Wanted: A Bill of Rights

Every weekend during the six years that he held various jobs in the 1960s Labor Cabinet of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Richard Crossman would retire to his 17th century country house near Oxford and dictate the week's experiences into a tape recorder. Nothing remarkable about that. Memoir writing --and now taping--is a well-developed art, and Wilson himself had published his bland prime ministerial recollections in 1971.

Yet Crossman, a former Oxford don and journalist (he edited The New Statesman from 1970 to 1972) who died last spring, was devilishly unflattering in many of his reminiscences of Wilson, Britain's all-powerful civil service and even Queen Elizabeth. Financial Times Political Editor David Watt called the volume "the most important book about British politics to have been written in years," but civil servants in the office that serves the Cabinet found Cross-man's wealth of detail on how British government works to be profoundly disturbing. With Wilson's approval, they moved in effect to suppress the 350,000-word document by asserting their traditional right to a line-by-line scrutiny of Cabinet members' memoirs for breach of confidence. They found plenty, and it appeared that Grossman's candid insights might never see print.

Lip Service. Now, however, the London Sunday Times is challenging that subtle censorship by serializing the diaries without Cabinet permission. The series, which began last month, has focused public attention on press restrictions in a country that pays stiff-upper-lip service to free speech.

Government officials can pick from a choice of press curbs to stop the Sunday Times: the 1911 Official Secrets Acts, which bar unauthorized disclosure of any secret government document; sweeping copyright restrictions; vague and unwritten contempt-of-court rules; and the principle of "confidence," which prohibits publication of industrial secrets and other private information. Those legal weapons are seldom put into action. Their mere existence serves to discourage publication of sensitive material. Editors note wryly that a Watergate scandal might go undetected in Britain because the press there would be prevented from pursuing the story.

This time the expected did not happen, because Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans saw in the Crossman diaries an opportunity to publish an important document and frustrate censorship at the same time. The diaries are indeed uncharitable: they depict Wilson making major policy decisions without informing the Cabinet, the Queen showing more interest in discussing her Corgi dogs than affairs of state, civil servants hiding important documents from Grossman. But they spill few state or industrial secrets; so prosecution under the Official Secrets Acts or on other grounds would be difficult. Besides, during last year's election campaign Wilson had vowed he would narrow the Official Secrets Acts and make government processes more open. The night before the first Grossman installment appeared, a government lawyer did call the Sunday Times to complain that the paper "wasn't playing the game," but there has been no action.

The Grossman affair is not the first time that Evans has refused to "play the game." In 1966 his paper uncovered electoral gerrymandering in Northern Ireland and in 1971 revealed that the British army had tortured suspects there. Evans also ignored a 1967 government warning and published the memoirs of Soviet Counterspy Kim Philby. For the past two years, the paper has fought a court order banning its ten-year-old investigation of the thalidomide scandal.

Bluff Caller. Evans, 46, rose through provincial papers to become editor of the Northern Echo in 1961, was named managing editor of the Sunday Times in 1966 and editor in 1967. Short and slight, he still speaks with flat Yorkshire vowels and spends his few hours out of the Sunday Times office toiling almost obsessively at squash, skiing, Ping Pong and a book on photojournalism. He also serves as an occasional panelist on a television quiz show titled, aptly enough, Call My Bluff. Evans has long argued that British journalism should end its preoccupation with the elegant expression of opinion and tackle more American-style investigative reporting. "The growing power of government and corporations has led to a great invasion of personal privacy," Evans told TIME Correspondent Lawrence Malkin. "But in the eyes of the public, we have become the intruders into privacy. That's why we have to continue to battle against secrecy in the law whenever we can."

The battle is far from over. The final installment of the Grossman memoirs, to appear next month, contains details of stormy Cabinet meetings during Britain's 1966 economic crisis. Evans is certain that the disclosures will be deeply embarrassing to Wilson and others still in the Cabinet, and could finally rouse them to legal action. Says Evans: "What we need is a Bill of Rights."

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