- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 February 2001 03.14 GMT
Next up, Sir Robert Armstrong, was forced into the open by Mrs Thatcher, to make a humiliating journey to Australia to stop Spycatcher: a bad day for the mystique of a very special post. But Armstrong's prestige was as respected as his cunning. It would not have occurred to him, in any circumstances, to take lunch with the Hinduja brothers of his time.
What these men had in common was high intellect, but also authoritative intimacy with their political masters. They were feared in Whitehall. Their judgment really mattered. They all had many fierce problems to settle every day. None of these involved ruling on the fate of ministers charged with some kind of scandal. That was political work. But it's a fair assumption that if they'd been called on to sort out that particular kind of mess, neither Trend nor Hunt nor Armstrong would have allowed panic to overcome due process. The cabinet secretary should be a bulwark, above all, against panic.
The last two cabinet secretaries have been judges at the centre of just such scandal, and they've both made a mess of it. Quality in high office seems to be declining. Sir Robin Butler refused to investigate a welter of evidence against Jonathan Aitken, preferring, in establishment style, to believe the word of a minister against that of the editor of the Guardian. Stubbornly and at leisure, Butler protested Aitken's innocence. Thanks to him, a corrupt minister for a while kept his job.
Now Sir Richard Wilson has made the opposite mistake in the case of Peter Mandelson, becoming an accomplice in panic which removed a decent minister from his job and maybe from politics. The sheet-anchor of propriety and process abetted the very folly which the man in his position is paid to resist.
Mandelson has not been sensible in the past few days. Visiting the enemy press to plead his case exposed him to forms of manipulation and publicity which the old Mandy would never have risked. He looks a bit of a bloody fool, and nameless slimebags in his party have rushed to defame him further. Oliver James, who deserves to be struck off the psychiatrists' register for unprofessional conduct, has pronounced him suicidal.
But the Hammond inquiry will find it hard to prove a case against him that measures up to the punishment he's already suffered. If it does not, Tony Blair will look a rotten boss, but Sir Richard Wilson's failure to behave like a proper cabinet secre tary will have been substantially to blame.
The decline in respect for the job is not all his fault. The tendency has Thatcherite origins, from a time when the personal familiars of the leader began to weaken the influence of the professional civil service. Mrs Thatcher never did think much of Whitehall. Under Blair, the eclipse of the mandarins at the centre of government is more pronounced. When Wilson got his job, three months after the 1997 election, he arrived to find Blairite chiefs of staff and press officers who mattered more to the leader, inexperienced as he was in government, than the descendant, however august, of Burke Trend.
Besides, Wilson wasn't picked for his authority. He's a fixer and agreeable smoothie, not a Trend. Nor was he expected, or allowed, to be particularly close. When the Mandelson panic began, Wilson therefore came at it with disadvantages. Nonetheless, he should have done more to insist on the observance of a system and process which are in his stewardship.
That he didn't take that seriously enough may have had something to do with where he came from. As the former boss of the Home Office, he seems to have believed what Home Office officials reported about what happened, via Mandelson, in 1998. In a very short time, without assembling all the evidence, he was hustled into lending the weight of his once-great office to the condign verdict against the minister.
Since then, the suspicion has grown that Home Office officials were allowing a miasma of rumour and half- remembered suspicion to congeal into "fact". Other versions were not tested. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latest word is that Wilson is seeking to distance himself from the events of the last week in January, hinting that Downing Street had more to do with them than he did.
That's not the only word emerging from the turmoil. After a week of slagging Mandelson off, No 10 now calls for calm and says he should be allowed to defend himself. It's obvious what's happening. Belatedly, the official machine feels the need to prepare itself for the possibility that Hammond will not find its conduct in all respects justifiable. The murmur of preparatory damage limitation shimmers round the system, both in particular, as regards the cabinet secretary, and in general on behalf of the Downing Street apparatus.
Hammond is inquiring only into the events of 1998, and the bearing these have on a single sequence of remarks allegedly made by Mandelson in recent weeks. Maybe the investigation will find conclusive proof, that a) he intervened to influence a Hinduja passport application and b) he told, in Jack Straw's word, an "untruth" about that recently.
Or maybe not. Though Hammond himself is a former Home Office man, he'll be aware that public scrutiny of his account and its supporting evidence will be intense. He won't get away with any kind of fiddle. More likely, he will be able to point to no more than a series of cock-ups unverifiable as evidence of personal guilt.
On the other hand, Hammond won't be looking at the whole of what happened early in 2001. This is a very big pity. As regards our system of government, Mandelson's (at worst) slender intervention in 1998, if it was made at all, is far less worrying than the hysteria that gripped the prime minister's office on January 29. That is the political moment that needs taking apart.
Not only did it destroy a minister who will probably turn out not to have done anything bad enough to deserve such a fate. It also exposed a system of politics that has broken the rules of orderly government, with the connivance of the official who was once the guarantor of those rules, the great umpire who protected the basic ethics of government. The cabinet secretary has been brought very low when he can't remind the prime minister of the prudence, let alone the morality, of not panicking. If they both pay a price for Mandelson's political corpse, they'll deserve it.
