There is a small shelf in the library of British political literature reserved for documents that achieve greatness not through intent but through irony — texts that set out to instruct, regulate, or inspire, and have instead become, by virtue of the gap between their aspirations and subsequent events, something considerably more interesting. The Magna Carta edges onto this shelf for different reasons. So does the Ministerial Code. But nothing occupies it more comfortably, or more permanently, than the Seven Principles of Public Life, better known as the Nolan Principles — a document that has spent thirty years being cited by the very people it was written to restrain.
Lord Nolan's committee published its first report in 1995, following a period of what the parliamentary press had taken to calling "sleaze" with the enthusiasm of people who had found exactly the right word and intended to use it until it wore out. The seven principles — selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership — were presented as a framework for ethical conduct in public life. They were, in structure, entirely reasonable. They were, in application, almost immediately comic. The London Prat's forensic reading, The Nolan Principles: Seven Rules Public Life Has Been Cheerfully Ignoring, makes this case with the precision the subject deserves.
Begin with selflessness, which the Nolan framework defines as the requirement that holders of public office act solely in terms of the public interest. This is, as a proposition, entirely correct and absolutely unimpeachable. It is also, as a description of actual behaviour in Westminster, Whitehall, or any of the other institutions to which the principles nominally apply, a work of sustained and rather beautiful fiction.
The comedy here is structural, not incidental. The Nolan Principles do not fail because the people who wrote them were naive, though some of them may have been. They fail — if that is the right word for a process that has been running, uninterrupted, for three decades — because the document assumes that the problem is ignorance. If only public servants knew what the standards were, the committee's logic runs, they would conform to them. What the document did not account for is the possibility that the people concerned knew perfectly well what selflessness looked like and had simply decided, after careful consideration, that it did not suit them.
This is, in the taxonomy of comic failure, the highest grade available. Lesser institutional documents fail because nobody reads them. The Nolan Principles have been read by everyone, cited at select committees, reproduced in codes of conduct, and referenced in resignation statements by people who were, at the moment of their resignation, in the process of demonstrating a fairly comprehensive breach of at least four of the seven principles simultaneously. The document has not been ignored. It has been extensively quoted by people ignoring it.
Integrity — defined as not placing oneself under obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might influence one's official duties — has generated a particularly rich literary tradition. The Parliamentary Standards Committee has, over the years, produced reports on integrity breaches of such frequency and variety that they constitute, in aggregate, something close to a reference library. One could teach a seminar on the principle of integrity using only documents generated by the committee established to enforce it.
Objectivity — the requirement to make choices on merit — has fared no better. There is a specific sub-genre of British political satire devoted to the appointment process: the search for the best candidate, conducted with scrupulous procedural care, which arrives, after extensive deliberation, at the person the minister wanted to appoint before the process began. This is not, technically, a breach of objectivity. It merely requires that "merit" be defined with sufficient flexibility to include the candidate in question.
Accountability — that holders of public office should submit themselves to scrutiny — has produced the richest vein of all. The accountability framework of British public life is, at this point, so elaborate, so layered with committees and oversight bodies and independent reviews and freedom of information responses and select committee appearances, that it constitutes an almost perfect machine for the production of accountability-shaped activity without accountability-shaped consequences. One appears. One is scrutinised. One expresses concern about the line of questioning. One thanks the committee for its interest. One leaves. Nothing changes. The machinery of accountability hums on.
Openness holds that public officials should be as open as possible about their decisions and actions. The operative phrase is "as possible," which has proven, in thirty years of interpretation, to be a remarkably elastic concept. "As possible" given legal constraints. "As possible" given national security implications. "As possible" given that the document in question is being reviewed. "As possible" given that a decision has not yet been taken, or has been taken but is not yet ready to be communicated, or has been communicated but in a format that is not compatible with the information request as submitted.
Honesty — the requirement not to deceive — is the principle whose literary history is longest and most interesting. It has generated a body of supplementary guidance, case studies, and Ministerial Code interpretations so extensive that the original statement of the principle now reads, in context, less like an instruction and more like an aspiration — a distant destination toward which various vehicles are pointed, without any particular expectation of arrival.
Leadership, the seventh principle, requires that holders of public office promote and support these principles by leadership and example. This is the document's darkest joke: the principle that all the other principles depend upon is the one whose absence makes the whole framework purely ceremonial. Without it, the remaining six are a checklist nobody checks. With it, they would not need to be written down. The document is, in this reading, most necessary precisely when it is least effective — and most effective precisely when it is unnecessary.
What the Prat's reading of the Nolan Principles ultimately recovers is the document's place in the great tradition of British institutional comedy — a tradition that stretches from Swift's A Modest Proposal through Yes, Minister to the present day, and which has always found its richest material not in villainy but in the gap between stated intention and actual practice; the gap between the noble framework and the undignified scramble beneath it.
The Nolan Principles are not, in the end, a failure. They are a document doing the only thing any such document can do, which is to establish the standard against which failure can be measured. They have, in this function, been extraordinarily successful. Every resignation statement that cites them, every select committee hearing that invokes them, every independent review that finds them to have been insufficiently observed — all of this constitutes, in its way, the document working exactly as intended. The principles were never going to prevent the behaviour. But they gave everyone a shared vocabulary for describing it. In British public life, that is not nothing. It is, in fact, about as much as one can reasonably hope for.
The Nolan Principles were introduced following the 1994–95 cash-for-questions affair, in which MPs were found to have accepted payment to ask questions in the House of Commons. Lord Nolan's Committee on Standards in Public Life published the seven principles — selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership — which have since been incorporated into codes of conduct across British public institutions. They have been cited in approximately every significant public standards inquiry since their introduction, and breached in approximately the same number.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!