‘The infected blood scandal shows why we need a legal duty of candour,’ writes Nigel Nelson

JOURNO: I hear the PM has been reading the Bible recently and wants to take a leaf out of one of its books.

OFFICIAL: Which book would that be?

JOURNO: Matthew. The bit about killing the firstborn. I understand it's colloquially known in Whitehall as the King Herod white paper.

OFFICIAL: Not one for us mate. You’ll need to go to No10 for any questions about the PM’s reading habits. Or if it involves children can I direct you to the Department for Education?

JOURNO: No, this ball falls into your court. The plan is to reduce the cost of child benefit. I just wondered if you could tell me by how much?

OFFICIAL: We have no plans to make any announcements on a white paper this week.

JOURNO: How about next week?

OFFICIAL: I’ll send you a line.

And when it arrives it neither confirms nor denies anything. What you get is a spokesperson quote along the lines of: “The Government keeps welfare payments under constant review”.

Civil servants are very careful not to lie, but they work equally hard not to tell too much truth either. It leaves Britain at heart a secret society despite all those promises of greater transparency and openness.

Freedom of Information laws help to get to the bottom of what’s going on, but Tony Blair confesses that if he had his time again he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them.

Introducing FOIs, he says, was one of the biggest clangers of his premiership.

Talking to himself in his memoirs, he wrote: “You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There really is no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.”

That’s as maybe. But shining a light into the darkest recesses of government can only make those working in it think twice before they act. They are answerable to us, the people, and if they know we can now get at those answers they will take more care over the questions.

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When I began writing about espionage in the 1980s, MI5 and MI6 didn’t officially exist which was silly because everyone knew they did. Margaret Thatcher had to eventually acknowledge MI5 - but only because it was the only way she could deny allegations by renegade spook Peter Wright that its boss had been a Soviet spy.

She tried to suppress Wright’s book Spycatcher, too, which was another pointless gesture and badly backfired. Once Wright was able to be questioned by British media his plots and intrigues fell apart. The only result of Thatcher’s ban was to turn Spycatcher into a global sensation, the opposite of what she intended.

I have spent much time trying to persuade the intelligence services of the value of being more open. If we knew a little more about the terror plots they successfully foiled and the atrocities they saved us from in the past, we might be more vigilant with our eyes and ears on their behalf in the future.

I understand that operational secrecy must be maintained to catch the bad guys by surprise, and so as not to put the lives of agents at risk.

I understand why the names of MI5’s double agents in the IRA must never be revealed. Not ever. It was their condition for becoming turncoats. They needed to spare future generations of their families possible reprisals long after they were gone.

But cultural secrecy is another matter; being secretive for the sake of it because that’s the way it was always done. Secrecy makes it easy to cover up mistakes because no one will ever know a mistake was made in the first place and everyone escapes blame.

Which brings us back to the contaminated blood scandal. Inquiry chairman Sir Brian Langstaff catalogued a litany of half-truths and outright lies, of catastrophic errors swept under the carpet, and gross negligence hidden out of sight.

Thanks to Sir Brian we now know doctors, blood services, civil servants and prime ministers could not be trusted. Yet it has taken 40 years to get justice for the 30,000 people who suffered - justice which came too late for the 3,000 who died.

Had there been more openness and less secrecy much misery would have been avoided. To ensure this never happens again Sir Brian says a legal duty of candour must be introduced for public servants.

That really would be a culture shock for the British Establishment...being forced by law to tell the truth.

But it would allow even the most junior Whitehall press officer to definitively rule out a King Herod white paper when asked.