ABC was the acronym used for meetings of Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and William
Cohen when they all worked for the President Bill Clinton. RAB will hopefully in future be an American-style acronym for the cooperation of the three people voted to chair the parliamentary
committees for foreign affairs, defence and international development: Richard Ottaway, James Arbuthnot and Malcolm Bruce. If the government succeeds in welding together the different perspectives
of the FCO, DFID and the MoD – a prerequisite of modern crisis management – then the three MPs will have to find new ways of working together too as parliament will have to scrutinise this
new dynamic.
They must build on the examples of the cross-departmental Intelligence and Security Committee (established in 1994), and the joint committees for arm exports and human rights (1998), individual Select Committees began scrutinising cross-department work.
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