In the view of the postwar Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, “No government can be successful which cannot keep its secrets.” By that yardstick, still the traditional one in British politics, Theresa May’s government is one of the least successful in our history. This is not merely the view of its opponents. It is also the view of its own key members. Less than a month ago the Conservative chief whip, Julian Smith, admitted to the BBC that “discipline is not as good as it should be”. Brexit, he continued, had generated “the worst example of ill-discipline in cabinet in British political history”.
That’s quite a claim. But it is hard to blame Brexit directly for the extraordinarily reckless new act of indiscipline that took place this week. On Tuesday the government’s national security council, which is chaired by the prime minister and contains senior ministers as well as security officials, agreed that the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei could build parts of the UK’s 5G network. This would normally have been a tightly guarded and unpublicised decision – Attlee, for instance, involved only a few trusted ministers in his momentous 1947 decision to build an independent British nuclear weapon. Instead, the Huawei decision was reported in full detail in the following morning’s Daily Telegraph, which named five cabinet ministers who opposed it, and laid the decision directly at the feet of Mrs May.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Pxn0Wr
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