| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
4.21 pm
Sir Nicholas Lyell (North-East Bedfordshire): I should like to make only a brief contribution to the debate. I was asked if I would look very carefully at the Committee's report, and I have done so. I have also had conversations with my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman). I stand here neither to condemn her, other than in the terms of the Committee's report, nor to make a plea in mitigation. I shall simply give my opinion on the way in which the Committee has conducted its affairs concerning my hon. Friend, and make one or two suggestions for the future. I do not want those suggestions to be thought in any way to be reducing the work of the Committee.
I have read the report very carefully. In my view, the Committee's proceedings were conducted fairly and properly according to our procedures, and the penalty--although undoubtedly severe--is within the range of penalty that reasonably is available to the Committee. Although I thought about it, I do not think that I would have done my hon. Friend a service if I had really considered tabling an amendment suggesting a shorter penalty.
I agree with the whole substance of the comments of the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) in summarising the Committee's report. I believe that the report--the House would expect no less--is entirely accurate and balanced.
There is no doubt that, sadly, my hon. Friend--I know that she will understand this--has brought upon herself the great majority of what is said about her in the report. There is no doubt that a Member in that situation, from the very earliest moment, should first have consulted the registrar, and explained privately and exactly to the registrar the background facts. The Member should then have taken the advice of the registrar, who is extremely fair minded and helpful in these matters, on whether the matter was or was not registerable. Similarly, when the commissioner comes along, the Member should take exactly the same attitude.
To be fair to my hon. Friend, if she had done that, she would not really be in a difficult position at all. When it comes down to the basic facts, had the interests been registered, there is nothing very remarkable about them at all. There must be very many hon. Members who own let property, and many hon. Members who hold sincere views on either side of the argument on the Rent Acts in relation to which, 10 years ago, she introduced her ten-minute Bill.
The fundamental problem in this case has been the way in which my hon. Friend has sought to defend herself, and the extra difficulties that she has brought upon herself by the manner of her doing so.
I do not know my hon. Friend all that well as a private individual, but I respect her courage, as most of us do. We know that she is exceptionally combative. It is not just, as the old adage says, the lawyer who represents himself who has a fool for a client. It is very difficult to represent oneself when one is in a spot. Criticisms of a partly political nature inevitably intrude in our business and in the newspapers. Someone of a combative frame of mind can easily go in at the deep end and make matters worse for themselves, although not normally as badly as did my hon. Friend, who managed to go as far as possible and further, plumbing the depths in almost every respect.
To give some balance, there is one respect in which that is not necessarily the case. I do not criticise the Committee, but I have some doubts as to whether my hon. Friend's contact with a particular witness mentioned in the report was improper. I know that that is not a major part of the report, but if someone who is left to defend themselves wishes to speak to a witness, there is nobody else to do it. I say that only to ensure that I give as much balance as possible.
What is the point of my speech? It is simply to ask whether we should consider any reform of our procedures. I shall make some suggestions for further consideration, but I do not wish to deprecate what the Committee has done. I shall not oppose the penalty. According to our present procedures, the whole matter was conducted openly and fairly and I have no criticism to make. It was well done.
I emphasise that it is difficult to defend oneself. I have read what was said in the Neill committee and the report as well as the views of Lord Nicholls--a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary who took particular care to consider the issue. Most of his recommendations are not at all contentious. Everyone agrees that one should know at the outset
exactly what charges one has to meet. By and large that was true in this case, although I have one comment to make about that.
I should like to emphasise one point made by Lord Nicholls that deserves serious consideration. Many cases are not serious, but, as the right hon. Member for Swansea, West said, this one developed into a very serious case and is producing the most serious penalty for many years. In such serious cases, there is a strong argument for allowing legal advice and, when necessary, legal representation to be provided by the House. It is incredibly difficult to cross-examine and argue one's case and to give the facts at the same time. The two inevitably get muddled up. Very few people can do themselves justice in those circumstances.
Although we are right not to wish to become over-legalistic, not to over-encumber our procedures with legalism and lawyers and to maintain the maximum amount of self-regulation, we should reconsider our rule about entitling people to legal advice. Once the Committee considers that the case against an hon. Member is serious, as opposed to substantially administrative and routine, a halt should be drawn temporarily in the proceedings. The hon. Member concerned should be warned of the seriousness of the position, be invited to obtain legal advice--and given assistance in that if necessary--and be able not merely to have the legal adviser sitting beside them in the Committee, but to have some representation before the Committee. I think that doing that would improve our procedures.
Sir Peter Tapsell (Louth and Horncastle):
Having read the whole report, I regard the penalty proposed by the Committee as disproportionately severe. I do not wish to make party political points of any kind, but there have been a number of cases of so-called sleaze on both sides of the House. One, not very long ago, was connected with a property matter. For us to be told that my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) is to be suspended for a longer period than anyone else for what she has irregularly done seems an unfairly severe penalty.
Outside the House, to be suspended without pay for a month does not seem a matter of great severity, but inside the House, even to be suspended for three days involves an element of public disgrace. If that sentence were imposed upon me, I would be deeply mortified. So we must not lose sight of the fact that a very severe penalty is being proposed for my hon. Friend. Unlike my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell), I wish--to use his words--to put in a plea of mitigation.
When I first came to the House, and for many years afterwards, we had none of these rules and tribunals. I have always taken the Enoch Powell line that it is very much better to treat each other as honourable people and not have a tremendous number of codes, commissions, and outside bodies looking into things. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues--particularly, I am ashamed to say, in my own party--behaved so disgracefully in the
previous Parliament that we were inevitably drawn into the present situation. There is no reversing that, and it is going to get worse. The thrust of my right hon. and learned Friend's speech was that we will gradually move away from the position of controlling our own affairs and hand it all over to judicial supervision.
Let us not lose sight of the object of the exercise, which has been to avoid the corruption of the House and of public affairs. I do not believe that my hon. Friend has sought to corrupt anybody. The offences of which she is accused, although technically correct, are of the utmost triviality. They happened a great many years ago, and she has never been secretive about her interest in property matters. Not long ago, for weeks on end, it was almost impossible to open a newspaper without seeing her defiantly trying to defend a charming gothic porch which she had added to one of her houses and which the philistines in her local planning committee wished to demolish. Everybody knows her views on rent restriction. There has never been any suggestion that she was being corrupted or that she was seeking to corrupt anybody else.
Then we come to the extended nature of the inquiries that were made of her. The discussion about overseas trusts, although not one of the criticisms of her in the report's conclusions, takes up quite a lot of space in the cross-examinations that are published. For the uninitiated, the mere mention of the words "overseas trust" raises the suspicion that some skulduggery is going on.
Unfortunately, I have never been the beneficiary of an overseas trust, but they are entirely legal. There are hundreds of thousands of them. If one visits a lawyer's office on any island in the Caribbean, he will proudly talk of the tens of thousands of overseas trusts that he runs from his little office--including those for some of the world's most famous companies and personalities. Whether such trusts should be more carefully supervised is another matter; they are legal.
One aspect of the report that seemed to throw an element of discredit on my hon. Friend related to the fact that her properties in Portugal were held in an overseas trust. However, it was legal for her to do so. Indeed, if one tries to buy a property overseas, one is invariably advised by one's lawyers--I have always taken the advice of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire and surrounded myself with the highest-paid lawyers before I do anything at all in life--to put such property in an overseas trust.
I have some overseas properties. I hasten to add that I have never let them to paying tenants. I have not put them into overseas trusts, because overseas trusts have two great snares. The first is that one has to trust one's trustees. The second is that one's family cannot always be relied upon to die in the order of precedence that one has laid down in the trust. The right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) said, as a criticism, that my hon. Friend had included her husband in that sequence. However, it would be automatic in an overseas trust. One's lawyer will say, "If you kick the bucket, old boy, it's going to be inconvenient for me if I don't know who is to inherit the properties." That criticism was thus irrelevant.
Why was that matter raised in the first place? Incidentally, the allegations against my hon. Friend came from two journalists, whose motives were not as closely
examined by the Committee as I should have expected. Their allegations related to English properties subject to the Rent Acts--that is what the whole matter is about. By no conceivable stretch of the imagination can it be thought that our Rent Acts apply to a holiday home in Portugal. That matter is irrelevant.
The report slowly turns into a trawling operation. The Committee began by looking into a specific situation. My hon. Friend has admitted to that matter, although she has denied throughout that she benefited from the English properties. The Committee then examined a series of aspects of her life--including her private life.
One part of the report that is offensive is the conclusion. It states not only that the period of suspension is the longest that the Committee had ever recommended, but that it would have been even longer but for the distress caused to my hon. Friend when the fact that her marriage temporarily went through a difficult patch was dragged into public knowledge. Such difficulties are not unknown to many Members on both sides of the House.
The Committee implied that the difficulty in my hon. Friend's married life--now happily overcome, I understand--was part of the punishment, because the punishment would have been longer if the matter had not been exposed. All that is deeply unsatisfactory.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |