Speeches by Norman.

“You are content that the procedure is still as robust, if not more robust, than it started out being.”

“I thank the Leader of the House very much for announcing the business, and I welcome all colleagues back to the House. I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in congratulating His Majesty the King not only on the Gracious Speech yesterday, but on his glorious triumph in the United States of America, in par…”

“Top of the morning to you, Mr Speaker. Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?”

“Well, there had been a fiasco at the Foreign Office, so you can see why they might have thought, “We have got to step forward and actually lead”.”

“When you think about accountability, how would that clarity of purpose relate to Ministers?”

“The need for clarity and tough choices is one that works itself out across Departments among permanent secretaries, but also in relation to Government Ministers and, potentially, No. 10. If you are moving to a Cabinet Office-led model, presumably it is more that it is in order to get more central direction.”

“I apologise if I missed bits of that—I had to be at another Committee briefly. To pick up on that, a Cabinet Office SRO-led model would enable problems such as competition between Departments, unclear responsibilities and what you might call either overlaps or empire building. Presumably, those kinds of behaviours that…”

“No one wants responsibility or they all want all of the responsibility.”

“Mr Lincoln, did you want to add something?”

“No—and you are also flying the flag for responsible leadership in the civil service.”

“Yes—thank you. Can we just go on for a second? Given what you know, and what Mr Lincoln knows, imagine that we had the same crisis tomorrow, or something similar: a resettlement scheme needs to be set up in very short order. What do you now know that would make things different from what was done at the time, and how s…”

“I have some experience of that, as a viewer.”

“I would have assumed that you would draft the whole thing.”

“So every word of that report was written either by you or personally approved by you?”

“In terms of accountability, what kind of model do you think would sort the problem out? A single Minister? A single SRO from within the civil service? A separate taskforce?”

“Obviously it was convenient, as it proved, and you were to some extent aware of that—I think that is what you just said. It did not necessarily shade your judgment, but you were aware of that.”

“In relation to the Triples, for example?”

“Were there any areas that Ministers and officials paid particular attention to, more than others, in the report?”

“You and your team have certain professional institutional affiliations. What steps did you take to satisfy yourself that those were supporting the aims of the inquiry and not necessarily narrowing the range of evidence that you looked at?”

“There was a party political aspect to this, wasn’t there? It was not inconvenient to the new Government to try to show that the previous Government had acted precipitately or heavy-handedly.”