Speeches by Norman.

“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…”

“In relation to the Triples, for example?”

“Do you mean drafting the report? They were helping you draft the report?”

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

“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…”

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

“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.”

“But you have said that officials and Ministers did get a chance to review your emerging findings, because they pressed you on how good the evidence was and how strong the view was. Is that right?”

“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.”

“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”.”

“So you are taking institutional accountability, as the perm sec at the time, but that leaves open the possibility that there may have been actual decisions made by your subordinates that were themselves questionable. In a sense, you are trying to deflect some of the pressure from those people by taking responsibility o…”

“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?”

“And to protect the discussions under the legal framework, which was the cause of the super-injunction, presumably.”

“Well, a lot of money was at stake, apart from anything else—so the Treasury and every affected Department.”

“No, I mean official criticism, within Government or by Ministers.”

“You briefed Ministers and you did a cross-Whitehall meeting.”

“Okay. I am just trying to get clear what is happening. You said you gave some emerging findings to colleagues at the MOD. Were they reviewed by Ministers?”

“Were there any other updates to Ministers, such as written communications or verbal briefings, in the course of your work before—”

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

“Picking that up for a second, if I may, Mr Williams, have you been the subject of any criticism?”