Whitehall's Dark Side

Two scandals reveal the nastiness of the British political class.

RUPERT DARWALL

From today's Wall Street Journal Europe.

LONDON -- Within a month of the G-20 circus leaving London, British politics is back to business as usual. As the protagonists in "The Godfather" would explain to their victims, "it's not personal, it's business."

Over the Easter weekend, a political blog published a series of emails sent by one of Gordon Brown's personal advisers, Damian McBride. The emails revealed that No. 10 was planning a campaign of false and scurrilous attacks in the media on the private lives of leading Conservatives and their families.

Mr. McBride immediately resigned, and the prime minister was forced to write letters expressing his regret to the intended targets. An apology would come a week later. Too late. The world had seen what Mr. Brown's opponents in the Labour Party had long maintained: that the Scripture-quoting prime minister has a Nixon-like need to destroy his political enemies, by whatever means come to hand.

Yet an even worse abuse of power -- by both elected officials and civil servants -- has also continued to play out in recent weeks. The McBride affair was nasty enough, but the latter case offers evidence of Whitehall's violation of fundamental constitutional safeguards. Arresting an MP for doing his job is a line that should not be crossed in a democracy. In this case it was a line no one in Whitehall observed or respected.

Back in November, a Conservative member of Parliament named Damian Green and a junior official in the Home Office, Christopher Galley, were arrested and held by antiterrorist police on suspicion of "conspiring to commit misconduct in public office." Specifically, Messrs. Green and Galley were accused of leaking confidential government documents which revealed embarrassing failures in the Home Office's immigration policies. Mr. Galley was fired for his actions.

Yet on April 16, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced that he would not press charges against either Mr. Green or Mr. Galley. The leaked information, Mr. Starmer said, was not secret and did not affect national security. In some cases, he noted, it "undoubtedly touched on matters of legitimate public interest."

The scandal here is that it took so long for someone in the government hierarchy to state this plain truth.

While the majority of the politicians not aligned with Mr. Brown expressed their revulsion at Mr. McBride's dirty tricks, and members of the Brown faction at least gave the impression of doing so, the arrest and questioning of an opposition MP is a serious abuse of public power. Whitehall prides itself on its probity and political neutrality, but Mr. Green's detention illustrates its dark side.

Ministers and high-ranking civil servants had a shared interest in suppressing the leaks about the government's immigration failures. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her department's permanent secretary, Sir David Normington, were increasingly embarrassed by the leaks. The latter subsequently discussed the matter with an official at the Cabinet Office, who then asked the head of the antiterror branch of the Metropolitan Police to act. The alleged grounds, parroted by ministers in the media, were that the information was prejudicial to national security.

The desire of ministers and bureaucrats to suppress the leaks meant that, for the first time since Parliament established its supremacy in the English civil war, agents of the executive entered Parliament and searched a member's office. Antiterror agents removed computers and a Blackberry from Mr. Green's office for examination, and the MP later said police had threatened him with a life sentence on conviction.

But even before Mr. Starmer dropped the case, a House of Commons committee report published earlier this month dismissed the national-security claim as hyperbole. And as Mr. Starmer noted, even though the leaks might affect the proper functioning of the Home Office, that's not a matter for the criminal courts. If it were, others surely would already have found themselves in the dock. One former Home secretary, John Reid, has described the department as not "fit for purpose," and auditors have had to qualify the department's accounts in the past.

The arrest of Damian Green and the absence so far of any sanction against those responsible bear out political philosopher Harvey Mansfield's description, in his 1989 book "Taming the Prince," of the "numbing careless bureaucracy" acting in the interests of the ruling party. And, he might have added, particularly when those interests coincide with its own.

The Green episode reveals a Whitehall that covers up poor performance and sees itself as operating outside the rule of law binding everyone else, using antiterror police as its own private security force to settle scores. Even after Mr. Starmer declined to prosecute, Home Office sources were still briefing against Mr. Green ("not whiter than white") and the official ("a loser"). Evidently the Home Office didn't need Mr. McBride to do its press briefings.

Richard Thaler, Barack Obama's favorite economist, recently said he would like to clone Whitehall's top civil servant and take him to Washington. Maybe the head, but not the system.

For Britain's permanent civil service needs thorough reform similar to that in New Zealand, where an arm's length relationship between ministers and departments formalizes what the former has a right to expect from the latter. Such an overhaul requires the separation of ministerial support, where politicization is legitimate, from those areas where it is not -- especially the use of public powers, the spending of public money and the objective reporting of both. And it needs a much-strengthened freedom of information regime, so that performance failures and policy tradeoffs are automatically in the public domain rather than finding their way out through unauthorized leaks.

The arrest of an opposition politician for doing his job is a line that should not be crossed. Mr. Green's arrest was provoked by the desire to suppress evidence of performance failure. The fact that it was permitted to happen brings shame on the mother of parliaments. In any self-respecting democracy, that alone should be sufficient cause to bring about the reform of Whitehall that Britain badly needs.

Mr. Darwall is the author of "Reluctant Managers," a 2006 study of the British civil service co-published by Reform.