Bagehot Updated: I

"The most curious thing about the Cabinet," Walter Bagehot, founder and editor ot the Economist, wrote in 1867, "is that so very little is known about it. The meetings are not only secret in theory, but secret in reality....No description of it, at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be something like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak and few listen--though no one knows." A century later, the situation had not changed. Richard Crossman--Oxford don, psychological warfare chief, Labour M.P. and editor of The New Statesman--complained of "how little is normally revealed of what goes on in the modern Cabinet, and how much information is available about these secret proceedings, if only someone who knows the truth can be stimulated to divulge it."

The following year Crossman was thus "stimulated" when he joined the Cabinet himself. For the next six years, until Harold Wilson's Labour government was unexpectedly turned out of office in 1970, Crossman learned about Cabinet government from the inside. His conclusion--after serving successively as Minister of Housing, Lord President of the Council, Majority Leader in the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Social Services--was that the Cabinet had little effective power and that Britain had drifted into a "Prime Ministerial" form of government. Crossman presented these views in his 1970 Godkin lectures at Harvard, which he later claimed had been entirely ignored by the press, with the exception of "The Harvard Crimson, which gave a couple of paragraphs to the third lecture."

Crossman died in 1973 and left behind him a set of political diaries that presented a "graphic and authentic" picture of behind-the-scenes workings of the Cabinet intended to expose the myths of Cabinet government with the same devastating accuracy Walter Bagehot had levelled against the myths of constitutional monarchy a century earlier.

Crossman arranged for the publication of these diaries and before he died had been assured by lawyers that there were no legal obstacles. As his chief literary executor he selected Michael Foot, a fiery figure of the Labour party's left and someone strong enough, Crossman felt, to stand up to Harold Wilson. The Sunday Times of London published two series of excerpts from the diaries before Wilson intervened to quash them. Claiming that he acted on the advice of impartial civil servants, Wilson instructed his attorney-general to seek an injunction against further publication of the diaries.

The legal issue involved in the Crossman case was the common law issue of prior restraint, an area in which British courts tend to be less concerned with protecting public acess to information than American ones. Hovering in the background, though not officially invoked, was the Official Secrets Act of 1940, passed under wartime conditions and giving the government broad powers to muzzle publication.

The issue was further complicated and Wilson's position strengthened by Foot's status as a Cabinet Minister. Under the interpretation of the Official Secrets Act ex-Ministers were forced to get the "advice" of the Cabinet before releasing any "official secrets" in their memoirs, though the Cabinet could not impose any legal strictures. As a current Cabinet Minister, however, Foot was bound by the doctrine of "collective responsibility" to follow the advice of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary. Faced with the alternative of resigning from the Cabinet or retreating on the Crossman diaries, Foot predictably chose the latter alternative.

Why was Wilson so anxious to suppress what Crossman had to say? Crossman's revelations were not exactly bombshells. He portrays the Cabinet as an ill-informed, impotent group of all-too-human Ministers concerned mostly about maintaining their own power and prestige, but these observations were neither unprecedented nor earth-shaking. It seems that what forced Wilson to take action was Crossman's version of factual events--a version that contradicted Wilson's own--and the influence this might have on the left wing of the Labour party, restive and ready to bolt at any sign of weakness on Wilson's part.

Wilson, after all, had published his own volume of reminscences of his first government, entitled A Personal Record. At the time no one had raised any objections about the propriety of releasing inside versions of "secret" cabinet meetings. Wilson claims in these memoirs to have been against the resumption of arms sales to South Africa, an assertion that Crossman's diaries show to be false. Wilson and Crossman conflict on many other points, mostly ones that seem fairly trivial to outsiders but that have remained issses of passionate conceern to the Labour party's left wing.

This left wing has been giving Wilson more and more trouble lately. In his Godkin lectures, Crossman described the job of any Labour Prime Minister as "driving the two-horse chariot"--maintaining control over both the Parliamentary Labour Party, which tends to be middle-of-the-road, and the National Executive, which represents the party outside Parliament. In the complicated Labour Party Constitution, written in the early years of this century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson, the big unions were supposed to supply the moderate ballast to keep the national party roughly in line with the P.L.P. Since the end of the Attlee government in 1951, though, the two largest British unions have shifted radically leftwards and increased the split between M.P.'s and trade unionists to alarming proportions. Wilson has so far, single-handedly bridged this gap. As Crossman pointed out, in Bagehot's terms Wilson has acted as the "bridge or buckle or hyphen" between Labour's two power bases.

This has been an increasingly difficult circus act to perform. Revolts against the "moderate" Labour M.P.'s have weighted the balance of power within the National Executive heavily in favor of the radicals. The moderates, by deserting Wilson over the Common Market issue (they voted, with the Tories, to keep Britain in the EEc) lost key positions of strength. After Edward Heath's brinksmanship on the edge of class war failed to rally the nation during the Coal Strike of 1974, Wilson took office on the principle that only a Labour government could come to a rational deal with the Trade Unions. He is now trying to work out such a contract with the support of Jack Hones, the president of the Transport and General Workers Union, Britain's largest, and Michael Foot, who won over crucial support for Wilson's new policies in an emotional speech at the recent conference in Black-pool

Part two of BAGEHOT UPDATED will appear in this space next Thursday.