House of Commons Hansard Debates for 12 Jul 1999 (pt 9)

4.7 pm

Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): I do not wish to make any comment on the conduct of the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross). He has accepted the Committee's judgment, and there is little more to be said about that.

My comments will be directed, in the context of the eighth report, to the conduct of the Foreign Secretary, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, of the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd),

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and of the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs--the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson).

So far as the Foreign Secretary is concerned, the Committee's report is, in fact, quite damning. It deals with him at paragraphs 24 to 27. At paragraph 26, the Committee considered in detail the defence that he advanced for his conduct, and the conduct of those for whom he is accountable, in receiving and retaining draft reports of the Select Committee. The Committee, without qualification, rejected that defence. It seems to me to follow absolutely and inevitably from the Committee's findings that the Foreign Secretary was guilty of contempt of the House.

I have of course listened carefully to what the Standards and Privileges Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), has said, but I find his explanation for the lack of a specific finding in relation to the Foreign Secretary very far from convincing. That explanation may well go to mitigation of the Foreign Secretary's conduct, but the defence that he offered was rejected without qualification. The Foreign Secretary should, therefore, at the very least, apologise to the House for his conduct. His failure to do so and his absence from this debate themselves reinforce and aggravate the contempt that he has shown the House, and illustrate most vividly the contempt that the Government as a whole display for the House.

Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): Is there not a distinction between what the right hon. and learned Gentleman calls "holding the House in contempt" and being in contempt? He has accused the Foreign Secretary of being in contempt. Will he explain why--and under which rule?

Mr. Howard: The hon. Gentleman is quite right to suggest that there is a distinction between the two kinds of contempt. However, I believe that the Foreign Secretary is guilty of both kinds. The reason--which the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) has asked me to specify--is simply this: in his evidence to the Standards and Privileges Committee, the Foreign Secretary advanced a defence as to why he should not be accused of having held the House in contempt. That defence was rejected out of hand by the Committee. The logic, therefore, is that the Foreign Secretary was indeed in contempt of this House, and the explanation given by the Chairman of the Committee, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, while it may go to mitigation, does not affect that point.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: The right hon. and learned Gentleman has great experience, but he completely misunderstands the term "being in contempt". He is simply talking rubbish.

Mr. Howard: That is an assertion, rather than an argument. I invite the hon. Gentleman to look at paragraphs 24 to 27 of the report, where he will find ample justification for the points that I am making. Similar criticism applies also to the Minister of State.

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Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes): The right hon. and learned Gentleman points to paragraphs in the report which refer to the Foreign Secretary. Paragraph 26 states:

"It is the case that there is no precedent for regarding the disclosure of a draft report to another Member as a contempt."

Will he take that on board and stop going down this alley?

Mr. Howard: The fact that there was no precedent for regarding particular conduct as a contempt does not begin to mean that the conduct on the occasion in question was not a contempt. That is the point.

Mr. Sheldon: I thought that what the Committee said was quite clear--that it was not a contempt, but a misunderstanding. The Foreign Secretary thought that he could go to a Committee, as indeed I thought for some time after the introduction of Standing Order No. 126. Many Members still assume that they can go into a Select Committee. That was the view that we rejected--it had nothing to do with contempt. The Foreign Secretary thought that he had that right, and we said that he did not.

Mr. Howard: Even if that rule had not been changed, that would have been a fanciful and far-fetched reason for receiving a leaked report from the Committee and retaining it for a period of time.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: He did not.

Mr. Howard: The Foreign Secretary did receive such a leaked report, and he did retain it. He saw the report, and he did not return it. Even if the rule allowing hon. Members to attend Select Committee meetings had not been changed, it would be fanciful to suggest that that would have been an adequate defence. However, the rule had been changed, and the Foreign Secretary was capable of discovering that. He has not come to the Committee or to the House to say, "I am very sorry. I now know that the rules have been changed. Had I known, I would not have retained the report. I therefore apologise for the fact that I behaved in that way, in ignorance of the fact that the rule had been changed." That might have been an acceptable response. However, we have had no response of that kind, no apology and no recognition that what the Foreign Secretary did was wrong.

That is not the only aspect of this affair that merits close scrutiny. The first report from the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs referred to parliamentary questions relating to the time at which the Government might have had sight of the Committee's report on Sierra Leone. The report said:

"Though the answers to these questions are germane to the leak from the Committee, we express no opinion on them since this is a matter which the Committee on Standards and Privileges may wish to consider."

The Committee went on to draw particular attention to the Foreign Secretary's answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) on 23 February. To appreciate the full significance of that question, one needs to look at the Minister of State's answer of 16 February, which is reproduced at annexe D to the report. The Minister of State was asked when he first saw the Select Committee report. He said that the report was first drawn to the attention of the Foreign Office when the Clerk collected it from the Select Committee on the morning of publication.

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On 23 February, the Foreign Secretary for the first time gave a full account, putting up his hands and coming clean about the extent of the leak and his knowledge that the report had been seen by officials and by the Minister of State. The Foreign Secretary has claimed that the answer given on 16 February was "accurate, factual and correct". I do not believe that any objective commentator could possibly support that claim. He implicitly conceded as much in his answer of 23 February.

The question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham was not about leaks or about when the Foreign Secretary received the report. It was about statements made by the Foreign Office to the media. If he regards it as a sufficient discharge of his duty to answer questions accurately, factually and correctly, as he suggests, there was no need for him to disclose information about the leaked report in answer to my hon. Friend's question. He did so only because he knew that the game was up, as on that very day the hon. Member for Dundee, West put up his hands and made his admission. On 16 February, Foreign Office Ministers thought that they could get away with it, so they gave an answer that was completely at variance with the facts as they knew them to be; but on the 23rd, when the game was up, they came clean.

The Government make much of openness. In his introduction to the ministerial code of conduct, the Prime Minister said:

"In issuing this Code, I should like to reaffirm my strong personal commitment to restoring the bond of trust between the British people and their Government. We are all here to serve and we must all serve honestly and in the interests of those who gave us our positions of trust.

I will expect all Ministers to work within the letter and spirit of the Code."

We do not need to look far into the body of the code before reaching its guidance on ministerial answers to Parliament. Paragraph 1.iii of chapter 1 says:

"It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister".

Of course, the exercise of that sanction is a matter for the Prime Minister. This episode provides an illuminating illustration of the yawning gulf between his words and his deeds. The Foreign Affairs Committee specifically drew those parliamentary answers to the attention of the Standards and Privileges Committee, and it is a mystery to me why it did not investigate the matter.