The circulation and use of political information is an ever-evolving practice

The story about Geoff Hoon and a memo about Iraq is a blast from the past but the broader shift to digital and informal decision-making is bad news for the public, writes Sean O’Grady

Sir Tony Blair, still causing controversy (PA Wire)

There is a great irony that the government that passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2000 should have spent so much time evading its application. Yet that was very much the ethos of Tony Blair’s administration, and the claims made by former Labour defence secretary Geoff Hoon would seem to corroborate its taste for secrecy.

The motto that the formidable New Labour machine carried from opposition into government did seem to be that the ends always justify the means. They were ruthless, and didn’t like leaving fingerprints.

Specifically, Hoon claims he was told by Downing Street – though not Blair personally – to “burn” a memo that suggested the invasion of Iraq could be illegal. In Hoon’s memoir, published recently, he tells of how his own adviser was told “in no uncertain terms” to get rid of a memo written by the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

Having read the document “under conditions of considerable secrecy”, and told not to discuss it with others, Blair’s powerful chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, ordered its destruction, it is claimed. According to Hoon: “When my Principal Private Secretary, Peter Watkins, called Jonathan Powell in Downing St and asked what he should now do with the document, he was told in no uncertain terms that he should ‘burn it’.” Instead, Hoon and his staff placed it in a safe.

There may, though, be a little less to this incendiary news than meets the eye. Some secrecy in matters of national security is normal and acceptable, and the legal advice – which attracted so much attention at the time and in the various inquiries since – was anyway leaked to the press at the time and has survived. Besides, it was more supportive of the 2003 intervention than the current headlines suggest, even by Hoon’s own account: “I read the opinion several times; it was not an easy read. Eventually I came to the view that the attorney general had decided that invading Iraq would be lawful if the Prime Minister believed that it was in the UK’s national interest to do so. It was not exactly the ringing endorsement that the Chief of the Defence Staff was looking for, and in any event, I was not strictly allowed to show it to him or even discuss it with him.”

So there it is, the restriction of information not to the press or general public but even to the top military – and an apparent willingness to see the destruction of inconvenient copies of official documents. The MoD version might, for example, have annotated remarks indicating misgivings from Hoon or the generals, but Downing Street was never going to allow that price of paper to make it into an archive for the benefit of historians or indeed, parliament or subsequent public inquiries.

It was an ironic theme during the Blair government, given the commitment to FOI, though no surprise now. Blair in his own memoirs later said how much he regretted the FOIA, chastising himself in these terms: “You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.”

In any case Blair and his team, suspicious of a senior civil service that had been appointed by, and served, Conservative governments for 18 years, did a great deal to “informalise” government. The traditional if cumbersome system of cabinet sub-committees with full civil service record-keeping and supervision was undermined by “sofa government”, small groups working without much official record or assistance. The sticky and removable Post-it note became a key item of equipment, so if remarks and views that might subsequently embarrass the author were applied to memos and reports, it somehow fell off before they reached the archives. Some things were better not recorded – Powell’s alleged order to “burn it” was verbal, not written.

It was also an era when old paper-based records were giving way to digital, which at first might have meant that official records were more difficult to manage and delete – an email can’t be burnt (Blair was always a self-confessed technophobe).

Since New Labour, things have probably deteriorated, with some suggestion of more regularised procedures under the conventionally minded Theresa May. For example, there is evidence of the use of private email accounts to bypass civil service scrutiny and official record-keeping, with Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings being reportedly early pioneers of the technique.

All FOI requests are now vetted centrally, and, as we see with “partygate”, transparency isn’t especially treasured in Whitehall these days. Boris Johnson doesn’t seem the type of man who likes his every decision and offhand remark to be diligently noted for the benefit of anyone else. WhatsApp groups are especially impervious to unwelcome scrutiny, though sometimes leaked selectively. On the other hand, the proliferation of smartphones and their cameras, text messaging and social media platforms means that there are more ways of recording and disseminating information.

The shift to digital and informal, cliquey, decision-making is, though, mostly very bad news for the public, for historians and indeed for anyone who hopes to understand how government works, now or in the future.

Given that things look so bad and chaotic from the outside, we can only assume that the reality is far worse than we assume. So maybe, like a sausage factory, it’s best in one sense that we don’t actually get to watch how Whitehall makes its decisions. We might get upset.