Taking exception to the Chatham House Rule

A pal of mine was very impressed by an event in Dubai this week. “An event that defied the norms and actually talked the real talk,” he said on social media.

Sadly, he was unable to share any of the content because it “was all Chatham House”. My friend later clarified that it was actually “off the record” but this fine distinction came too late to prevent the red mist descending over my eyes whenever I hear the phrase “Chatham House Rule”.

Never has such blatant obstruction to free expression and reporting been dressed up in more sophisticated pseudo-rationale as in the use of the Rule (singular, note). It is perhaps the biggest of my bugbears in modern media – nudging out the misuse of “no comment”, though that is a different story.

The Rule was introduced by the snooty UK Royal Institute for International Affairs, which met in the eponymous house in London’s West End. Diplomats in the aftermath of the First World War wanted to be able to talk candidly about important global issues, so the RIIA said its proceedings could take place under the following conditions:

“Participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor of any other participant, may be revealed.”

It’s important to note that Chatham House does not impose the Rule on all of its events; in fact, only a minority are held under it, it recently said.

But that has not stopped the Rule being widely and inappropriately applied to all kinds of situations that simply do not merit it, especially in the Gulf region, and has spawned a whole litter of other impositions like “background briefings”, “behind closed doors sessions”, and “no media” events.

I suppose if the subject under discussion is Nazi troop movements in central Europe, as it would have been in those early sessions, or Soviet nuclear weapons, as it was later, then some element of self-restraint might be required on the part of journalists attending.

But for a discussion of trends in modern media under the banner “The Anti-Social Conference” (as was the case last week)? Seriously?

What began as a worthwhile attempt to protect security and encourage free expression has turned into a blanket ban on free reporting, gleefully seized upon by censors the world over.

I think the current tendency to overuse the Rule arises from two motivating pressures on the organisers, neither of which stand up to scrutiny: first, the inexorable temptation to appear more serious and interesting than events actually are; and second, the increasing appearance of middle-ranking government officials on panels at forums.

Nothing says “gravitas” as much as the proclamation of the Rule, even if the resulting panel is a dull, scripted event of absolutely no intrinsic news worthiness at all. Attendees are duped into believing they are hearing top secret pearls of wisdom, rather than trite scripted formulas.

The presence on the panel of the second assistant deputy minister gives it a veneer of government power, but of course that individual official rarely has an original thought in his or her head – and would be scared of what the minister would say if any such originality was expressed without permission.

Some of the biggest organisations in the world are the worst. The World Economic Forum – “committed to improving the state of the world” – routinely bans media from reporting on interesting panels by imposing the Rule – sometimes even when it is being live-streamed simultaneously. Figure that one.

I recall at Davos one year seeking, and receiving, permission from an important Saudi prince to report on what he said on a panel – only to have the organisers berate me later for breaking the Rule with the rationale “it would be a dangerous precedent”. Such inflated sense of self-importance.

Retrospective invocation of the Rule is even more galling. You have an interesting conversation with an important figure in the world of banking, for example, only to be told by his flacks afterwards that the conversation was “all Chatham House”.

I believe there is a place for background briefings and off-the-record conversations. They can be invaluable for transmitting the reality of a news story in a sensitive situation.

But the arbitrary wielding of the Chatham House bludgeon is an unwarranted and unjustified weapon against free expression, exploited by people who don’t know what it means, and who just want to curtail genuine public discourse.

In an era where AI-generated fakes are damaging news transmission across all media, the personal, face-to-face conversation is one of the few remaining reliable sources of truth. It should be encouraged and expanded, not Ruled out.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia