I am reading “A View from the Foothills” by Chris Mullin.  It is enormous fun, a good read, and entirely convincing about the misery of life as a Junior Minister.

There are also some fascinating asides.

Like this entry from 5th April 2000, recording an encounter in the tea room with Archie Norman, then an MP and Chairman of the Conservative Party, now of course not-an-MP and Chairman of ITV:

“Later, half an hour in the Tea Room with Archie Norman.  He said it costs about £9 million a year to run the Tory party and about another £10 million to run an election. ‘There won’t be any more big poster campaigns because we can’t afford them.’  He added quietly, ‘It is amazing what some people will do for a peerage.  I know stories I could never tell.’”

I wonder what it is he could never tell?

Of course, Cameron’s Conservative’s are spending big on posters at the moment ….

Meanwhile, ConservativeHome records the search for a hundred new Tory peers ….

Now is there a pattern here?

Over the Christmas break I enjoyed “The Tortoise and the Hares“, the enormously readable account by my colleague Lord Giles Radice of the relationship between Clement Attlee and the giants in his 1945-51 Cabinets like Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton, Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell.

The book focuses on the relationship between the quiet, unassuming Attlee and the extraordinary figures around him in the leadership of the Labour Party and the Labour Government.  Attlee’s ability to play off those around him, so that he was always able to head off the frequent challenges to his leadership by one or other of them, but at the same time giving each of them the space to deliver fundamental change in their respective policy areas, was quite remarkable.

However, even more striking is the formidable nature of the individuals making up those Cabinets.  Today, we have become used to Parties led by strong figures with other leading members being clearly several steps behind.  The situation in Attlee’s Cabinet was rather, if taken forward fifty years, as though Tony Blair had had four figures of the calibre and strength of Gordon Brown filling the major offices of state, all seeking ownership of the government’s direction.  The change seems to have occurred after the 1979 General Election when Margaret Thatcher came to completely dominate her Cabinet.  There was something of a reversion under John Major – although none of the figures in the 1990-97 Cabinets could really be described as of huge substance.  Then from 1997 onwards, we again had pre-eminent Prime Ministers.  And in the (unlikely) event of a Conservative Government being elected later this year, it is hard to see any of the present Shadow Cabinet having the stature to affect the authority of David Cameron.

So has the change come about because of the individuals holding the office of Prime Minister?  Or do we no longer have the same supply of dominating figures in the front-rank of politics?  I rather suspect it is the latter – although if few of the present Cabinet are in the mould of the Bevins and Morrisons of the 1940s, they are giants compared with the pygmies on the Tory front-bench.

Of course, politics sixty years ago were very different.  Today, it is hard to envisage a senior Cabinet Minister having to resign, as Hugh Dalton did, for briefing a member of the press before an announcement in the House of Commons.  Nor is it possible to imagine that the wife of a prominent Cabinet member might have tea every Friday afternoon with a Sunday newspaper correspondent and give him near-verbatim accounts of Cabinet discussions (as was the practice of Isobel Cripps) without the source of the leak rapidly becoming known (according to Giles Radice even the security service failed to identify her).

Even more striking is how ill some of the major figures were much of the time.  The book describes the mission to the United States in 1949 to discuss the sterling exchange rate led by Cripps and Bevin.  The two men sailed to the US on the RMS Mauretania, because as the book describes it:

“Both Cripps and Bevin were in poor health: Bevin could not travel by air because of his heart and stayed in bed resting, while Cripps used the boat journey to prolong his convalescence (from acute colitis which had incapacitated him for months).  Curiously the two ministers did not actually meet for the first three or four days.  Cripps rose at 4am, often pacing the deck till dawn, and retired to bed early at around 4 or 5pm.  Meanwhile Bevin did not rise until late afternoon.  It was not until well into the voyage, when Cripps agreed to stay up a little later, that … (the civil servants) … had the opportunity to brief the two statesmen together.”

It is not clear that politicians are allowed to be unwell these days.  (This, of course, was not just a factor for Labour figures – Churchill was frequently indisposed even during the War and his devastating strokes in 1949 and when he was again Prime Minister in 1953 were kept secret for months.)  Attlee, of course, outlived all the hares in the book and Churchill.

I have been reading “Torture Team: Uncovering War crimes in the Land of the Free” by Philippe Sands, Professor of Law at University College, London (he is also a practising barrister at the Matrix Chambers and an Arsenal fan – although neither of these should be held against him).

The book describes in detail – on occasions meeting by meeting and memo by memo – how the use of “aggressive interrogation techniques” came to be authorised against detainees at Guantanamo Bay.  This overturned existing US policy dating back at least as far as 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued the instruction that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty … nor of torture to extract confessions”.  Along the way, it was asserted that the Geneva Convention does not apply to those detained as part of the so-called “war on terror”.

The specific techniques included “water-boarding”, deprivation of sleep, maintenance of stress positions for long periods (the then US Secretary for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, entered a caveat on the memo approving this, saying that he thought the restriction on standing for more than four hours was unnecessary as he personally often stood for much longer than that during the course of a day), humiliation, nudity in front of female soldiers, and exposure to extremes of room temperature.

In at least one instance, these techniques were repeated daily for more than seven weeks with a detainee who had already been kept isolated for many months.  It is apparent that no new information of any substance was obtained from this individual as a result of this “aggressive interrogation”.  (This echoes the remarks made to me by a former senior official of the Secret Intelligence Service: “Not only is torture illegal and morally wrong, it doesn’t work anyway”.)  The Bush administration eventually charged the individual with a list of terrorist offences including murder, only to withdraw the charges a few months later, admitting that the way he had been treated “met the legal definition of torture”.

Indeed, that admission of torture is significant.  Eventually, the Bush administration was constrained by proper legal process.  In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees were subject to Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention and had to be treated humanely.  And by then the various documents authorising “aggressive interrogation” had been revoked.

However, the process by which those documents had originally been produced is fascinating.  Legal advice was obtained, so that those acting on the authorisation could be assured that “aggressive interrogation” was lawful.  However, as Sands points out this advice was not authoritative and bypassed the proper channels (in particular, those lawyers within the military who would have challenged what was being suggested).

Sands draws a distinction between lawyers offering advice and those providing advocacy for a point of view.  The former must present the law clearly and indicate if their advice would be commonly accepted or is likely to be accepted by the Courts.  The arguments used as part of the advocacy of the latter is not the same as advice.

Sands concludes that the lawyers involved in the decisions to authorise “aggressive interrogation” are just as culpable as those who actually made the decisions.

Whether or not any of this leads to charges in the US or elsewhere for war crimes is one thing, but the lessons about advice are relevant to all politicians whatever the level of the decision being taken.

I remember as a local council leader often seeking advice on the legality of policies proposed.  While a legal opinion that supported the proposed action provided protection to those councillors making the decision, it was much more important to know whether the decision was sustainable (rather than arguable) if the matter was ever challenged in court.

I have already commented about the accuracy (or lack of it to be more precise) of the autobiography produced by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair.  However, a review in the Observer by Andrew Anthony should hasten the remaining stocks of the book to the discount shelves.

Apparently, the book is “plodding and pompous”:

“Blair does not fit the traditional mould of a policeman. He sees himself as a bit of a Guardian-reading liberal and he studied English at Oxford. A pity, then, that he didn’t come up with a more dynamic title for his book than Policing Controversy. But it points to a prose style, by turns plodding and pompous, that defeats casual interest. The reader is required to care as much as the author, and the author, like anyone who feels they were unfairly dismissed, cares a great deal.”

According to the Observer, the writing is “prone to incoherence” and there is too much self-justification:

“Blair never reconciles these contradictions, but he does conclude with a spirited defence of police independence in the face of Tory plans to make constabulary chiefs answerable to elected mayors. He envisages a future in which wealthy communities become increasingly well policed, while the poor and powerless are neglected. “The security of the citizen,” he writes, “should not be a commodity.” It’s noticeable that when articulating a belief, Blair can be spare and precise, but when explaining an action, he is prone to incoherence. It’s a shame that he didn’t concentrate more on justice and less on self-justification.”

However, even the self-justification is unconvincing in the sections dealing with the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes:

“The pall of suspicion stemming from that incident hung over Blair for the rest of his time as commissioner and almost certainly helped bring his term to a premature end. It wasn’t the errors resulting in Menezes’s death that undermined him so much as the belief that he played a part in trying to cover them up. In this memoir, Blair makes a detailed but not always convincing attempt to answer his critics. Essentially there are two charges against him, the first being that he denied and then delayed the Independent Police Complaints Commission access to the scene of the crime at Stockwell.

Blair maintains that this was necessary to prevent further lives from being placed at risk. It’s easy to make rational judgments in hindsight, but this seems dubious. Far more likely is that he didn’t want to upset his armed response teams with an investigation while the terrorists were still at large.

The second charge concerns when exactly Blair learnt that his officers had killed an innocent man.  He insists it was on 23 July, the day after the shooting, which would explain why he issued a press statement late on the 22nd specifying that it wasn’t clear whether the dead man was one of the failed suicide bombers. But several senior officers knew hours before he issued that statement that De Menezes was not one of the wanted men. So why didn’t Blair?

I think it’s probable that Blair didn’t know, yet that in itself is an indictment of his leadership. Surely the top man should have been warned as soon as it became apparent that the wrong man had been shot? Blair struggles to explain the procedural logic of why he wasn’t informed at the earliest opportunity, but in doing so he paints a picture of a divisive, top-heavy management structure steeped in intrigue and resentment.”

Oh dear …..

A few years ago, the Guardian was famous for its typographical errors.  I was reminded of this when I ran into Anita Pollack, the former London MEP, at the Foreign Policy Centre fringe.

She has a book coming out: “Wreckers or Builders? – A History of Labour MEPs 1979-1999″.

I can never see her without remembering the Guardian error.  This was in the European Election results issue in (I think) 1989.  At a late stage, the editorial team had clearly decided that they should refer to the “turnout” rather than the “poll” in each euro-constituency.  They used the then cutting edge technology of “Find and Replace”.

The result was that one of London’s MEPs suddenly became – the hitherto unknown – Anita Turnoutack.

Prompted by the excellent exhibition, “Henry VIII: Man and Monarch“, at the British Library, which I visited last week, I have been reading David Starkey’s book, “Henry: Virtuous Prince“.  I am not sure whether the book inspired the Channel Four series (which I didn’t watch) or whether this is the book prepared for the TV programme and its viewers.  Certainly, it ends abruptly just after the death of the son Henry had with Catherine of Aragon and the arrival at court of the young Thomas Wolsey in 1511.  We will have to wait until September 2010 for the rest of Henry’s life.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Starkey’s focus on the young Henry – particularly as most of the history I remember being taught concentrated on the later – more tyrannical – Henry and dwelt on his wives and what became of them.

However, I wonder if many of today’s school-children even know that much.

I was reminded how little British history is now taught these days, when – again last week – I watched a group of about thirty ten- and eleven-year-olds being asked where the names came from of Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square.  The former produced various lavatorial answers, but the latter produced nothing.  The kids knew that the “thing in the middle” was Nelson’s Column, but, when asked who Nelson was, the best they could come up with was Nelson Mandela.

Now I accept that history should not just centre on Britain – and certainly not just on its Kings and Queens – nor should it end in 1815 or 1901.  An understanding of world history and of the social factors that underlie historical events is an essential part of being able to interpret what is going on around us today.

However, an essential part of being British ought to be at least some general awareness of the chronology that led to the modern United Kingdom.  Maybe this makes me sound like a reactionary old f*rt – no doubt many would say that that is what I am – but, as we debate the meaning of citizenship, I can’t help feeling that some knowledge of the historical basics should be a prerequisite both for those applying for citizenship and for those whose citizenship is their birthright.

So come along then:  where does Henry VIII rank amongst our greatest Kings?  Certainly, the events of his reign (like the break with Rome) had a profound influence on the country’s future, but did that make him great?  And how would he rank if you included the Queens in the list?  And Cromwell, as Lord Protector?

I”ve just been reading David Aaronovitch’’s “Voodoo Histories: The role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history“.  It is an enormously enjoyable review of a variety of conspiracy theories that have engaged millions over the last hundred years – sometimes with devastating consequences.  He starts with the insidious “Protocols of the Elders of Sion” whose origins were nothing to do with the Jews (nor even aimed at them) but arose from a satire on Louis Napoleon involving an imaginary dialogue in Hell between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu.  The text was then adapted to produce the anti-semitic nonsense used by Hitler, believed by people like Henry Ford, and still being cited as fact by the Iranian regime.

Subsequent chapters deal with Stalin’’s terror and the Moscow show trials, McCarthyism in the United States, inevitably the assassinations of the Kennedys, the deaths of Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe, the blood-line of Jesus Christ (as popularised by “The Da Vinci Code“), the 9/11 “truth” movement and the death of David Kelly (including a devastating hatchet job on the book by the LibDem MP, Norman Baker).

Part of the interest for me is that I have read many of the books describing the conspiracies that Aaronovitch debunks.  Maybe I am a potential believer in such nonsenses, although I can say that I have never been entirely convinced by the tomes I have read, despite the myriad of pseudo-learned footnotes and quasi-academic references.  So yes, I did read “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail“, while on holiday near Rennes-le-Chateau (allegedly where the secret scrolls were found) – I also remember a local Anglo-French resident telling me very sniffily that it was written by former “Dr Who” script-writers.  I have read Mark Lane’’s “Rush to Judgement“, books about Marilyn Monroe’’s “murder”,  and Norman Baker’’s “The Strange Death of David Kelly“.  I not only read ”Unlawful Killing: The Murder of Hilda Murrell“, but employed its author, Judith Cook, for a while.

The widespread belief in conspiracy theories does not make those theories true, but the desire to believe in them does tell us something about people’’s attitudes to authority.  The theories themselves are by no means harmless: they are corrosive to trust and can lead to violence and oppression.  Nonsense needs rebutting.  And as consiracy theories are resilient, their nonsense needs to be challenged repeatedly.