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Mr. Wilshire: It may seem extraordinary to some people, but after my experience of the Sierra Leone inquiry, nothing surprises me about the conduct, attitudes and comments of officials in the FCO. In principle, I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but on the specific point, I am amazed that he is amazed.
The eighth report raises another issue that the House needs to address--the role of the Prime Minister in this shabby episode. When he came to office in 1997, the Prime Minister made much of his changes to the ministerial code. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) made exactly this point. After much trumpeting of moral virtue, what a pity that the Prime Minister overlooked the simple matter of leaked documents when he made his changes. What a pity that he waited for the report before making any further changes. The facts were clear and were admitted in February. It is now July, yet the Prime Minister has done nothing.
On numerous occasions, the Prime Minister promised the nation that he would dismiss erring Ministers. Given the clear evidence in the report of wrong-doing by the Foreign Secretary and by officials, when will the Prime Minister sack the Foreign Secretary?
As the report makes clear, the shortcomings revealed by the episode go right to the top. The House must not allow itself to be stopped in its tracks simply by making
the hon. Member for Dundee, West a scapegoat. The House must demand this afternoon an unconditional and immediate apology from the Foreign Secretary, and must insist that the Prime Minister belatedly takes action, and does not merely carry out a review.
The report reminds me of three things. First, among any group of 659 human beings, weakness will always rear its ugly head from time to time. We wish that it would not, but we know that it will. Secondly, individual Members of Parliament can still act honourably, even when their conduct falls below the standard that our constituents are entitled to expect of us. Thirdly, the Government's conduct is all too often disgraceful. The report makes it crystal clear that the behaviour within the Foreign Office was not an abberation; it was entirely within the approach to the government of the country adopted by new Labour.
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
I genuinely had not intended to speak this afternoon, but I have been listening intently to the speeches and this is one of those occasions on which speeches are important and possibly make a difference.
Let me say first that I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) behaved in a very dignified way. My heart goes out to him, because, as one or two hon. Members may recollect, 32 years ago I was in a not dissimilar position having fallen foul of the Committee of Privileges in relation to a visit of the Select Committee on Science and Technology to Porton Down. I was hauled to the Bar of the House and the Speaker put on his black cap. Thankfully, that does not happen today, but it is a very unnerving and disagreeable experience to be hauled before the House of Commons in such a way. I can say only that my hon. Friend behaved with dignity and grace, and all credit to him.
I have one point to make. I have listened to the speeches, in particular those of my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard). The speech of the former Home Secretary was understandably complex and, without reading and re-reading it, one could not sensibly pass any kind of judgment on it, but, whatever one thinks of those speeches, my whole instinct is that this is a matter between Parliament and the Executive. It is of such importance that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary ought to come to the House, tomorrow or the day after, to answer the questions that have been raised.
For the sake of Parliament, this matter cannot be left in limbo. We cannot leave it at that because--however competent my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House may be, and she is indeed competent--no Leader of the House is in a position to answer for the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office in such circumstances.
5.3 pm
Mr. David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden):
I commend the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), the Chairman of the Liaison Committee, on his report. Given the evidence presented to him, it must have been extraordinarily difficult to bring it together, particularly as a unanimous report. I understand the problems of achieving that better than most. It must have been extremely awkward to have reached some of the conclusions in the report, but it was probably the only set of conclusions that the Committee could have reached. That fact alone will have implications for the future, and I shall elaborate on those in a moment.
I wish to focus on three issues: first, the point made by the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne about the importance of breaching Select Committee integrity; secondly, the issue that must have presented the most difficulty for the Committee--the credibility of the evidence presented to it, and the problems that that created; and, thirdly, what should be done about such matters in the future. I am thinking more about the Select Committee system and the privilege system than about the substance of the report.
How damaging has this matter been? Frankly, it has been extraordinarily damaging, simply because the problem that we face--and the problem for the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), who, I agree, has behaved with great dignity--hits at the mechanics of how the Select Committee system works. Select Committees have no absolute power. Most of them cannot dismiss, punish, change policy or allocate money. They can do nothing except expose information to the public gaze, comment on policy and outcomes and, in the final analysis, embarrass the Executive. That is their only weapon, but it would be surprising if the Executive of any political persuasion accepted that embarrassment passively.
That is the leverage, and the breach that we are discussing hits at the fulcrum of that leverage. Once an Executive knows in detail about an upcoming report, it can do any number of things to destroy the report's effectiveness. As the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, my predecessor as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, knows, when a Committee produces 50 reports a year, the outcomes are known to the Government because they were there for the evidence sessions and know what happened. Moreover, there is a timetable for the publication of reports. As a result, the Public Accounts Committee, in extremis, is always susceptible.
I can give three examples that demonstrate what Governments, in general, can do. A year or two ago, the PAC produced a report on social security fraud. Unusually, the Government issued a Green Paper and made a statement to the House the week before in order to take away the report's impact. On another occasion, we issued a report on what was, at that point, the Government's fairly mixed performance on the millennium bug. The day before its publication, a very senior Minister went on television to talk about the good parts of the Government's work on the millennium bug, in an attempt to lessen the report's impact. On another occasion, an embarrassing report was due out on the Sunday and it was leaked on the Saturday.
There are dozens of other methods that Executives use. Select Committee Chairmen have to deal with them, and generally they do so without too much difficulty. However, the breach of a Select Committee's integrity by letting the Government know in advance what its report says allows the Executive any number of mechanisms for destroying the one lever that Select Committees have. If we leave such breaches unfettered, they will bankrupt our democracy. At present, Select Committees are the strongest check on the Executive that the House has. Clearly, therefore, this matter is of enormous importance. For that reason alone, I agree with the draconian penalty recommended by the Standards and Privileges Committee. If we do not take draconian action, we shall send out the wrong message.
I wish to turn now to a more detailed point--the credibility of the evidence presented to the Committee. Given the traditional procedures, the Committee had no choice but to come to the conclusion that it did. I do not agree with my hon. Friends who have disputed that. The House, however, has a separate duty to assess the evidence placed before it in the report. We have already heard from the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) about contradictory information from the Foreign Office, so I shall cite some of the evidence provided to illustrate to the House how much credibility we should give to it.
Paragraph 12 on page 6 of the report says:
The report says that Mr. Hood
According to the report:
"Mr Hood, Mr. Cook's political adviser, explained that he had come across the document by chance".
It is interesting that the document should have been come across by chance. Mr. Hood saw it as his duty to pull it out for himself, but,
"he had not alerted Mr. Cook to it straight away because there had been no opportunity to do so".
Mr. Hood is a special adviser--the political adviser to the Foreign Secretary--and the report is about the hottest issue of the day, and in the headlines at every turn. Mr. Hood was unable to find time to raise the matter with the Foreign Secretary for three weeks, although he admits in the evidence that he thought that he ought to have raised it with him at some point. For three weeks he did not find an opportunity to do so. I leave it to the House to judge the credibility of that point.
"had not thought it was wrong to retain the leaked draft but he knew it would have been wrong to have acted on it in any way."
He then said that he handed it to Mr. John Williams. Mr. Williams is not a policy wonk or someone who sits in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and deliberates at great length on the policy implications of reports; his job is to handle the media--media manipulation. He was previously the political editor of The Mirror, so surely he would not sit idly by, given such a hot potato to handle. He is, in effect, a political appointee in the news department.
"Mr. Williams, of the News Department, said that he was unaware that he should not have seen the leaked draft."
This man had been the political editor of The Mirror, but he was unaware that there was anything wrong in a Department having a leaked document of a Select Committee. The report says:
"He regretted that he had focused on it too narrowly as a matter of media strategy."
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