Sir Peter Kitcatt; Secretary to two Speakers (very interesting)
Hyfler/Rosner
April 2, 2007 Monday
First Edition
SIR PETER KITCATT;
Secretary to two Speakers
BYLINE: Tam Dalyell
Peter Kitcatt was not all he seemed to be. For members of
the House of Commons, where he occupied the important post
of Speaker's Secretary in the years 1986-93, he was a
discreet, self-effacing presence at Parliamentary Question
Time. He stood to the left of the chair of Mr
SpeakerJackWeatherill,andsubsequently Madam Speaker Betty
Boothroyd, who was particularly grateful to have inherited
him, in the first month of a first
womanSpeaker.Hisfunction,whenasked, was to help the Speaker
with the name of a member standing up, or to remind the
Speaker that Mr Dalyell had been called umpteen times
already during the course of the month, and that other
colleagues had a prior claim to be called.
Actually, and by sheer chance, I knew of a different Peter
Kitcatt. On a visit to my old Cambridge college and his,
King's, I had been ribbed late at night that I did not
realise that the Speaker's Secretary, outwardly seemingly
dull, had been an extremely successful officer in the
intelligence services and was a man of hidden depths and
considerable scholarship.
When I confronted Kitcatt with this,he asked, courteously,
if I would refrain from mentioning his security and
intelligence-service past to parliamentary colleagues. Until
now I have never breathed a word. But this background is
essential to an understanding of Kitcatt's life.
Son of Horace Kitcatt, a teacher of Classics, and his wife
Ellen, also a teacher, Kitcatt was born in 1927 and went to
BordenGrammarSchoolinSittingbourne, from which he gained a
major scholarship to read Classics at King's College,
Cambridge, where the policy was to admit major scholars and
mathematics students fresh from school at 18, and make the
rest of us do our National Service first.
At King's, even among contemporaries three to five years
older, some of whom had been from Alamein to the Elbe,
Kitcatt blossomed as a favourite student of the extrovert
Provost Sir John Sheppard, famous for putting on plays by
Euripides, F.E. (later Sir Frank) Adcock, editor of the
Cambridge Ancient History, who held play-reading evenings in
his rooms, and George ("Dadie") Rylands, whose wonderful
voice entranced the college Ten Club, membership of which
Kitcatt treasured all his life.
Crucially, Kitcatt's supervisor was Patrick Wilkinson,
scholar of Ovid and later to be Senior Tutor of King's.
Wilkinson was to be identified as the recruiter in Cambridge
post-war for MI5 and MI6. Kitcatt was the right material.
Sent off after a first class degree to gain experience of
the world, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service
Corps from 1948 to 1950, he was allocatedto work under the
cloak of the Colonial Office. Handpicked in 1953, he was
appointed Assistant Private Secretary to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies - Oliver Lyttelton. Socially,
intellectually, and in every other way, Lyttelton was a very
heavyweight post-war politician,formally of the Grenadier
Guards, later chairman of Associated Electrical Industries
and the first Viscount Chandos.
These were turbulent times in the process of decolonisation.
Kitcatt was at the centre of a vastly important department
dealing with acute and delicate problems, particularly in
East Africa and the West Indies. "I'm not necessarily a
Tory, let alone a High Tory like Lyttelton, but I did admire
Viscount Chandos and was privileged to keep in touch with
him. For some years, he looked after my career," he told me.
One example of Kitcatt's initiative: in 1953, there was a
hunger strike among students at Makerere College in Uganda.
The ringleader was a young Bugandan, Abu Mayanja, a friend
of the wayward Kabaka of Buganda. The choice before
SirAndrewCohen,therecentlyappointed Governor of Uganda, was,
either to put Mayanja in prison in Kampala, or to send him
to his own university of Cambridge. Kitcatt took it on
himself to advise the latter course, and offered to
facilitate Mayanja's three years at King's. (And I was one
of the undergraduates assigned by the Senior Tutor to look
after him.)
Chandos was followed by another heavyweight, Alan
Lennox-Boyd, later Viscount Boyd of Merton. After Kitcatt
left the Private Office, his exact role is shrouded in
mystery. He was certainly active in intelligence (under the
veil of the office) and he was much involved in the crisis
that became known as Mau Mau. He had direct access both to
Lennox-Boyd, and to Iain Macleod as Secretary of State for
the Colonies. All I know of Kitcatt's views is that he
admired Harold Macmillan for his "wind of change" speech in
South Africa.
In 1960 Kitcatt was chosen to be Secretary (and minder) to
Princess Anne on a tour of the Caribbean. On his return
Macleod appointed him Secretary of the East African Economic
and Fiscal Commission, a post of topical significance at the
time.
With the advent of the Labour government, Kitcatt was not
unhappy to be moved to the Treasury, where he was a
principal with responsibility for aspects of overseas
spending. It so happened that the flat above me in
Rutherford Street was occupied by Sir Robert Hall, later
Lord Roberthall, a Treasury mandarin who said I ought to be
jolly pleased when Kitcatt had been appointed as Secretary
to the Speaker. Hall's approval is telling.
In 1972 Kitcatt transferred to the Ministry of Defence, to
the Royal College of Defence Studies with the rank of
Under-Secretary, and three years later was seconded to the
Department of Health and Social Security. In 1978 he went to
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and we can only guess at
his duties.
Those best placed to make judgement are most enthusiastic in
their praise. Sir Donald Limon, formerly Clerk of the House
of Commons, recalls that Kitcatt looked after both his
Speakers and had their best interests at heart. A view in
the Clerks' Department was that perhaps he was not an
innovator but more passive than some of his predecessors and
successors - but none the worse for that. Jack Weatherill,
one of the great Commons Speakers, regarded Kitcatt as "a
wise counsellor" whose background in 10 Downing Street made
him "invaluable": In particular, he was trusted by all
parties, who could be sure that every message that was given
to him would be passed on accurately to the Speaker. Betty
Boothroyd describes Peter Kitcatt as "a most wonderful and
dedicated servant of Parliament" who "taught me a great deal
about Speakership".
My personal experience was not only of Peter Kitcatt's
kindness but his fairness to dissenters, some of whose
opinions he may not have found congenial - or did he,
remembering his own moulding at King's?
Peter Julian Kitcatt, intelligence officer and public
servant: born Sittingbourne, Kent 5 December1927; CB 1986;
Speaker's Secretary, House of Commons 1986-93; Kt 1992;
married 1952 Audrey Aylen (three sons, two daughters); died
Croydon, Surrey 25 March 2007.
