House of Commons Hansard Debates for 1 Mar 2000 (pt 9)

Mr. Hogg: I am not confused; I am talking about liberties and rights. The outcome of the process is that my hon. Friend will be suspended for a month and her reputation will be gravely damaged. Whether we call that liberties, rights or privileges matters not. She will suffer very severe penalties at the hand of the House, which has to put in place a process that treats Members fairly. I do not believe that we are doing so in the case of hon. Members facing the Select Committee.

The right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) said that the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) is one of the most respected and fairest-minded Members of the House. Then he added--I think jocularly--the words, "one of the few"--[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Swansea, West makes a deprecating hand motion. Fair enough, but the point is this: are we certain that the process that we have put in place ensures that Members are tried exclusively by Members who are fair minded and responsible? I am not saying that there was any departure from that principle in this case, but I am saying that the process is suspect. We should reform it.

5.8 pm

Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge): May I make a particular point at the outset? I commend the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) for the way in which he introduced the report. I also make it clear that I have not the slightest doubt that the Committee spent, as it would see it, an enormous amount of time trying to be fair. It has already been said that, given the number of mavericks from both sides of the House who are members of it, none of those people were in any sense subject to pressure. Knowing the personalities to the extent that I do, none would have thought that they had the opportunity to do something horrid to a colleague.

The right hon. Gentleman was fair enough to say that we must surely take from the process an understanding that we can improve our procedures. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell) picked up that point as well. I hope that Members read the report and I urge those who have not to do so. It has to be read; it bears reading for both good and unsatisfactory reasons and we must learn from it in the light of experience.

Mr. Alan Williams: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his courteous comments.

For 15 months, the ex-Attorney-General, the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell), and I sat on a Joint Committee of this House and the other House under the chairmanship of Lord Nicholls, producing recommendations to change and update the position. The hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) was on the Committee,

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too--my apologies: he was an active member of it. We spent 15 months going into great detail. I doubt whether many Members know that its report exists. I would wager that, even if they know that it exists, not one of them has read it.

Mr. Nicholls: What the right hon. Gentleman says is entirely right.

I have read the report extremely carefully on, I think, four occasions. I have studied it over two weekends. I have given at least as much attention to it as I used to give to briefs of clients who were paying me to do so, so I can probably say that I have read the document more carefully than many that I have been called to vote on from time to time.

I did that for the following reason. I realised only relatively recently the trouble that my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) was in. I read about it in the paper as casually, I suppose, as many other people. I thought, "Oh dear, that person's reputation is on the line."

I found that interesting. I do not say that I know my hon. Friend particularly well. We do not live near each other. We share some political views, but there are many that we do not. She is to me an honourable friend in theory; I hardly know her at all, but the one thing that I have come to believe over the years from seeing her operate is that she is straight and fair. She may be zany, but she strikes me as someone who would not have a corrupt bone in her body. Therefore, I was interested in the fact that her reputation was on the line. Let us be in no doubt: her reputation is on the line, although, ironically, probably not in the House.

Members have had the benefit of reading the report--if they have cared to do so--and hearing the speeches of people such as the right hon. Member for Swansea, West, but the following will be said at the Frog and Bucket later today: "Have you seen what they have been up to in Parliament? Someone has done something dodgy"--the person must be dodgy because that is implicit in overseas trusts. "She did not disclose a load of dodgy trusts. They caught her and kicked her out for a month. Well, they are paid too much anyway."

Whatever we say tonight, that will be the way the matter will be perceived by the general public. If we condemn anyone--any hon. Member or member of the public--to such a judgment, we owe it to ourselves and to the people whom we represent to ask whether we could have done it better.

I make it clear: I imply no criticism of the care that the Committee and, indeed, the commissioner have taken when I say that, as a lawyer, I read things in the report that make me deeply uneasy. I will not detain the House for many minutes, but I will draw its attention to one paragraph as an example: paragraph 32 on page xii. After the first sentence, it says:

We agreed with the Commissioner's conclusions, and said: "Although not a requirement, there are occasions when interests of this nature would be better registered, and if a doubt should arise Members ought to seek the advice of the Commissioner. We and our predecessors have made this point on several previous occasions. If a Member feels it necessary to seek professional advice on a matter of registration it is clear that some doubt must exist".

I ask the House to think about that sentence:

If a Member feels it necessary to seek professional advice on a matter of registration it is clear that some doubt must exist.

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We seem to have put ourselves in a position whereby, if a Member is prudent enough to say, "I do not know the full implications. I have many other things to do in my life. I had better take advice," and he does so, it must mean that he should register the interest.

Mr. Tom Levitt (High Peak): That is not what the report says.

Mr. Nicholls: I have quoted from it. The hon. Gentleman can go away and look it up if he wants to. It is as if someone is brought to a court of law and, at the end of that process, the judge says, "I have now checked the books and there is not an offence that quite fits your case, but you should be convicted. That is the way of it." That is the effect of such a process. We should be concerned about that.

Mr. Levitt: I speak as a member of the Committee. The quotation that the hon. Gentleman uses is from an earlier report, which talks about slightly different affairs in terms of trusts, but, most significant, it seeks to advise Members to get rid of any ambiguity in the situation. Advice should be sought. If that advice is that Members do not need to register an interest, there is no need to register it, so it is not fair to say that seeking advice confirms that there is a registrable interest.

Mr. Nicholls: I see the point that the hon. Gentleman is driving at, but he is wrong. The first part of my quotation was a phrase from the previous commissioner of which the present commissioner approved. My point stands.

The quotation contains a further implication. It has been said several times that my hon. Friend said that she had no connection with overseas trusts. My reading of the evidence is that she made that point after having thought about it--doubtless with the benefit of lawyers--and in the belief that she had no interest that was registrable. Whether she had such an interest is a matter of debate, but we cannot say that someone who felt she had no interest, but who was subsequently held to have had an interest, must have been acting dishonestly.

My hon. Friend is not the only person who felt that way. We are in a remarkable position. One of the charges upheld against my hon. Friend is detailed on page xv as follows:

Mrs. Gorman gave seriously misleading information in 1995 and 1999 about her connections with the offshore companies Partingdale Holdings, Loxhill Investments and Kinloch Investments, owned by Queenstown Trust, and did not specify them in the Register.

However, my hon. Friend had taken advice on the point from leading counsel. At annex A, on pages lix-lx, the opinion of Philip Heslop QC concludes, at paragraph 9:

It follows that, for the same reasons given in the opinion of Michael Beloff QC but a fortiori, Mrs Gorman had, in my opinion, no interest in the Queenstown Trust registrable under category 9, and Mrs Gorman's position as regards non-registration under category 10 is, for the reasons also set out in Michael Beloff QC's opinion, more than arguable.

My hon. Friend has been found guilty of not registering a particular interest when leading counsel had said that she did not have to do so.

The Standards and Privileges Committee--perhaps like many juries--draws on a wide range of experience. I have gone through the relevant entries in "Dod's Parliamentary

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Companion" and "Who's Who" to find out the backgrounds of those who sat in judgment on my hon. Friend. I detected one non-practising barrister and a solicitor who had previously had experience of employment law. That was the sum total of legal experience on the Committee. In effect, we have set up a jury that passes judgment without the benefit of counsel arguing before it or a High Court judge who can direct it on matters of fact or law.

I have on a number of occasions spoken not in defence of lawyers. I am a lawyer, but none of us is perfect. As a species, I do not particularly like lawyers. I do not mix with them, and I am not very keen on them. But even lawyers have their uses. We have set up a judicial process in which someone's reputation may be put on the line. We have given the Committee the impossible task of arguing matters of law before itself on which its members are not qualified to argue, yet no trained lawyer is present to ensure that the right inferences are drawn.

These matters used to be handled better. My hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir P. Tapsell) said that it was probably inevitable that we reached this point because of some of the excesses that occurred in the previous Parliament. Yet it was probably better in the old days when, if one behaved badly, the judgment of one's peers was such that one's life here became untenable. If one did not realise that one's place was untenable, the Chief Whip would telephone the association chairman, and one would find oneself not standing again for Parliament. That is the way it used to be.

I accept that these matters can never be handled that way again, but we have achieved the worst of all possible worlds. We have condemned someone through a judicial process in which that person did not have the benefit of a lawyer or a chance to have someone sit in judgment.