Last week, defence select comittee chair James Arbuthnot told CSW’s sister title The House magazine that Hammond has “really clamped down on discussions between journalists and politicians on the one hand, and the military and Ministry of Defence on the other.” He’d previously told The Guardian that the MoD’s tendency to suppress information has “got substantially worse ”since the summer of 2010.
Hammond denied the charge last week, telling ConservativeHome website – another stablemate of CSW’s – that his critics wanted senior officers “to have cosy little lunches...with them, telling them all sorts of tales out of school.”
He added that the military are no different from other parts of the public sector, “where the accepted discipline is that we have our disagreements internally, we reach an agreed public position, and then we all as senior representatives of the department present that position.”
He argued that military chiefs have “a formative voice in the making of the department’s policy” and are allowed to speak publicly, but are expected not to give unattributable private briefings to journalists.
Arbuthnot told The House that his “committee does have difficulty getting information” from the MoD but added that he thinks Hammond “is beginning to accept the need for an improvement in communications.”