Clare Short's whistle-blowing was more anger than candour

Guardian ^ | 02/28/04 | Mark Lawson

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Clare Short's whistle-blowing was more anger than candour

Mark Lawson Saturday February 28, 2004 The Guardian

Details of MPs' external earnings released this week suggest that Robin Cook received £450,000 from publication and serialisation of memoirs which proved to contain no major revelation. So one oddity of the spy scandal now bugging Tony Blair is that Clare Short blurted out for free on radio a revelation which might genuinely have been worth seven figures if strategically saved for a hardback and Sunday front-page splash. The former minister's failure to follow that fashionable strategy for a fallen politician can be interpreted in two ways: 1) she is an instinctively honest person who finds it impossible to hold back information relevant to public debate; or 2) a quick temper and a loose tongue mean that she often doesn't realise what she is saying. Is she, in short, a heroine or a heroism-addict?

Possibility one - that Short is a political whistle-blower, a cabinet equivalent to Katharine Gun, who leaked from GCHQ and avoided prosecution - raises problems. In a generally confessional culture, it's tough to make the case for secrecy; but anyone who chooses to become a minister or a privy counsellor (neither of which action was forced on Short) is signing up to the idea of state secrets. These are basic professional rules: don't become a rugby player if you want front teeth; don't become a senior politician if you wish to be completely honest or true to your conscience.

A defence might be that, while she broadly accepted the necessities of espionage and an official secrets act, she had never in her blackest fantasies imagined that our spooks would be tapping into the UN. But the hole in this apologia is that the casual reference in her radio interview to transcripts of Kofi Annan's phonecalls landing on her desk suggests that she tolerated this moral horror while in the job. There seems to be no suggestion that her discovery was even the cause of her resignation, which was driven by personal opposition to the attack on Iraq.

Another piece of moral fibre flakes away on the question of timing. While it's to Short's credit that she didn't save the Annan revelation for her memoirs, it's surely to her debit that her own courage so closely followed the safe completion of Ms Gun's own whistle-blowing mission. There's much less merit in taking the high moral ground when there's already a big flag flapping on it.

It's also worth noting that Short was among those criticising Tony Blair for his presidential approach. But one sure way of encouraging leaders to become more reluctant to discuss decisions with colleagues is to create the fear of the spill-all interview by former ministers. Cook has also been guilty of this contradiction. (A distinction should be made between books published in mid-administration and those which wait until the events for which you shared collective responsibility are history. Alastair Campbell, for all his faults, appears to understand this.)

It seems more likely (possibility two) that what happened this week was a product of Clare Short's temperament. Surname is sometimes destiny. Muriel Spark writes sparky fiction; the architect Rem Koolhaas designs cool houses; Clare Short has a short temper and never stays in a job very long.

One newspaper commented yesterday on the coincidence that she twice made an impact on the media this week: the night before her Radio 4 interview, she had appeared on BBC2's My Week in the Real World, a job-swap series in which she moonlighted as a geography teacher in a comprehensive school.

The show was a humiliation, in which she lost control of the class after choosing to use ingratiation ("You have to help me") rather than discipline. Short has complained about selective editing, but it seemed to me that what emerged was the personality flaw which denied a great political career to a woman who had all the other gifts for it. In the classroom, as in the minister's office, Short ignored the proven rules of the game in pursuit of feeling comfortable with what she was doing.

For me, the proximity of My Week in the Real World and the Today programme interview was not a coincidence. Humiliated by that documentary and angered by the mocking press coverage of it, Short, deliberately or subconsciously, wanted to re-establish her validity as a political figure.

So she told us a secret.

She must know that her career is now over, as the civil servants and the spooks will never let her near a secret memorandum again. But her final self-destruction was characteristic. In those newspaper questionnaires in which celebrities are asked what their first act would be if they ran the world, the fashionable smart answer has become "resign at once". That was the spirit of Clare Short, and is admirable in everyone except a politician. What made her a hopeless teacher made her a bad minister as well.

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