I grew up in Tasmania in the 1980s. The capital city, Hobart, had a bit of a “living at the edge of the world” feeling in those days. It seemed about as far away from anywhere as you could get. So, I remember the thrill when the first hints of the “Spycatcher” scandal hit. A British spy had “secretly” been living only a few miles away in the sleepy town of Cygnet. To a child, it all felt impossibly adventurous.
The British National Archives has now released a slew of Cabinet Office papers dealing with the extraordinary series of events surrounding this man and his attempts to publish Spycatcher, a memoir that promised to spill secrets on double agents and assassination plots. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at the time, was so concerned about the book’s contents that the UK government launched multiple legal attempts to have it barred from publication. The most famous of these cases unfolded in Australia, where Thatcher had dispatched her top civil servant to fight the former MI5 operative Peter Wright in court.
The documents lay bare how fearful she was about the book. In communications between government officials, we see the intensity of briefings and updates flowing into Number 10 as the court case unfolded in Australia in late 1986. The government was determined to stand by the principle that security information must remain confidential.
The prime minister followed the exchanges closely, as revealed by her handwritten comments across documents. These ranged from brief scribbles like “Bad news” (on an update relating to potential revelation of sensitive documents in court), to noting that “the consequences of publication would be enormous” and commenting in frustration that “surely Wright himself is in breach of the Official Secrets Act?”
The cast of characters in this saga is in itself rather breathtaking. It begins, of course, with the elusive Wright – in my mind’s eye in the 1980s, I had expected him to be a dapper figure in a pinstriped suit. The picture that hit the press at the time instead revealed an old man in a rather incongruous broad-brimmed hat, who did not exude the requisite level of mystery.
Thatcher herself also looms large, as does Robert Armstrong – the head of the civil service she sent across the globe to Sydney like a gun-for-hire, in an extraordinary attempt to prevent the book’s publication. In court, Armstrong would face none other than the up-and-coming Australian barrister Malcolm Turnbull, appearing for Wright’s publishers.
Turnbull would go on to be Australia’s prime minister 30 years later, but not before eliciting from Armstrong in court his infamous description of having been “economical with the truth” in a letter he had written that was relevant to the case.
What the papers released by the National Archives provide is something rather more than just a good story, however. They provide a rare window into how the British government worked in the 1980s. They offer a marker against which to measure what has changed and what has remained the same in the conventions and traditions that underpin the nation’s political system.
That was then …
In the 1980s, aspects of British government could remain shrouded in mystery without expectation of public scrutiny. Even the names of the leaders of MI5 were a closely guarded secret, never mind the workings of their organisation. It was simply not the done thing to discuss issues of national security in public.
The institutional settings of Whitehall and Westminster were built for “governing in private”. Advice was offered and arguments made behind closed doors and away from the public gaze. This applied not just to the security agencies but the civil service in general.
In British constitutional theory, the civil service was an indivisible part of the executive government. It was not an independent creature of the parliament, or indeed the wider public. The job of civil servants was to serve ministers in non-partisan ways, based on deep reserves of mutual trust between the political and administrative leaders of government. Armstrong could be sent to the Antipodes knowing that he carried with him the total trust of the prime minister, and vice versa.
His goal, of course, was to stop Wright’s memoir from ever seeing the light of day. In the 1980s, it was still possible for government to believe it might be able to control the spread of information. In a pre-internet age, it still made sense to try very hard to prevent the publication of a book, knowing that its contents could potentially be stopped or contained. Such ideas seem dreamily quixotic in our modern digital age.
This is now …
Today, the luxury of being able to govern in private, to carefully consider actions with a degree of secrecy, has given way to far greater scrutiny. Modern expectations of transparency mean that governments are now governing in public, whether they like it or not. Where once the heads of MI5 had their identities protected, we now find them striding the public stage. Stella Rimington, the director general of MI5 in the mid 1990s, published her own autobiography in 2001. Her successors give regular public speeches and updates discussing perspectives on national security in ways that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s.
In theory, the status of the wider civil service has not changed – it remains an indivisible part of the executive government. But the bonds of trust have begun to fray. Few of Armstrong’s successors in the civil service could claim the complete trust of a prime minister. And amid the blame games of modern government, ministers and officials can now find themselves in public disagreement, teasing apart the threads of indivisibility that previously kept them in a mutual embrace.
But perhaps the most dramatic change is to the information environment. The relative futility of trying to prevent information from entering the public domain is self-evident. Information – both true and false – flies into the public domain like water through a colander.
A modern government rarely makes the mistake of drawing attention to a set of memoirs by going to great, public lengths to try and stop their publication. Wright died a millionaire. His book was a bestseller. The irony is that he had the British government to thank for boosting his sales. Their attempt to quash what turned out to be a rather innocuous book turned it into an international cause celebre.
The Spycatcher saga is a reminder that the nature of British government has changed. It shines a light on the extent to which something seen as an extraordinary public scandal in the 1980s would be seen as far less remarkable today. Modern governments are far more used to the norms of governing in public – for good or ill – in our more transparent age.