Bernard Ingham: Whitehall farce over secrecy exposes the nonsense of ‘open government’

That is a distinction I share with my 14 predecessors in the post and all my successors apart from Alastair Campbell, who made his own rules, which were entirely governed by expediency and the perceived political advantage of the moment.

It is a distinction that made a mockery of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, which has now been on the Statute Book for exactly 100 years.

This section – as distinct from Section 1 dealing with espionage – was so tightly drawn at a time of national hysteria over the prospect of war that any Civil Servant could have had his collar felt for disclosing information, whether secret or not, without authority.

In other words, anybody telling a reporter how many proverbial paper clips were in the possession of his department could theoretically have been prosecuted if his Minister had not already authorised him to disclose that useless piece of information.

Just before I retired on Thatcher’s resignation in 1990, the scope of S2 was narrowed because it was becoming impossible to defend the original.

It follows that I spent virtually the whole of my 24 years as a government press secretary operating under the old, draconian 1911 Act.

In one sense, it might never have existed. In going in to bat daily with journalists, I never gave the Official Secrets Act, let alone S2, the slightest thought. I was not in the business of giving away secrets.

As I told American correspondents during the Falklands War, if you think I am going to tell you where and when we are going to invade, you are dafter than you look.

But – and this was tacitly conceded by the system – I had to be given room to explain the government’s position properly or to carry credibility. In other words, I was licensed to leak. Put another way, I was licensed to break the law on a daily basis, if necessary.

Having said that, you could not make a profession out of wanton incontinence. There had to be a point to it at a time when, believe it or not, it was considered altogether too much to reveal the existence of Cabinet committees and more specially the codes by which they were known – such as “EY(H)” for some group perhaps dealing with the domestic economy.

Not unnaturally, journalists coveted these hieroglyphics as much as train spotters prized new “namers” – trains named after someone or something.

Which brings me to the real problem with S2. Having been conceived in hysteria, it perpetuated it for virtually 80 years. It generated an obsessive secrecy in Whitehall that made it the tightest-lipped bureaucracy in the Western world.

Worse still, in 1945 Clement Attlee put the newly created Government Information Service under the hierarchical control of the mandarins who actually operated the secret state. Dracula took charge of the blood bank.

The result was an hourly battle by press officers – and not least by Chief Press Secretaries to the PM – to drain blood out of the uncompromising official stone. Things got so bad during the Falklands campaign that I told them that had we not been fighting a war I would be tendering my resignation. Cecil Parkinson was brought in to pacify the warring tribes of Whitehall.

What made all this official secrecy so contemptible was the certain knowledge that some officials would, for their own purposes, tell journalists what they would never vouchsafe to us.

Indeed, some of them talked so freely to the budding Professor Peter Hennessy, chronicler of secretive Britain – even about myself personally – that The Times regularly carried what I described as the mutual massaging of egos.

In short, S2 was progressively honoured in the breach not as government opened up but as standards of official behaviour fell.

But there was never any commitment to a more open society. Nor is there now, after moving in 15 short years from the old S2 to the Freedom of Information Act. I personally regard open government as a ludicrous nonsense. Some of it has to be closed, but it could be far more open than it is.

It is going to take a long time to allow common sense to bring down the iron curtain of the old S2 and make a licence to leak redundant.