"We are much beholden to Machiavel and others that write what men do, and not what they ought to do". So said Francis Bacon of the ways of government in his Advancement of Learning, published in 1605. One wonders what he would have made of the Scott inquiry into the sale of British arms to Iraq, published yesterday amid a surreal phantasmagoria of charge and counter charge about the processes of duplicity and deception in the ways of British government.
Bacon came to know them well, serving successively as Solicitor General, Attorney General, Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor in British governments from 1607 until 1621, when he was arraigned before the House of Lords for bribery. He denied ever having perverted justice but confessed, honourably, that he had been guilty of "corruption and neglect". Deprived of the great seal, he was fined, condemned to confinement during the king's pleasure and prevented from sitting in parliament. After a few days in the Tower of London he was released by James I and spent the remaining five years of his life completing his philosophical and literary work.
It is a sad commentary - on the state of British government that Bacon's healthy realism should have descended to the depths of cynicism and amorality revealed so graphically in the arms for Iraq affair. Language is made surreal by the fine distinctions drawn between "deliberately" or "designedly" failing to notify parliament of a secret shift in British arms control policy after the end of the Iran Iraq war in 1988, and the Scott inquiry's conclusions that there was no "duplicity", "malice" or "conspiracy" involved.
The impression is altogether reinforced by the way in which ministers yesterday latched on to such ambiguous findings, spinning them into the most favourable justification for their actions after a week's preparation.
The facts of the matter are relatively plain and simple. Reason of state, a category well known to Machiavelli - and to Bacon - dictated that British policy towards supplying arms to Iraq be changed without public or parliamentary acknowledgment. International competition in the arms trade among the main Western powers reinforced the case for such an engagement, but not to the point where United Nations arms embargos would be reversed. All this was tolerated up to the very days in which Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 1st, 1990. It became a highly inconvenient truth thereafter. With rare inefficiency, one branch of British government pursued a prosecution against the Matrix Churchill firm after the war was over for selling arms to Iraq, not knowing that other more powerful ones had secretly endorsed it. The collapse of the case in November 1992 provided even rarer insight into contemporary governance.
The Scott report is commendably comprehensive and exhaustive; but in its dissembling judgements it falls prey to the very culture of cynicism among politicians, civil servants and lawyers, rendered proverbially and memorably in the "Yes, Minister" television series, that it criticises so harshly. As Bacon said: "It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt".