A few months back, Steve McIntyre said something that stuck in my memory:
Never under-estimate the capacity for institutional mendacity.
Today he writes in similar vein about the extraordinary range of mutually inconsistent stories put forward by the University of East Anglia in its various pronouncements on the availability of the CRU emails. Institutional mendacity indeed.
The story of Climategate is one of repeated - nay, continuous - mendacity and deceit, but I don't think we should fool ourselves that this is a problem that is restricted to CRU or to climatology or to science. I was struck by this story, in which MPs on the Public Accounts Select Committee decided that they would ask a civil servant at the Revenue (HMRC) to give evidence on oath - a very rare event if the article is to be believed. This has apparently caused outrage among senior civil servants.
During the inquiry, HMRC lawyer Anthony Inglese was the subject of an unusual exchange when the committee called for a Bible to be brought in for him to swear on – a rare but critical moment in establishing the truth of what had happened in a tax deal he described as perhaps "unconscionable". This seems to have been the cause of the angry letter from O'Donnell to Hodge, and a wider campaign against the committee now being waged.
O'Donnell accused the PAC of being "a theatrical exercise in public humiliation" and argued that civil servants were not accountable to parliament, but only to ministers. This goes back to Whitehall conventions, most recently asserted by one of O'Donnell's predecessors, Lord Armstrong. The PAC, because it investigates how public money is spent, rather than policy issues – which clearly are for ministers – has always been an exception. O'Donnell argues that this only affects the person at the top, the "accounting officer", not advisers such as Inglese. The committee wonders, in that case, how they are possibly supposed to get to the bottom of failures in an organisation like HMRC.
Given that senior civil servants seem to have no qualms about lying to Parliament or to anyone else, I think it is high time that they were forced to give evidence on oath in this way. As we have seen, the Science and Technology COmmittee inquiries were a sham, in which people on the public payroll consistently misled MPs and we were left with the farcical situation in which everybody - MPs, civil servants and the public - knew that lies had been told and the truth covered up, but nobody who was in a position to do anything about it was willing to do anything about it. Perhaps if Acton and Russell and Oxburgh and Jones had been speaking on oath we would have reached a different outcome. And as we know from Don Keiller's Information Tribunal hearing, UEA are very, very keen that Jones should say nothing on oath.