"[7] Harold Wilson had a positive view of the CPRS and he commented in his book The Governance of Britain "It was set up by our predecessors but we have found it very valuable and have continued it.
"The CPRS had originally been set up by Ted Heath as a source of long-term policy advice for the Government at a time when there were fewer private think-tanks, fewer special advisers in government and a widespread belief that the great questions of the day could be resolved by specialized technical analysis.
However, according to Joe Haines (Press Secretary to Prime Minister Harold Wilson) even before the proposals were shown to Callaghan the Foreign Office intervened: "the document he eventually saw, and approved, was modified – or doctored – on the way to his desk.
officials, and the head of the C.P.R.S., Sir Kenneth Berrill, was asked to make deletions before it was put to the Secretary of State.
There had been a mixed response from the Foreign Office during the review, the most notable and possibly most critical came from Sir Nicholas Henderson the Ambassador to France, although Anthony Parsons in Tehran was more supportive of the CPRS's work.
There was a debate in the House of Lords in November 1977 with contributions from members with connections to the British Council, the BBC as well as the Foreign Office.
[13] The orchestration of a critical campaign against the Review and the CPRS by the Foreign Office had started before its publication and is indicated by Bernard Donoughue in his diary entry for 7 February 1977: "Had lunch with The Economist journalist Richard Leonard – who told me that somebody from the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) had got the editor (Andrew Knight) of The Economist to 'doctor' an article so it was savagely critical of the (still unfinished!)