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Madam Speaker: Order. Before I call the next hon. Member to speak, I should say that the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) has asked me to inquire about a document in the Library that was said to be embargoed. I have made some inquiries about it. The document was sent over to the Library from the office of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. There was no intention whatsoever to embargo that document; it was to be made available to hon. Members immediately, as the accompanying letter says.
Madam Speaker: Will hon. Members allow me to finish, please?
Mr. Douglas Hurd (Witney): The hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) has been telling the House about the Scott report for three years now. It sometimes seemed to us that he got not three hours' notice but about three years' notice of the Scott report. He seemed to have very extensive inside information about what it would contain. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Putney (Mr. Mellor), however, is quite right. What the hon. Gentleman has constantly predicted is not what has occurred.
The hon. Member for Livingston has constantly predicted that the Scott report would show a conspiracy of Ministers to do two indefensible things: to arm Saddam Hussein in secret; and, in that cause, to allow innocent men to be sent to prison. That is not what the Scott report has revealed. The hon. Gentleman has shown us an elegant sideways movement, so that he can claim that what he now alleges is what he has always alleged.
On the point about conspiracy to arm Saddam Hussein, what the hon. Member for Livingston said is wholly characteristic, because he omits--it is crucial--to say what Sir Richard Scott said about the conduct of my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary. He said that if my right hon. Friend, when considering the licence for Matrix Churchill, had known the current intelligence about the destination of the lathes for export, he would not have approved the licence.
That movement is typical of what has happened to the accusations. What starts as an accusation of conspiracy becomes a criticism of the circulation of defence material. My right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade has acknowledged--as anyone would acknowledge--that there is a problem. The problem has already been addressed to some extent, and it can be further addressed. However, a problem about the circulation of intelligence material to Ministers of State is light years away from the accusation that the hon. Gentleman persists in making, that my right hon. Friend was in some way privy to a secret decision to arm Saddam Hussein. Exactly the same movement has occurred, as I shall seek to show, on the question of sending innocent men to prison.
I have no particular axe to grind in this matter.[Hon. Members: "Oh?"] No; Sir Richard Scott deals very reasonably with my difference of opinion with him about Jordan. He did the Home Secretary and me a favour by once more correcting the sloppy and inaccurate press reporting about the PII certificates that we signed on the Ordtech appeal, which once again showed that the certificates were upheld by the court and not repudiated by them.
Mr. Giles Radice (North Durham):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hurd:
I do not wish to give way.
Nevertheless, I find the Scott report--I speak entirely for myself--a disappointing document. Sir Richard has been timid in one important matter in which he could have been bold and, in other passages, partly through ambiguity, he has allowed the Opposition and the press to convey to the country an impression of policy making that I know to be wrong.
Sir Richard makes an immense analysis of the PII certificates--I obviously do not have time to follow it--and I believe that there are three conclusions be drawn
about them. The first conclusion is that there is a need for such certificates--the hon. Member for Livingston did not deny it--in both criminal and civil trials. There will be occasions on which it is right for a Minister to point out to a judge that the documents in question would, if published in their existing form, cause harm to the servants or interests of the Crown. Sir Richard may be right in saying that, in criminal cases, there should not be a class objection but only an objection as regards a particular document and its contents. The inquiry can look into that.
The second conclusion is that there is no such thing as a gagging order, and that there has been no such thing as a gagging order since the Conway v. Rimmer case,in 1968. Ever since then, the law has been clear, and as my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General explained it to the Ministers in question. A Minister can give a view about the document; he is competent to do that and he ought to do that. What he cannot do is to give a view on the trial--on the question of the influence of that document or its publication on the guilt or innocence of those involved in the trial. That is not a matter for a Minister; it is a matter for the judge. Only the judge can see the total picture and decide whether and, if so, in what form the document should be released.
Mr. Rupert Allason (Torbay):
Will my right hon. Friend give way on that very point?
Mr. Hurd:
No, although I am sure that it is on that very point. Madam Speaker, I am sure that my hon. Friend will have a chance to catch your eye.
That is the doctrine of Conway v. Rimmer, in 1968. That is the doctrine that the Attorney-General explained to the Ministers and, in my view, it must be right.
My third conclusion is more controversial. I am driven to the conclusion, from some experience in this subject, that we need legislation on it. I am not happy about the latest judgment, the Wiley judgment after the Matrix Churchill case. With the best of motives, the judges in the Wiley case have invited Ministers back on to that treacherous ground of performing a balancing act. They have invited Ministers to balance the merits or demerits of publishing the document against the interests of the trial. I do not think that Ministers should have anything to do with that balancing act.
Sir Richard Scott believes as a judge--in this he is too timid--that the matter should be left to waft from trial to trial on some flying carpet of case law. I do not believe that. One can hardly open the pages of The Times orThe Daily Telegraph these days without reading about some distinguished judge or Queen's Counsel trying to blow the flying carpet in the direction that he favours. That judgment is not guidance that Ministers can successfully operate. Several of us have had rueful experience of that. I believe, reluctantly, that we need legislation to make matters clear and I hope that the review will lead to that conclusion.
On the second question about the portrait of policy making that emerges from the report, I cannot spend much time on the question whether paragraph (iii) of the guidelines was altered, modified or changed or whether the guidelines were more flexibly interpreted. I have read the essential papers on that point three times now.I read them in 1992, when it first became controversial;I read them in 1994, before I gave evidence to the inquiry;
and I read them in the report itself. I can see that different officials described what happened in the spring of 1989 in different ways, and clearly, in practice, it did not seem to them at that time that the difference between one phrase and another was crucial. It had nothing to do with the Matrix Churchill trial or the guilt or innocence of those involved.
On that particular point I rest my case on two things: first, my absolute confidence, derived over several years of working with him, in the integrity of my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary; and, secondly, the fact that when in July 1990 the Prime Minister of the day asked me to review the guidelines, what we then reviewed were the original Howe guidelines, without reference to any changes of interpretation or modification that might have occurred in 1988 or 1989. We believed that the Howe guidelines held the field and that it was they that fell to be reviewed.
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