Richard Norton-Taylor, Mark Lloyd and Stephen Cook
Gollancz, London, 1996 £9.99
This arrived just too late for the previous Lobster and even though it feels now almost like a museum piece, what with the enormous balloon of guff in which we have been enveloped since the election, this is too important a subject to forget. Authors Norton-Taylor of the Guardian and Lloyd of Channel Four News are the only journalists who sat through the entire Scott proceedings.
The authors note on p. 10: ‘This book is both a tribute to Scott’s work and an attempt to make up for one of its perceived shortcomings. It charts the government’s ruthless attempts to neutralize the Report, offers a concise summary of its prolix contents, and analyses how the government escaped apparently unscathed.’ I would add: it also contains a detailed chronology of the events and a cast of characters which themselves are almost worth the cover price, and is simply and clearly written.
At this distance from the events two things in particular struck me. One is the account of the campaign of leaks, smears and disinformation organised against Scott himself by Whitehall. Some day somebody might go back and re-examine all those stories in detail: a better documented Whitehall disinformation campaign does not exist. The second is the section on pp. 16/17 where the authors briefly comment on the enormous subsidies paid to companies selling British arms overseas when arms have been less than 2% of British exports in the last decade. Now there’s the subject matter for a book!