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5.27 pm
Sir Peter Emery (East Devon): I shall be fairly brief, but, as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, there are two matters that I should like to draw to the attention of the House, and one matter that I ask the House to consider.
First, the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) made an absolutely frank statement to the Select Committee before any Committee member knew anything about what had really happened, and he submitted his resignation to the Chairman immediately before he spoke. He behaved entirely honourably in Committee about the mistake that he had made. That should be to his credit, and that credit should be given not only by Labour Members, but by an Opposition Member. I am very willing so to do.
Secondly, I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) on his speech, in which he outlined a great deal about the Foreign Secretary's position--a matter to which I shall return in a moment.
Page xv, paragraph 2, of the report states:
Today, we have had a very important statement from the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; it was right that that statement was made. I have no reason to disbelieve any of that statement. The hon. Gentleman has behaved quite honourably in all of his dealings with the Committee. It is therefore imperative that the Foreign Office--which seems to be trying to drag him into the matter by the statement on page xv--should support the hon. Gentleman's statement by making it absolutely clear that no use was made of
We have criticised the Foreign Secretary for not apologising to the House, and we have heard the Leader of the House say that no Foreign Secretary had made more papers available to the Committee ever before. Yes--but, by Jove, they had to be forced out of him. They did not come willingly. They had to be dragged out like bad teeth. One of the witnesses whom we wished to see was refused, and we never saw that witness. The concept that there was great openness from the Foreign Secretary is a slight myth, and the response from members of the Foreign Affairs Committee shows that they are not willing to run against my views.
Mr. Wilshire:
Given what my right hon. Friend has just said, how does he rate our chances of seeing the minute to which the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) referred?
Sir Peter Emery:
If I have anything to do with it, it will be a 100 per cent. chance. If the Foreign Office has anything to do with it, it will be a 0 per cent. chance. It will not be done willingly--it will have to be dragged out of the Foreign Office yet again.
I have always wanted to believe that the Foreign Office was one of the leading Departments. I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary there for three years, so perhaps I am slightly influenced. Of course, that was a hell of a long time ago--from 1961 to 1963, before most Members sitting in the Chamber today were in the House. Since then, and under any Government, the Department has had a high reputation, as have its Secretaries of State.
The report has left a nasty taste with members of the Select Committee. Real honour was not one of the thoughts being considered in the way in which the Department dealt with the Committee. Nor did the Foreign Office do anything other than try at every moment to hide anything that it could possibly keep from the Committee's inquiry. There is the unpleasantness.
Mr. Alan Williams (Swansea, West):
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), I have been in the House for 35 years, and
It is salutary to think that we are the mother of parliaments, but the average person's sole involvement in the parliamentary process, in 80 years of life, will be to have cast 20 votes. That is democracy, but democracy in the meaningful sense of the accountability of the Executive exists only in Parliament. That is why we are here today protecting the rights of our Committee.
Setting aside the politicking that always goes on in the House--we have been in opposition for long spells and fully understand the frustrations of Opposition Members--the most important thing to emerge from the report is that we have at last found a way of closing the channels. Leaks are only as important as the distance that they can get. If we can stop the movement of documents, we go a long way towards ending the problem of leaks to Ministers, and I think that the report achieves that.
I argued that it was not enough to call only the three officials, and that to call the permanent secretary would send a message throughout Whitehall. It did: within hours, Whitehall was responding. The permanent secretary brought us a message telling us that, even though he had been in the civil service for 33 years, he did not know that it was a breach of parliamentary privilege to handle leaked documents, but that from that day on, it would be treated as a disciplinary matter for any civil servant to handle documents other than to return them to the Committee.
The President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mrs. Margaret Beckett):
I join those who have thanked the Standards and Privileges Committee for its work and for the report. I echo the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who put his finger, in a few measured words, on the nub of what these proceedings should be about. His speech and the equally measured contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) were in line with the measured tone of the report, although one might not have thought so from some of what has been said.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne made it clear that the report did not criticise my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and that before this incident, there was no guidance on what a Minister should do should he or his civil servants receive a leaked Select Committee document, but he also made it clear that to handle such a document would now be regarded as a contempt of the House.
"On the day before publication the Chair of the FAC gave a full briefing to Andy Henderson, the Head of the FCO Parliamentary Relations Department".
As a Committee member, I had no knowledge of that fact, which the Chairman had not mentioned. That paragraph in the report was the first instance on which it was drawn to my attention.
"either the draft or the additional information from Mr. Anderson or Mr. Ross"--
12 Jul 1999 : Column 54
which Andy Henderson himself minuted and said that he circulated in briefing the press. I am sorry, but what the devil were those people up to? What was the publicity department doing? Those people are there to defend the Secretary of State. The idea that any information that they had would not be used for the benefit of the Department is nonsensical. If we believe that, we believe in "Alice in Wonderland".
Rather than retaining any doubt or criticism of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Foreign Office is obliged to make public the minute by Mr. Andy Henderson, so the matter can be cleared up and the Chairman can proceed, knowing that his statement to the House is complete.
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