14 June 2018
Grenfell Tower
The Rice-Davies Rule.
By John Watson
True or apocryphal? It could be either, but the story that senior civil servants pencil the initials “MRDA” into the margin of documents is good enough to satisfy any fan of Yes, Minister.
The reference, of course, is to the trial of society osteopath Stephen Ward which formed the climax of the Profumo affair. Defence Counsel put it to one of the witnesses, Mandy Rice-Davies, that Lord Astor denied having any involvement with her. Her reply made the court laugh and found its way into the Oxford dictionary of quotations.
“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” she said, and since then the initials “MRDA” or the phrase “Mandy Rice-Davies Applies” have been used to indicate that a statement is not trustworthy because it was made to serve the interest of the person making it. Look at Andrew O’Hagan’s research into the Grenfell Tower disaster against this standard.
You will find a review of O’Hagan’s work later in this issue (see The Tower by J R Thomas) and he clearly did a considerable amount of research. Still, his conclusions remain provisional because the same ground will be covered by the public enquiry into the disaster, so we will in due course be able to compare the conclusions of that enquiry with those of Mr O’Hagan. For the moment however, we are left with the revelations that the fire brigade’s decision to keep telling people to sit tight was a disastrous mistake and his view that the Council were better people doing a much better job than has been suggested. He puts the primary responsibility for the disaster onto the building industry, and believes that the Council’s efforts to get people rehoused have been very unfairly traduced.
First, the fire brigade. Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigade Union leaps to their defence. Well, he has an interest certainly, but the defence of his members is very much what he is there for, and however disastrous the continuation of the “remain in place policy” may have been, the union’s comment that its commanders were in an impossible situation rings true. Difficult decisions had to be taken in an atmosphere of confusion. The fact that some of them turned out to be wrong is hardly surprising. We should be slow to criticise those who make the wrong call under pressure simply because that call has disastrous consequences. Both Wellington and Napoleon made serious errors at Waterloo but that hardly makes them incompetent military commanders.
Let’s move then to the efforts of the Council to help and rehouse those affected by the fire. According to O’Hagan, who had extensively interviewed the then leader of the Council, Paget-Brown, and also his deputy, Fielding–Mellen, the Council performed energetically but the media and others built an untrue narrative to the contrary. O’Hagan’s analysis has then been attacked in its turn, for example, by the New Statesman and by the local MP. This is a layer cake to which to apply MRDA, so like any good baker we should start with the bottom layer.
O’Hagan’s analysis is based on interviews with Council officers and staff, and there must inevitably have been a strong tendency towards self-justification. That cannot be something which passed O’Hagan by. Anyone listening to senior Council officers would understand it, and having written the letters “MRDA” in the margin of their notebook would test what they said particularly carefully. There is no reason to think that O’Hagan didn’t do that. After all, it is clear from his report that he spoke to a large number of people. That would give him a good idea of whether the message he was getting from the Council was right or wrong.
Moving up the cake we come to Mr O’Hagan himself. Is there any reason to think that he came to the matter with a particular bias? At first sight you might think this unlikely as it would have come out by now, but in fact there is a much better reason for believing in his neutrality. The ground he has covered will be re-analysed in more detail by a public enquiry led by a distinguished judge. O’Hagan must be aware that if he is wrong in his conclusions his errors will be very publicly revealed. That does not mean that he is right of course, but it does mean that he will have taken every possible precaution to see that he is. Whatever his politics may be, it seems unlikely that MRDA will apply here.
Up a level then to those who criticised the Council or, alternatively, have sought to discredit Mr O’Hagan’s report. It is here that it gets difficult. Did the Government hang the Council out to dry to limit political risk to the Tory party? Did local activists support a false narrative as part of a “class war” against the Council? Did the press finger the Council as a villain to enhance the marketability of their story line? Or are these suggestions all blinds of some sort? Really it is impossible to tell. There are too many possible applications of MRDA to leave the reader comfortable that he or she has got to the bottom of it all.
But we will find out, won’t we? In due course the public enquiry will publish its conclusions. If it comes out with the accepted press narrative, those conclusions will be accepted with little need for extraneous support. If however it comes out with the same view as O’Hagan, the coincidence of analysis will make it much easier for the public to accept that the original narrative was wrong. In those circumstances O’Hagan, however many brickbats he may receive now, will have performed an important function in establishing the truth – and that is crucial if we wish to be sure that those mistakes which were made are not repeated.
