My intuitive reaction is that you are following this rule more strictly than intended.
This is not my understanding, since the original context involves foreign policy issues where it might be highly important for someone to not have officially been at an event.
I also think it’s pretty horrible to have rules where people take them seriously to different degrees, in part because the rule is costly to follow and the benefit of following it rapidly falls off as other people don’t follow it. (Remember that the core goal of the rules is to allow people to say things that they don’t want attributed to them, even in a loose sense, but if you are half-following the rule that means people still pay the costs of being careful about what they say outside the event, and can’t trust that they can speak freely inside the event.) At one such event, someone made a claim of the form “okay, now we’ve established common knowledge about Chatham House Rules” which was obviously not true (and also made me worried about what that person thought common knowledge meant!).
A later comment suggests the Chatham house website is sympathetic to my interpretation:
Q. Can participants in a meeting be named as long as what is said is not attributed? A. It is important to think about the spirit of the Rule. For example, sometimes speakers need to be named when publicizing the meeting. The Rule is more about the dissemination of the information after the event—nothing should be done to identify, either explicitly or implicitly, who said what.
Even when it comes to high level foreign policy issues I wouldn’t expect that no content is shared with spouses. Sharing content in an attributed way with spouses doesn’t prevent attendees from speaking freely.
For what it’s worth, if I asked somebody to keep something secret and not tell anybody, and they said yes, I would consider it a breach of trust if they told their spouse.
This is not my understanding, since the original context involves foreign policy issues where it might be highly important for someone to not have officially been at an event.
I also think it’s pretty horrible to have rules where people take them seriously to different degrees, in part because the rule is costly to follow and the benefit of following it rapidly falls off as other people don’t follow it. (Remember that the core goal of the rules is to allow people to say things that they don’t want attributed to them, even in a loose sense, but if you are half-following the rule that means people still pay the costs of being careful about what they say outside the event, and can’t trust that they can speak freely inside the event.) At one such event, someone made a claim of the form “okay, now we’ve established common knowledge about Chatham House Rules” which was obviously not true (and also made me worried about what that person thought common knowledge meant!).
A later comment suggests the Chatham house website is sympathetic to my interpretation:
Q. Can participants in a meeting be named as long as what is said is not attributed?
A. It is important to think about the spirit of the Rule. For example, sometimes speakers need to be named when publicizing the meeting. The Rule is more about the dissemination of the information after the event—nothing should be done to identify, either explicitly or implicitly, who said what.
Even when it comes to high level foreign policy issues I wouldn’t expect that no content is shared with spouses. Sharing content in an attributed way with spouses doesn’t prevent attendees from speaking freely.
For what it’s worth, if I asked somebody to keep something secret and not tell anybody, and they said yes, I would consider it a breach of trust if they told their spouse.