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Mr. Keith Simpson: The hon. Gentleman may intend to develop his argument on those lines, but will he say who is to blame? As I said when I intervened on the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), the permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office is a highly efficient and competent senior official. It is to be expected that the Foreign Secretary would have asked questions about the matter, and that his officials would report to him on it. There appears to be an enormous credibility gap at the centre of the hon. Gentleman's exposition.

Mr. Anderson: The hon. Gentleman asks who is to blame. Does he seriously suggest that the Foreign Secretary should go around asking people whether anything is wrong in Sierra Leone? It cannot seriously be suggested that my right hon. Friend knew what was going on. As for blaming anyone, as the Legg report and our Committee pointed out, serious deficiencies in the conduct of officials were revealed during the course of our inquiries. I invite people to read the Committee's report and to let it speak for itself in terms of the actions--or, rather, the inactions--of several key players in the machine.

I believe that I speak for all members of the Select Committee in expressing our enormous admiration for the quality and efficiency of Foreign Office personnel in our dealings with Foreign Office officials in this country and

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when we travel abroad. However, in this episode, we conclude that the officials concerned failed badly, and that is where the blame lies.

Mr. Simpson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I do not suggest that the Foreign Secretary--to use the hon. Gentleman's emotive words--should scuttle around seeking information. However, the Foreign Secretary has senior officials, who report to him, and special advisers. Speaking as a special adviser to a previous Administration, I can say that one would immediately recognise that, if something like that was going on, one had to act as the eyes and ears of the Foreign Secretary. Indeed, I understand that, in this case, it was the special adviser--

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman seems to be making a speech.

Mr. Anderson: The fact is that those officials did not inform the Foreign Secretary. The hon. Gentleman takes a rather classical view of ministerial responsibility. The last time that the view was taken that Ministers should be responsible for everything that happens in their Department was the Crichel Down affair in 1954 and the doctrine was obsolete even then. Given the complexity of modern government, no Minister can seriously be expected to be responsible for everything that happens in his Department. If the hon. Gentleman still holds that strict classical view of ministerial responsibility, I suggest that he has a quiet word with the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who has previous form on that matter from his time at the Home Office.

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): The $64,000 question is why the Foreign Secretary thinks that our criticism of officials is disproportionate and unfair. Unfortunately, my right hon. Friend is not in the Chamber; he should be here to listen to the speech of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. Anderson: I am not a psychiatrist, merely a politician. I can only suggest that the Foreign Secretary was showing an excess of misguided loyalty. Initially, he said that the Committee was unfair to civil servants. However, I invite hon. Members to read the report and let its words on the conduct of the officials speak for themselves.

Dr. Godman: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Anderson: Let me first go through the Foreign Secretary's three criticisms. Secondly, he said that the Legg committee set out what went wrong and that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had put it right. That is partially correct, but the Select Committee's recommendations went substantially beyond those of the Legg report. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary very properly said today that the Foreign Office was responding positively to a number of our recommendations--recommendations that were not part of the Legg report.

Finally, the Foreign Secretary said:

"Seven months later the Select Committee has not come up with a single significant fact that was not already in the Legg Report."

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I would respond as follows. First, Sir Thomas Legg is an establishment figure--a fact reflected in his report--and he clearly pulled his punches unnecessarily in many instances. Secondly, the Legg report was conducted in private, while the Foreign Affairs Committee held meetings in the full glare of the press, television cameras and the public. We are accountable to the public and the people can draw their own conclusions.

Paragraph 72 of the report refers to a clear instance when the Committee uncovered more than the Legg report in relation to minutes of a meeting of 3 December 1997. The Legg report proceeded on the basis of a certain assumption that was revealed only in January this year to be incorrect. I am pleased that the Foreign Secretary has said that he will respond positively to a number of our recommendations.

I shall now deal with the final part of the report about Executive-legislative relations, which is of general interest to the House.

Dr. Godman: I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. My intervention is prompted by the comments of the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) about the permanent under-secretary who, in my opinion, is a very fine civil servant. I remind my hon. Friend that the permanent under-secretary was astonishingly and refreshingly candid whenever he appeared before the Committee, and readily admitted that he and his officials had made mistakes. Is that not so?

Mr. Anderson: Indeed. The Committee can have only the highest admiration for the permanent under-secretary in all his relations with it. The main charge against the permanent under-secretary is that, at the end of March 1998, he became aware of a raid on the Foreign Office and four weeks elapsed before he informed the Foreign Secretary about a highly sensitive matter. That information reached the Foreign Secretary only as a result of a letter from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline. The four weeks of inaction and the failure to inform a Minister form the gravamen of the charge against the permanent under-secretary.

Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington): I am sure that my hon. Friend would not want the House to run away with the idea that he is trying to talk down our report, which was widely acclaimed in the media upon publication. Sadly, all the detailed criticisms of the internal workings of the Foreign Office fall squarely at the door of Sir John Kerr. Is that not correct?

Mr. Anderson: Far from talking down the work of the Committee, I believe that it has played a major role on behalf of Parliament and enhanced the credibility of Committees as a whole. If we had rolled over and done nothing, we would have remained very limp and lame for the rest of the Parliament. The Executive--if it were so inclined--could have easily ignored Select Committees.

In our system, Select Committees are a relatively new and weak creation. We have Executive-led Government, and that is particularly true in foreign affairs, where there is the Crown prerogative. If the Government are committed to the distribution of power--I am confident that they are--they should distribute power between

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Parliament and the Executive with the same zeal that they have shown in distributing it within the United Kingdom to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Select Committees are the main instrument available to Parliament for keeping the Executive in check.

The Foreign Secretary can claim with justification that he has appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee more frequently than any of his predecessors. He is also justified in claiming that he has allowed greater access to official documents than did any of his predecessors, including Conservative Ministers. However, those concessions were given reluctantly, tardily and only following protracted argument. We believe that the Foreign Secretary should have been far more willing to be open with the Committee and to provide us with the tools that we needed to do our job. That is particularly true of intelligence. We believe that Committees should have controlled access to the intelligence community and must be trusted by the Executive. Why should Sir Thomas Legg have greater access than hon. Members? We point that out forcefully.

The last part of our report deals with access to information and what is relevant to the work of other Committees. That was discussed last Thursday in the Liaison Committee, which brings together the Chairmen of all Select Committees. Since the leak has been made, I can say only that there is widespread dissatisfaction among the Chairmen not only with this Government but with all Governments and their co-operation with Select Committees. A dossier will be compiled by the Chairman of the Liaison Committee, and I hope that it will be not only debated in the House but taken seriously by the Government.

I hope that the Government will take seriously all our recommendations and that the House will recognise that we have done an effective job on behalf of Parliament. We concluded our report by using the searchlight analogy mentioned by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats.

Had there been a simple Opposition motion asking the House to agree with the conclusions of the Foreign Affairs Committee, it would have been extremely difficult for us to oppose that motion. Of course the Opposition have tried to be too clever and could not resist the temptation to go too far. The motion has three legs. The first

"endorses the criticisms made of Ministers"

in the report. No conclusions in the report directly criticise Ministers, and many seek to strengthen Ministers in their relations with officials. The high point, as the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife pointed out, is paragraph 19, but that recommendation is to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a whole.

The motion's second leg

"deplores the conduct of Ministers which led to such criticism".

I have already covered that point in my remarks on the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. Finally, the motion

"calls on the Ministers concerned to accept responsibility for their conduct."

That fails because, in general, Ministers' conduct in substantive matters was not criticised.

On the relations between the Executive and the legislature, the criticism is mild. In paragraph 99, we welcome the increased access to documents. In paragraph

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101, we urge the Government to accede to the Select Committee's request for information, irrespective of the existence of a departmental inquiry. In paragraph 109, we deal with intelligence. The Government gave more information and access than any of their predecessors, but that was not enough. It is possible, particularly because of the failure to grant access to intelligence material, that the focus of the report is not what it should have been. The Government should have been more open and co-operative.

Thus, the motion misses the point of the report: in this instance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office machine, which is normally efficient and highly admired by the public and, indeed, by the Committee, failed to perform and to give Ministers the quality of advice that they needed. The Opposition's attempt to distil the report into criticism of individual Ministers is therefore surely a partisan distortion. I shall oppose the motion.

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