Tribunal orders Westland disclosure
A tribunal has told the government to release the minutes of the 1986 cabinet meeting during which Michael Heseltine suddenly walked out and resigned as defence secretary.
As I reported earlier, the case was heard by the First-Tier Tribunal last month, when the Cabinet Office appealed against an earlier decision by the Information Commissioner. The tribunal has now ruled that it is in the public interest for the minutes to be disclosed.
In the tribunal accepted that cabinet minutes should be kept secret except in rare cases, to preserve the convention of collective responsibility.
But it concluded that in this instance disclosure is justified. It argued that the convention has been undermined by several former cabinet ministers who have published their own accounts of the meeting in memoirs and by Margaret Thatcher herself in her Commons statement on the resignation.
The tribunal's decision was also influenced by the political and historical significance of the meeting and by the fact that nineteen years had passed at the time of my request.
It states: "We do not think that any reasonably robust member of the present or a future
cabinet would be deterred from arguing his or her corner by the thought that the opinion expressed might see the light of day twenty years from now. By far the greater and more imminent threat would seem to come from the prompt publication of a colleague's memoirs."
This is only the second occasion on which the tribunal has ordered the release of cabinet minutes. The other case concerned discussions prior to the Iraq War, and publication was then vetoed last year by the Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw.
The tribunal also accused the Information Commissioner's Office of "inexcusable maladministration" for taking over four years to assess my case.
I calculate that so far over 1,400 working days have passed since I made this FOI application.
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