Word: bagehots
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...Part I of "Bagehot Updated" explained how Harold Wilson attempted to block publication of the diaries kept by Richard Crossman, but lost his case in the courts. In the process, important issues about Cabinet secrecy and freedom of the press were raised, as well as Crossman's theory that "Cabinet government" has been replaced in England by "Prime Ministerial" government. Last week's piece ended with a short account of Wilson's difficulties in holding the Labour Party together and how the Crossman diaries fit into this situation...
Wilson's attempt to keep the Crossman diaries out of public view raised some of the same constitutional issues that Crossman himself discussed in his Godkin lectures and in his introduction to a re-issue of Walter Bagehot's English Constitution published in 1963, the year before he entered the Cabinet for the first time. Bagehot had named cabinet secrecy as one of the three sine qua nons of cabinet government, along with party loyalty and collective responsibility. Secrecy allows each member of the Cabinet to express his or her views freely and without fear of being contradicted when called...
Secrecy is strictly adhered to. No minutes of Cabinet meetings were taken until 1916. Even today minutes aren't drawn up until after Cabinet meetings, so that only the Prime Minister's summation--and not the arguments that went before it--are recorded. Bagehot's dictum that "no minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice" would make public the inner workings of Cabinet debate remains valid to this day. So far, Crossman is the only major figure who has challenged...
...since Bagehot's time the Cabinet's role has changed enormously. In Bagehot's analysis, the Cabinet was the most powerful and effective organ of government, or, as he put it, government's "efficient secret." When Crossman joined the government in 1964, he discovered that, like the House of Lords before it--the Cabinet had moved from the efficient part of the constitution to what Bagehot called the "dignified" part, where its chief role was ceremonial. The Cabinet was at the beck and call of the Prime Minister and, like Parliament, was unable to make or break him. That struggle...
Part two of BAGEHOT UPDATED will appear in this space next Thursday...