Official Histories

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords:

“We need a sustaining stream of Official Histories”.

So wrote our esteemed colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, who sadly cannot be with us today, in one of his recent books, which never fail to stimulate and entertain, as well as inform. Even a historian operating on a much more modest scale, as I do, knows what riches are to be found within the covers of the official histories. No other nation has ever produced an official history explicitly dedicated to wartime intelligence that approaches in magnitude Britain’s five volumes, amounting to more than 3,000 pages, published between 1978 and 1990. There is so much to relish and, naturally, historians in this House, in academic life and elsewhere feel strongly that the programme must endure and look forward to its relaunch.

We all tend to have particular projects that we would like to see proceed, so that the distinctive, complex, and often secretive processes of government in our country can be understood better. In all of this, a study of what the great HAL Fisher called,

“the play of the contingent and the unforeseen”,

so often turns out to be particularly momentous.

In an earlier debate on this subject, my noble friend Lord Bew referred to the case for an official history of the Northern Ireland Office. I strongly agree: the department is so frequently a neglected element in the various versions that appear of events that led eventually to the peace process. In the recently published second volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, based on a very wide range of official papers, Charles Moore has laid bare much of the activity of the Cabinet Office, some of it extraordinary in character, in the period leading up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement 30 years ago. But what about the government department that has been central to the implementation of British policy in Northern Ireland since 1972? How valuable an official history would be in elucidating it.

The construction of a programme of new work still lies very much in the future. What we have to do today is, first, to thank the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, for the tenacity with which he has pursued the matters that have to be settled so that the official history programme can proceed, as so many of us want. Historians owe him an immense debt of gratitude. We must also recall with gratitude the work of the two other members of his group of privy counsellors, to whom he referred, who contributed so much to the programme: Lord Healey and Lord Howe of Aberavon, whose recent deaths caused us such deep sadness.

The second thing that we have to do today is to underline the importance of implementing the recommendations of the excellent report on the official history programme produced in 2009 by Sir Joseph Pilling, an old friend of mine who, as it happens, would occupy a prominent place in any official history of the Northern Ireland Office, having been its Permanent Secretary during the peace process. Sir Humphrey obfuscates; Sir Joseph is unequivocal. As the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, reminded us, Sir Joseph stated:

“The overwhelming weight of evidence supported the continuation of the programme”.

He went on to lay out with clarity and precision the manner in which it should be done. Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, reminded us, that was some six years ago.

Those Ministers who have had the—not especially enviable—task of explaining the Government’s position in response to the Pilling report, including the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who it is so good to see here, have resorted constantly to pleas of poverty in this so-called age of austerity. I suggest that the time has come to invoke a firm Tory principle and to bring it into play now. The principle is that, as the state divests itself of certain responsibilities, as this Tory Government are doing—particularly in the sphere of local government —so it should ensure that the state’s duty is fully executed in those areas that fall permanently to its care. The Official History Programme is one such obligation.

I would not dream of showing any disrespect to my long-standing noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble, but I rather wish that the noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, could have joined us for this debate. The Official History Programme has never had a stronger champion than his grandfather, Edward Bridges, who was a wartime Cabinet Secretary and one of the greatest public servants—one of the very few rewarded with a Garter. In late 1941, a low point in our wartime fortunes, Bridges commissioned a series of official histories on both the civil and the military aspects of the conflict. He said:

“We must think in the long term of the continuity of the state”.

That above all is why this publicly-funded programme should continue, and continues to be needed.

Not that Edward, subsequently Lord Bridges, expected his own profession necessarily to be exalted or praised by the histories. “I confidently expect”, he said of civil servants,

“that we … shall continue to be grouped with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as one of the recognized objects of ridicule”.

A Government who include this great and witty man’s grandson ought surely to do their duty.