which captures a quality of recognising situations, which I think people develop through experience. It becomes almost intuitive. There is something in there that tells them, ‘Situations like this lead to problems like that’. It is hard to call it strategy because they may find it very difficult to give a series of coherent reasons why that should be done. But it is judgement, and judgement is critical in a lot of policy making.

What you can also get from history and experience are questions that are sensible to ask: what are likely to be the consequences of doing this rather than that? That, again, comes from a little bit of knowledge that the last time something like this happened, this was the problem that resulted. It does not mean to say that is the problem that is going to result this time, or that is a reason for not doing it, but it gives you a question to ask. And the questions to ask seem to me to lead to the sort of values that Robin Butler was talking about, making sure that you extract the best from the machine that you can at your moments of crisis.


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Sir Stephen Wall

I. Party political factors in crises

In reading Gill’s great book I was set to thinking about some events where perhaps random factors–not irrational, but unexpected factors–have played an important part. When Tony Blair made his second appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry he was asked about Cabinet discussion of Iraq and whether there had been adequate discussion. He said, ‘Of course the Cabinet discussed Iraq extensively’, and he added that ministers were even more concerned about the politics than about other aspects of the issue.

Of course, that makes quite an important point. Between January and March 2003, and particularly as we got closer to the start of war, the issue became one in which if the Government lost its vote in the House of Commons it would certainly have been the demise of the Prime Minister, and perhaps fatal to the entire Labour Government. At that point, for Cabinet ministers the issue of the survival of the government meant that in practice, whatever doubts they might have had up until that point about the wisdom of the war took second place to the survival of the government. That may sound cynical but it seems to me, as a civil servant looking at these things, that if you are a member of a political party, by definition you believe that your political party is the one that is best able to represent the interests of the nation, and therefore actually staying in power is not an ignoble objective if you are a politician.

Another example: during the negotiation on the Maastricht Treaty, John Major secured, as a price of his acceptance, an opt-out from the so-called Social Chapter. Would John Major have insisted on that opt-out if Michael Howard, his employment secretary, had not been on the phone the whole time threatening to resign if there was not an opt-out?

The result of that opt-out was that Neil Kinnock, whose party otherwise supported the Maastricht Treaty, opposed the Maastricht Treaty, which in turn created a huge range of problems for the Major government. In turn, because Kinnock fought against the Maastricht Treaty on the basis of his support for the Social Chapter, it became part of the inheritance first of all of John Smith, and then of Tony Blair. Tony Blair had to go into the 1997 election vowing to opt in to the Social Chapter if Labour was elected, even though he did not actually agree with what was in the Social Chapter, and even though the Social Chapter dogged his footsteps while he was Prime Minister, just as the issue continues to dog the footsteps of the present government and has become again one of the issues that will be renegotiated if a renegotiation takes place. Arguably, that one issue–the Michael Howard potential resignation–has had a sort of domino effect, which has ricocheted down the years. It is not perhaps, in foreign policy terms, the most vital issue, but in political terms it is a very big issue.

Re-application for EEC membership and the 1975 referendum

In 1967, when the Wilson government decided to reapply for membership of the European Community, the debate by the political cabinet, which effectively took the decision, which was ratified by a formal cabinet a few days later, followed a series of visits that Wilson and George Brown, as Foreign Secretary, had paid to European capitals exploring the attitude of our potential partners.

It is not recorded in the minutes of the Cabinet but it is in the notes of the Cabinet Secretary, which are now public, that a number of Cabinet members, most notably Dennis Healey, who were lukewarm or hostile to membership. Nonetheless they argued in that meeting that so much political capital had now been invested in the process that for the Government not to go ahead with an application for membership would be more damaging than the reverse. In other words, in domestic political terms it was safer to apply, even if there was a French veto, than not to


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apply at all. The domestic political consideration tilted the way in which some Cabinet members voted in terms of the decision that was taken.

At about the same time, or maybe a bit earlier, President Lyndon Johnson offered economic support to Howard Wilson in exchange for a British troop contribution to Vietnam. Wilson’s reply to Lyndon Johnson was: ‘If I were to accept the terms you are offering me–in other words, if I were to send a company of troops to Vietnam, I would not be in a position to enjoy the economic support you are offering me, because I would no longer be the Prime Minister.’ Such was the position within the Labour Party and the domestic politics of it generally.

A few years on, when Labour were in opposition in the early 1970s and the Labour Party turned against membership of the European Community, it was Tony Benn who first suggested inside the Shadow Cabinet that they should offer the British people a referendum on membership. It was rejected by the Shadow Cabinet as being a constitutional outrage, but Jim Callaghan said privately at the time that this might yet turn out to be the life raft to which the Labour Party would have to cling, and of course it proved to be so.

On the one hand, you could say this is rather a cynical act, but on the other hand the alternative would have been for the Labour Party to go into the elections of February and October 1974 on a manifesto which would certainly committed them to coming out of the European Community. What was done for party reasons nonetheless had important national ramifications in terms of government policy.

II. Other Factors

Personalities

Let us say a bit about some other, not just unrecorded, but unspoken elements of decision-making. In 2003, the Labour Cabinet basically reached a decision that they were in favour of Britain joining the euro, but not yet. It was a compromise between the position of Tony Blair on the one hand and Gordon Brown on the other, of course. The Cabinet was determined, not so much to reach a decision on the pros and cons of the euro, but to reach a decision that would stop this battle of the two giants, Blair and Brown, which in turn was hugely damaging to Cabinet unity, to the unity of the government and its standing in the country.

Public opinion

Similarly, the decision that Tony Blair took in 2004 to offer a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty was not a Cabinet decision. Charles Clarke, senior member of the Cabinet and leading pro-European, had an argument with Michael White of The Guardian when Michael White told him the referendum was going to be offered, assuring Michael White that this was not the case. Michael White said: ‘I am very sorry Charles, I have to tell you that I have been told by 10 Downing Street that this is the policy’. In other words, the policy was decided by the Prime Minister on a very narrow basis. It was endorsed by the Cabinet and was not challenged by Cabinet, because of course all Cabinet felt the pressure of public opinion in that direction; more especially, they felt the pressure of the Murdoch press.

Media

We talked a little bit about the press earlier. Timothy Garton Ash said in a lecture in about 2005 or 2006 that Tony Blair’s Europe policy could be summed up in two words: Rupert and Murdoch. Like all caricatures it has a grain of truth in it. I do not want to go down that road, but I asked myself the question as we were talking about this earlier: will the power of modern media be the same? If you


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look at Twitter for example: does the power of Twitter actually equate to that of the traditional press?

Twitter is clearly a brilliant measure of opinion. It was 8 million hits on Twitter that told us Obama had lost the first presidential debate in the recent election, but I wonder if that new media will be as powerful a focus of concerted pressure in the way traditional media have been. After all, we can all, at any moment, sign up to any number of online lobbies. If I do not like something going on in the United States I can sign something on line, but how much pressure do the sheer numbers, unless they are focussed in a domestic way, actually exercise?

The Individual

Just briefly I would like to say a bit about the individual in foreign policy and give a few examples. There are two in particular and they both relate to the issue of Vietnamese boat people. When the Thatcher government came in 1979, the problem of refugees fleeing Vietnam in tiny boats for Hong Kong and either perishing at sea or landing in Hong Kong and then living in the most appalling over-crowded conditions, was an issue the new government faced. Margaret Thatcher was very loath to do anything about it. She was not persuaded by the representations that the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, or the Foreign Secretary, Peter Carrington, made to her.

Carrington went to Hong Kong, taking with him British journalists and television crews, and he had himself filmed on the harbour in Hong Kong with the refugees huddled behind him. He used the power of the media to pressure Margaret Thatcher into a change of policy. Gus O’Donnell will remember going to Hong Kong when John Major was Prime Minister. The situation was by then even worse than it had been. It was not only a humanitarian disaster; it had become a foreign policy issue. I can remember John Major, when he was Foreign Secretary, meeting Jim Baker, his American opposite number. It was dominated by Jim Baker producing charts which showed how many Vietnamese boat people had been taken in as refugees in the United States, and even proportionately our performance was extremely feeble. It was Douglas Hurd, when he became Foreign Secretary, who took it upon himself to decide that the only the way to deal with this issue was to repatriate Vietnamese boat people to Vietnam, and to negotiate with Vietnam the conditions in which they would be allowed back. It was hugely high risk for his political career. As it happened, it paid off and did indeed help deal with the problem, but it was a classic case where Cabinet was perfectly happy to go along with the decision, but in that case knowing that the fall guy would not be them, collectively. The fall guy would be one man, namely Douglas.

The national psyche

One of the reviews of Gill’s book spoke of the stories she tells reflecting the innate conservatism of the mandarin classes. Well, okay, up to a point, but it does seem to me that one of the themes of our post-war history in Government, and certainly since the mid 1960s, is the unspoken acceptance that certain things about Britain’s place in the world are constant: the transatlantic relationship, membership of NATO, membership of the European Union, and, certainly as far as government has been concerned, retention of the British nuclear deterrent. Some things are absolutely in the national psyche. We know that David Cameron had a great success at the European Council because François Hollande failed. The French people know that Hollande failed because David Cameron succeeded. You do not need to explain why that is; we all know it comes from our history.

III. Informed decision-making and unintended consequences

How far does the informed process of decision-making take you? Part of that is that the quality of the decisions is only as good as the information on which they are based. I have often asked myself the question, not least because I was one of Tony Blair’s advisers at the time, why was it that in February 2003, one month before the invasion of Iraq, there was only one head of


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government at the Athens summit who said: ‘Nobody round this table has talked about deaths, and if we go into Iraq, tens of thousands of people will die’. That was President Chirac. Nobody else asked that question or even thought, when it had been asked, about whether it was worthy of investigation.

I ask this as a question because I am not privy to these things: how far was it either predicted or predictable in the NSC discussions leading up to the decision to unseat Colonel Gaddafi, whether, as is now the case, today’s terrorists in Mali would be getting refuge and weapons from the liberated, democratic Libya?

When John Major was thinking about whether or not to put British troops in a combat role in the former Yugoslavia, you could argue that his decision not to, in the light of history, along with the decisions of others–because it was a united policy in Europe–led to the prolongation of that conflict. Could John Major at the time have gained, say, the advice of the Chief of the Defence Staff that to do the job would require 50,000 troops and that you would take heavy casualties?

I come back in my own mind to Jack Straw’s point: that all these decisions are taken without the knowledge of what their consequences will be. I do not know whether John Major was right or wrong in terms of what happened, but it seems to me, in respect of the political decision that he took at the time, that he would have been both extremely bold and now potentially condemned by history if he had put British troops in and we had taken heavy casualties. Yet his decision is now sometimes condemned as being pusillanimous.

The Rt Hon Lord Howell of Guildford

I have been reading on the aeroplane from Japan both Gill Bennett’s excellent book again and, as it was a long journey, I read the whole of Lawrie Freedman’s brilliant book on choice of enemies3 and the limits of power. I probably remember more about his views that he can himself at the moment; they are fresh in my mind.

I. The impact of Suez

What is particularly refreshing and stimulating in Gill’s book is the period of Suez, and how the British political and official establishment, and the whole thinking class, drew various lessons from Suez. One was that trying to pretend we could be an independent country, even with a special relationship with America and so on, could not go on. We were finished in that respect. We had to give up our global role, and indeed we then did give up the whole perspective of the global role, or began doing so with our first application to the EEC, which of course was rejected by de Gaulle as the book describes. We then proceeded indeed to give up our global connections and global role, because that was the world we were then in.

Lawrie’s book also reminds one the American influence on us was decisive: Kennedy wanted us to join the European Community as it then was. He was very anxious that Europe should have our influence in it and not turn out to be either actually protectionist or even hostile to America. He thought we would have a good influence on it by being in the centre of it. Of course, there was the bitter moment when the American government decided that they were not going to support the position we had taken up at Suez, and that was it. The whole atmosphere for Britain then began to shape in totally different ways.

3 Sir L. Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: American confronts the Middle East (2010).


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II. Joining the EEC

People ask at what point did the decision become possible, and then probable, about applying to join the European Community as it was. The seeds were in Suez. Some people may have seen beforehand that the writing was on the wall, but Suez was the deciding point. It was the point I first became involved in politics, rather seedily in university politics I think, in 1956, but you could tell even then that we had reached a decision point, a new perception point, and that everything was going to be different from before.

There were huge personal influences on the decision. The view that there would be political and possibly economic collapse if we did not somehow get into the European system was pushed very hard by some very great figures, both in this office where we are now [the FCO] and in the Cabinet. I was at one stage in the distant past a bag carrier for Duncan Sandys, who whirled around Europe later on, but he was absolutely convinced that this was the way forward. Christopher Soames–not to be confused with Nicholas–was also very articulate and very pressing, and of course Frank Lee it and Con O’Neill4 were constantly arguing for it. William Armstrong, with whom I worked when I first went into government, also took the very strong view that we must get on and get in. The Treasury came to it a bit later, but then as our domestic economic situation began to decline, they too came more and more to the view that come hell or high water we just had to get in.

I think that is a good example of how the lessons of Suez–and I will come to some of the business of drawing lessons in a moment–created the conditions in which all of Britain’s thinking and leadership classes began to revise totally the view of what we could do in the world and so on. That led later on to the East of Suez decisions, which were made primarily under the Labour government but carried through by Heath, with much doubt. When I was working with him he often said: ‘Are we really right to go this way?’, but somehow we had inherited the inevitable situation and anyway it fitted into Ted Heath’s strong views that our destiny was in Europe.

III. European crisis

So that is how it all happened and things rolled on from there. It was a very long journey; I read one more book on the flight, which was Bill Jamieson’s brilliant Britain Beyond Europe, published in 1994–19 years ago. It is still totally up to date. It predicts down to the last word everything that has happened, with the chaos of the euro system, the departure of the Club Med countries because they would not be able to keep up, the growing over-centralisation and intrusion; the problems of handling public opinion, not merely in this country but throughout Europe, and the need for allies in searching for new ways of maintaining our leadership and enthusiasm in the European Union before it gets into even further trouble. It is a remarkable book. That is enough about book reading on aeroplanes!

IV. The historical curve

I want to share with you a marvellous quote I came across in John Buchan’s Memory Hold the Door, one of the best political memoirs: ‘In the cycle in which we travel we can only see a fraction of the curve’. I thought that was terrific, because it reminds one first of all that we can only see little bits of the curve. Secondly, it is a curve; not a straight line at all. Extrapolations put forward with great certainty by analysts and economists never work out. It is a curve, and in order to understand what the shape of the curve is of course we have to go back into history and

4 As Joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1960, Sir Frank Lee was responsible for much of the preparatory work for Britain’s first application in 1961 to join the EEC. Sir Con O’Neill, a diplomat, was Permanent Representative to the European Economic Community from 1963-65 and headed the negotiations for British entry 1969-72.


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understand how the views come to be formed that lead the decision to be taken when it is taken–whether it be to send troops or anything else.

I am totally of the view that history decides everything in policy. Far from history not being a major influence on policy decisions, history and assumptions are absolutely central. Of course history does not repeat itself: it is a process. Everything we know is. Life is a process, economy is a process; it is not a system at all, as people think. The assumptions and ideas that have got into people’s heads at every level are what make the conditions, the context, in which the new decisions are then made.

History is absolutely key in understanding how we got to Suez, how we got into the world of the post-Suez situation, and our membership of the European Union, how it became apparent that the Soviet Union was not going to last because centralisation would not work anymore, even though some great authorities–particularly in America–were writing almost while the Berlin Wall was being pulled down that the Soviet Union was here for good and we would have to negotiate with it. They just had not moved on in their minds.

It is worth bearing in mind that all we are dealing with now is a product of history, misunderstandings and understandings, good lessons and bad. Peter Drucker said rather drily, and I did interview him quite a lot when we were trying to put together the new style of government in the late sixties in Opposition, that the real danger in the world is not all the turmoil around us but responding to it by acting on yesterday’s logic. I thought that was a reminder which we should constantly keep in our minds.

I am not going to go in great detail into all the dramas of these periods. I was not in government or anywhere near government at the time of Suez, obviously, and a very junior player at the time of the first European Community dramas, although I was very close to Ted Heath for a time. I think later on he took a rather poor view of his acolytes who had moved over to a new mistress, and our conversation became rather more abrupt and less enthusiastic than it had been in the heyday of working for Heath. But I did my best. He was particularly concerned when, having been his speech writer, I was appointed to the completely powerless job of chief speech writer to Mrs Thatcher in the late 1970s, in preparation for the 1979 election. That is another story.

I think lessons are the thing. It was of course Anthony Nutting who said about Suez, when he resigned, reminding us of Kipling’s couplets, that it had taught us no end of a lesson and it had done us no end of good. I am not sure how much good it did do. I think at the time maybe it did do us good, but it led to all sorts of assumptions about this country which were valid then but have been completely invalidated now.

We are living in a totally different, networked world: the world of the worldwide web. Two billion people are on the web every morning. The interactivity and exchange over policy is so many times more powerful than it was at the time of Suez, or indeed, at the time we applied to join the European Union. There is simply no comparison at all. Indeed, as many of us predicted and wrote books about, democracy has gone onto the streets. You can see it in the Arab awakening; you can see it in a thousand different political tensions and riots in the streets of every capital in the world, even in cities in China, in Moscow and indeed, riots in our own country as well. This is internet mobilised, e-enabled and mobile-telephone enabled, and it gives an extraordinary new twist to the democratic process, greatly weakening traditional forms of central government. This is what we have to now adjust to.

As to lessons, the Suez lesson was probably right at the time but needed revising quite soon after. We have the lessons of the Arab awakening to take on board now. I do not think we have begun to absorb those. We have the lessons of the euro crisis, and the turmoil in many aspects of the traditional, integrationist philosophy of Europe, which clearly does not fit into the 21st Century at all. It was a noble aim at the time, but we have not taken on board the lessons and implications.


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Nor do I think we have taken on board the lessons of the energy revolution. I do not mean the green one, I mean the shale one. It means that the Middle East is suddenly not what it has been since 1914 or before, that is, the region we must look after because it is the source of all our energy, power, oil and gas and so on. The implications of this shift are huge and are already being fed into the American policy-making system, with quite dramatic results coming along the line. We have to adjust our geo-political positioning accordingly. So there are lessons of history there. I am not even sure that we have taken on board fully the lessons of the networked world we now live in. Suddenly, the old blocs and superpowers and so on do not play the role they did in the past.

Conclusion

So there are lots of lessons from these marvellous ‘Six Moments’. There are lots of thoughts about the totally different world we are now living in, where the very nature of diplomacy is changing very fast, given the lattice work, the vast weave of connections between countries, which has transformed the international landscape. I suppose an obvious statistic is that there were 100 sovereign states in 1970; there are now 196. Most of them are wired up; even the rogue states are wired up. Even the junta in Myanmar has had to respond to outside internet pressures. The Chinese government is struggling all the time, contrary to our impression that it is an all-powerful superpower. Actually, the world is in a state of permanent and difficult crisis to keep control of its international connections and the impact of interactivity of the street.

It is a strange world, and I hope we have learned the lessons. This book is a marvellous start: in remembering that lessons have to be learned and that we should, if possible, try to draw the right ones.

Discussion

Peter Hennessy

Thank you, David. I am grateful to David for re-introducing me to that John Buchan quote about the fraction of the curve the other day, which I think is the motto for both diplomats and historians, which brings us nicely together.

Patrick Wright

Can I pick up on two points that Stephen Wall made? I am very glad he referred to the boat people problem because in my five years as PUS, in every discussion I had with my American opposite number, Bob Kimmitt, it was the dominant theme. Indeed, it was the most serious disagreement between the British and American governments in my five years as PUS.

The second point I want to pick up is that I am very glad you mentioned the political aspect of decision-making by ministers, because one thing that our ministers have to do, which curiously enough the American Cabinet does not, is to follow up decisions by explaining them to Parliament. Although American ministers, Cabinet members, are required to appear before committees and so on, they do not have to appear before the whole Parliament, in their case Congress. As David Howell will know, that must be a pretty scary experience.

There is indeed a record of Helmut Schmidt and Harold Wilson’s talk, because I took it. On a side point about Chequers–and I am ready to be corrected–I am pretty certain that the reason why that talk took place at Chequers was that Harold Wilson had been told that the charter of Chequers required that no photographs should be taken. Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher shared one trauma, which was that they did not want to be photographed with either Germans or Japanese. That, presumably, is a generational problem, which I trust has gone.


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One point: Robin mentioned GCHQ. What went wrong with GCHQ–and I was closely involved as the Defence and Intelligence Under Secretary in the Foreign Office–was that it was treated as an intelligence problem, because GCHQ was not avowed. It was actually described in the Foreign Office book as a department under the Foreign Office dealing with communications. It was not publicly admitted that GCHQ were in the business of intercepting communications by foreigners, or indeed, perhaps by our own people. The result was that all the discussions that I took part in about the GCHQ employment problem were classified top secret and code word. It is absolutely ludicrous in retrospect. It should have been a job for the Ministry of Labour and the Prime Minister. The Foreign Office should have had no part in that at all, but it is an odd reflection.

I have incidentally recently been reminded–I think probably by Peter Hennessy–that when I was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee I did not exist, because the JIC had not itself been avowed in the 1970s.

Sir Francis Richards

Lawrie Freedman was very persuasive on the limits of strategy, but almost everybody I know who has come back from working for the British Government in Afghanistan does feel that there is an important strategic thing which we are not very good at. I think by that they mean we are not terribly good at setting achievable objectives, devoting the resources commensurate with those objectives, and then ensuring that every bit of Government works together coherently to deliver success. Is that fair? Why are we not better at strategic grasp?

Professor Keith Jeffery, Queens University Belfast

I have a general question, slightly prompted by the mention of the JIC and GCHQ. We have been talking about foreign policy decision-making and how it is informed, or indeed, not informed. The fascination of Gill’s book is in discussing those and these particular instances. In view of the increasing resources put into the function of intelligence, the efforts to make the system more sophisticated and working up the joint intelligence machinery, how important is intelligence in informing foreign policy decision-making?

Peter Hennessy

There is a lot there. Who wants to go first? Who wants to take the strategy point? I think Cabinet Secretaries are meant to be good at strategy?

Patrick Wright

I will leave that to Lawrie if I may.

Peter Hennessy

The Cabinet Office replied to the PASC Select Committee’s inquiry into strategy saying: ‘We do not use the phrase “Ground Strategy” any more’. That helped a lot then, I would have thought.

David Howell

I hesitate to query the whole concept, but strategy is usually a word you utter when things are going wrong as to why you are not proceeding in the right direction. My experience in and out of governments at all sorts of levels over a hell of a long time is that it is not like that. There is not a strategic pattern to be established. There is either a general vision, decided not only by ministers but by the establishment generally and by the media, and certainly by the best brains in the civil


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service, as to where we are trying to position ourselves, and within that you then dodge and weave. You do not strategise. You dodge and weave to try to keep up with your own vision. Or there is not a vision. If there is not a vision, trying to form strategy is like rushing around trying to put a large pond into little pools. It does not work.

I am afraid I am pretty agnostic about too much talk about strategy. I notice Bernard Jenkin’s Constitutional Committee came out with a tremendously grand statement, saying the government was not equipped to have strategy on this that or the other. It doesn’t matter: if we have not got a clear vision of how we are trying to position this country and what our interests now are, how we pursue them–how, in a totally interdependent world we link up with all the other events and interest in the network–unless you have that, strategy is just a word you rush around wringing your hands about and never get there. Sorry to be slightly agnostic about this matter.

Peter Hennessy

It is very stimulating. Lawrie, you are a sort of insider/outsider. Can you take the intelligence point, because you have been the official historian of the Falklands, and you have looked at every scrap of intelligence on Iraq? We are now taking you into the terrain that you cannot go into. Do you want to give an intelligence historian’s answer to an intelligence historian?


I actually started off looking at American intelligence, so I will start there. My PhD was about the influence of intelligence on American strategic policy. This is relevant to the strategy question as well, because there is a view of rational policy-making which is that there is a threat, and the threat is intelligence based. You identify the threat; you work out what to do with it; and that is strategy. But when you look at the idea of the threat, it becomes clear that a threat is a combination of what you think the other lot are up to, and what you think are your vulnerabilities. It is not a threat unless you have a vulnerability. Most of the discussion on threats is about vulnerabilities, in which it is then believed the other side are clever enough to have seen these vulnerabilities as well as you have seen them.

The sequence works backward: you decide more or less what you would like to do and then you look backwards and you discover the other lot might just have those capabilities and might be prepared to exploit your vulnerabilities. Certainly in the American system that I was looking at from the 1960s, the discussion of intelligence started with competing policy viewpoints. It is often one of the tragedies of intelligence that at the time when politicians need it most the intelligence community is as much in the dark as everybody else, except they are supposed to come up with good ideas. Because it is intelligence and secret, it has authority beyond that which it often deserves. That is not to say there is not a lot of often very great stuff in intelligence. The intelligence community, it seems to me, is at its best when reporting general trends and keeping people up to date with developing situations.

The intelligence community is often criticised for getting the Falklands wrong. Actually, it had it more or less right, pretty well up to the start of March 1982. They had very few resources on it but they had got it right. You knew there was a problem when the junta disavowed the negotiations. All the indicators were flashing, and they were right. They were wrong on two bases: first, they believed there was a rational policy for the Argentines, which the Argentines did not think would work. The British thought the rational policy was to lay siege to the Falklands, but the Argentines thought that we would just turn to Chile if they did that. The other thing, and it is crucial to most intelligence failures, is it is very hard to anticipate other countries making really stupid decisions. You like to think that people are being rational, even people you disagree with. Indeed, often when we talk about our enemies we talk as if they are incredibly clever and rational and far-seeing and patient and able to understand things that we are hopeless at understanding. Yet they often make very stupid decisions and they cause great problems for you and create a crisis. That


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is a very hard thing for an intelligence community to get right. The junta made some pretty stupid decisions.

I am a fan of the intelligence community. They do sterling work, but they are doomed never to be fully appreciated because they cannot understand decisions that are stupid and also it is very difficult for them to appreciate choices that are yet to be made by their own government, which is another part of the problem.

One final word on strategy, because I have a book coming out in October, a history of strategy. The problem with strategy is it has been elevated into something which is far more than it can ever be. John Kay’s ‘strategy is synonymous with expensive’5 is a pretty good way of thinking about it.

Sir Stephen Wall

Just one comment on Lawrie’s penultimate point. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is a perfect example of this: the intelligence was absolutely impeccable, but policy makers did not think he would be so stupid as to actually do it.


The other thing about the invasion of Kuwait–this is American, rather than British–is that Bush had his own network. He was ringing up all his friends in the Middle East, who told him it was a bluff. There was perfectly good intelligence coming through that this probably was not a bluff, because there were very good indicators that this was proper preparation for war. But if King Hussein told you it was a bluff, who are you, as a mere intelligence operator to say, ‘Actually, I do not think that is right’?

Peter Hennessy

To back up Lawrie’s point, one of the most film-script like bits of Mrs Thatcher’s evidence to the Franks Inquiry is when she says with great force, twice, ‘I could not believe the Argentines would be so stupid as to do that. So stupid.’ It is wonderful stuff.

Robin Butler

I would just add a sentence on that. I think for all the reasons given, predictive intelligence does not often get it right, but I was hugely influenced by Gordon Barrass’ book about the Cold War, where intelligence was enormously important. The Russians had good enough intelligence to know that NATO did not intend to attack, and we had good enough intelligence to know that the Russians were not capable of attacking. This very much helped to keep the peace.

David Howell

I cannot risk adding the point that as Energy Secretary I was concerned with energy security issues, but I never received any information from the intelligence bodies that was of any use at all. Energy seems to be a black hole in the intelligence machinery of this country and continues to be.

5 John Kay, The Structure of Strategy, Business Strategy Review, 1993.


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Peter Hennessy

Is there not partly a problem with that, because it may be friend-to-friend intelligence, which we have never done, have we? No need to comment on that.

Tim Dowse, FCO

I am probably swimming against the tide, but could I try a word in favour of sofa government? One reason–not the only reason–why it seems to me that Prime Ministers, not only Tony Blair, have been cautious to go to full Cabinet on some of these very big and highly politically sensitive decisions, or security sensitive decisions, is fear of leaks. There is the fear that you lose control of the whole debate once it gets into the media and you end up in a place that you were not intending to move to. That seems to me to be quite a legitimate concern and one that is much more salient today than it probably was for the Attlee Government over Korea, for example, where the habit of individual Cabinet members, if you like, briefing their preferred journalist, was much less of a problem.

Peter Hennessy

There was only one great leak from the Attlee cabinet and that was Dame Isobel Cripps, who wanted Stafford6 to be Prime Minister. She would have tea with Hugh Massingham of The Observer every Friday in the Connaught Hotel, and give Hugh the Stafford Cripps lowdown on what had happened in the Cabinet. The leak inquiry never found it out. Dame Isobel Cripps was the great source of insecurity in those days, but the only one, as far as we know. That is just a little footnote.

Robin Butler

I agree that fear of leaks is a fact, but the experience is that the big secrets never leak. All that leaks are the trivia.

Peter Hennessy

How interesting. That is Butler’s Law. I think somebody should write that down: Butler’s Law of Leaks.

Robin Butler

Peter, I think there is a question related to that, which is how far the determination of a particular leader to do something then affects the quality of the information coming to Government in terms of making the decision. In one of the programmes that was made about Suez on the anniversary a few years ago, one of the guys who had been a Foreign Office lawyer at the time recalled going to a meeting at cabinet and advising Anthony Eden that the nationalisation of the Suez canal was not illegal in international law provided that Nasser paid compensation to the shareholders, which I think was subsequently the advice of the Attorney General. According to this guy’s account Eden picked up the bit of paper, threw it on the floor, saying, ‘That is no f*cking use’. If you look at the run-up to Iraq, Foreign Office lawyers had to be quite brave, and were quite brave. It is quite easy to get into a situation–it is one reason why some of the stuff that is said about the Civil Service in public is quite damaging–not because it is just unfair to individuals, but because if you get a

6 Sir Stafford Cripps, who served in the Attlee government between 1945 and 1950 as President of the Board of Trade, Minister for Economic Affairs and then Chancellor of the Exchequer.


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climate in which the best advice is not actually available, then it makes it harder to take the best decisions.

David Howell

If I could turn that slightly on its head and go back to the first cabinet meeting the night the Argentine invasion had taken place during the Falklands crisis–I think we are out of the thirty-year limit, so it is all right. A bit of paper was passed around by the Cabinet Assessment Group as it was called then, saying that it was impossible to recapture the Falklands. It had never been done in history; it could not be done. Once an established force was on an island, you could never get them off and that was it. This paper was put in front of every Cabinet minister around the table, including myself. Of course, when the Prime Minister picked it up and saw it she exploded, and ordered Willie Whitelaw to go around the whole table picking up the copies, saying she never wished to see this paper again. So the political will was obviously in the direction of doing something about the Falklands: in fact, it was irresistible. The assessment happened to be wrong, but it was an assessment that was cast aside with great vigour by a lot of very determined people under a very determined Prime Minister.

Peter Hennessy

A final footnote on Suez. One of the last files to be declassified recorded when Attorney General Reginald Manningham-Buller, Eliza’s dad, wrote a note to Anthony Eden, saying the Solicitor General and I have to tell you that it in our view Article 51 cannot be used as an excuse for this invasion. We are not going to go public on it, but if the Solicitor General or I are asked a Parliamentary question in the House of Commons we will have to say that is our view. Nobody thought to ask. Just think of the impact that would have had in October 1956. It is quite extraordinary.

We have had a terrific afternoon and there is still a party to come. Thank you very much.

Reception, held in the Grand Locarno Room, FCO At the reception, Professor Patrick Salmon welcomed the guests and read out again the message from the Foreign Secretary that had been read out at the beginning of the Seminar. There then followed short speeches by Matthew Cotton of Oxford University Press, and by Gill Bennett. Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield then made the following remarks:

Peter Hennessy

It is a great honour to be able to speak in praise of Gill and this terrific book. As I said at the seminar this afternoon, I have known Gill and admired her for a very long time, and I am hugely grateful to her and to the Foreign Office Historians for all the help they have given to students. I can only echo what Robin Butler and others have said: thank heavens the FCO did not dispense with the Historians in the cuts round. The Treasury got rid of their Historical Section in 1976, in the International Monetary Fund crisis. The cost of the Treasury historians, who were a glorious bunch and produced remarkably good things, was exactly the amount required to satisfy the Treasury that it had me the cuts it was inflicting on everyone else. The historians went, and the Treasury is now regretting it.

As I said this afternoon, I am a great admirer of the Foreign Secretary’s profound interest in history, and the speech in this very room in September 2010 about the need to restore history to


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the place. His wonderful impression of Albert the Anaconda in his glass case as all that remained of the great Foreign Office library, well for the older of you in the room it was Stanley Holloway’s monologue at its finest. It is wonderful to have a Foreign Secretary who is straight out of the North of England music hall tradition, and his was one of the finest speeches I have ever heard from a senior minister. Not just because of Albert and the emphasis on history, though I am full of admiration for that, too.

The third reason that I am delighted to be speaking this evening is that Six Moments of Crisis is a fine piece of practical scholarship, with high current and future utility to match, as was evident throughout our afternoon seminar today. May I elaborate briefly on this third reason? As I said in the blurb on the book, Gill is excellent–in fact she is a natural–at reconstructing difficult and uncertain realities as crises unfold. She always sets them in the context of all the other vexing decisions, problems and anxieties flying at ministers and officials at the same time. As Gill herself said this afternoon, it is not something that young PhD history students are always aware of. You can spend three years on a thesis dealing with one crisis that had to be resolved one way or another within the space–take the Falklands–of two and a half months. Indeed, I have known some PhD these to deal with aspects of the Second World War that have taken longer than that war itself actually lasted. We all train our research students not to do this, but there is nothing worse than going with a fistful of declassified material from Kew to somebody in their 80s and saying, ‘On that afternoon, why did you think like this, and how on earth could you sign that off?’ It is just so awful, but there we are. Gill, of course, is entirely free of all this, because she understands. This is another reason, I think, why this book is so important, for research students to see how it can be done, the reconstruction of reality.

Also related to this is Gill’s selection of episodes. Wars are here in the book, as they should be and must be, but there are also different kinds of struggle. Dealing with General de Gaulle, a feat that nobody manages apart from Madame de Gaulle; the emotional geography of the United Kingdom that is always aroused when we try to undertake the hardest kind of disarmament, which is aspirational disarmament, something we find extremely difficult given our Great Power and Imperial past; the withdrawal from East of Suez–the discussions of 1968 are fascinating in the book, and indeed the first section of the seminar this afternoon on this topic was really very interesting; and the follow-up to the devaluation of sterling in 1967. I think it was an inspiration, Gill, that you should put in Operation FOOT, biffing the KGB in the early 1970s. I think it was just terrific, for all sorts of reasons.

This book works, I think, for those who played a part in the events it describes, for those Crown servants who will have to help tackle serious and sometimes unexpected problems in the future, for the students I have mentioned and indeed for the general reader. To sum up, Gill’s book is an example of why we as a country need to think above our weight as well as punch above our weight.

Finally–and I mentioned this at the seminar–Gill has a formidable patroness in what she has done and how she has done it. This comes from a recently-declassified set of papers in The National Archives, the transcripts of the Franks Inquiry into the Falklands. It is very interesting, because the Inquiry had four Prime Ministers, three as well as Mrs Thatcher, before them. They asked them all the same question: how did you make use of intelligence when you were Prime Minister? We very rarely, as historians, get much of an insight into that, but in the Callaghan, Wilson and Heath transcripts they all said the same thing, interestingly enough: that the box they read first at night was what Mrs Thatcher called the ‘hot box’. It is the blue one with the red stripe, in which is the intelligence and the dirt on colleagues–so much more interesting than Rate Support Grant. That is me speaking, not Mrs Thatcher.

This is what Mrs Thatcher said at the end of her session with Franks and his fellow Privy Councillors. Oliver Franks says, ‘So you think we can learn from history?’ Mrs Thatcher says, ‘I think you are very foolish if you do not.’ Amen to that, and we cannot have a finer example than Gill and her book to illustrate Mrs Thatcher’s point.


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