Examination of Witness (Questions 78 -
99)
TUESDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2001
THE RT
HON KENNETH
CLARKE
Chairman
78. Welcome to the Committee. We have received
your notes which we have found very useful indeed. Can I begin
with the point you make about frivolous and vexatious complaints
and that there are situations where the Committee dismiss these
or issue mild rebukes for quite trivial matters but these are
made a great deal of in the press and in the media which is to
the disadvantage of the Member. A great deal of what you say seems
to take account of this. Would like to elaborate on that, please.
(Mr Clarke) I suppose that was the main point that
I made in my letter; I am rather surprised that you have asked
me to come and give evidence upon it but it is something on which
I do have clears views and I rely mainly on the letter I have
sent to this Committee to express them. My concern is that this
Committee was set up in order to protect the reputation of the
House but also to protect the actual conduct of the House as well,
to make sure that our proceedings were not tainted by misconduct
by Members. Unfortunately, I think that by and large most of its
time is taken up with complaints of very little substance or even
very little importance, but these are all regarded as quite newsworthy
by the outside world and they are reported in a fairly dramatic
way. If you look at the list of Members who have been complained
against, it is a list of just about every well known Member of
the House whose name is likely to arouse public interest. I feel
that the reporting of these frequent complaints and the formal
inquiry and the publication of reports has fed an impression that
this House is now riddled with sleaze and impropriety and I do
not think it is. I am one of those politicians who no doubt will
be accused of complacency by saying that I think we do have one
of the most honest systems in the world. You have to look to Scandinavia
for a rival. However, a recent poll showed that I think 47 per
cent of the public thought that the Labour Party was riddled with
sleaze and only 49 per cent now believe that the Conservative
Party was. This may be associated with several spectacular scandals
where there has been impropriety, but actually I think it is an
exaggerated notion and it is fed by the constant sequence of complaints
against people which turn out to be made for party political reasons,
made by someone who is actually in collusion with the newspaper
that wants to have the right to produce it and which just gives
rise to a flurry of excitement about nothing. One suggestion that
I put forward in my letter for dealing with this would be that
where the allegation appears, the Committee could begin by saying,
"Even if true, does this have a bearing on this Member of
Parliament's conduct in the House of Commons? Were the allegation
true, do we believe that the Member's voice or his vote might
sensibly be regarded as influenced by this?" If the answer
is "No", then it does not seem to me to be a complaint
that goes to the underlying point of this Committee and it should
not be taken up. In my letter—I cite too that I have tried
to be bipartisan—I think the complaint against William Hague
on the use of a gymnasium was completely ridiculous. Who on earth
thinks that William changes his political views because of his
gymnasium? The complaint against John Prescott about the fact
that he had a flat which I and every other Member of Parliament
has known about for as long as he has been in the House of Commons
I think does not imply that John Prescott's political views are
formed by a sense of obligation to the National Union of Seamen.
I could add more and I do refer to the one which actually did
not cause me any damage when I was linked with Tony Blair when
we were mildly rebuked by the Committee for not declaring that
we had not paid a hotel bill at a political conference a few years
ago, a conference to which I had paid my own air fare, so I had
spent hundreds of pounds attending this conference. I do recall
that, at first, neither Tony Blair nor myself found it easy to
remember whether we had actually paid for the accommodation or
not when we had been there, but both of us were separately investigated.
That is not my prime motive, my mild indignation on that occasion
rapidly passed and I did not make any protest at the time, but
I was lucky that I was a minor victim; I think the others have
been held up to public ridicule by complaints which were actually
groundless and had not the slightest relationship to their behaviour
as Members of Parliament.
79. Or course there is a great deal of tit-for-tat
in all of this. I was expecting rather more in the run-up to the
General Election but I hope that that expectation is not going
to be realised.
(Mr Clarke) I am keeping away from the Michael Portillo
case because that is obviously partisan and it is obviously a
pre-Election one but that is the one current in the press at the
moment. Again, I am not going to intrude upon the Committee's
role of deciding whether or not they are going to investigate
it but, amongst the reports of the allegation that Michael Portillo
has not made proper disclosure of his relationship with an oil
exploration company, I have seen at least two references to the
suggestion that perhaps he advocated a reduction in the fuel tax
last year because of his connection with an oil exploration company
which, so far as I am aware, actually possesses no petrol stations.
I do not think that the Members of Parliament who made that allegation
believed it for a moment. I do not think the newspapers who reported
it believed it for a moment. Unless it does actually come within
the rules bearing on the conduct of Members, I do not think that
Michael Portillo is any more obliged than any other Member of
Parliament to give full disclosure of all his outside interests
and outside earnings. It was never the intention when this Committee
was set up and, since time immemorial, the House of Commons has
been full of people with outside interests and outside earnings.
80. A number of matters which you deal with
concern failure to register. If these are not terribly important,
how do you believe that we should try and achieve some consistency
in this?
(Mr Clarke) I think that a letter from someone acting
on behalf of the Committee saying that this has been drawn to
the Committee's attention and the advice is that it should be
registered would suffice in most cases. If the Member argues that
it should not be registered, then you have a debate but that should
normally be conducted in private. Again, unless it is suggested
that the failure to register could seriously be regarded as a
Member trying to keep secret something which is influencing his
activities as a Member of Parliament, the whole idea of the Register
and the whole idea of the enforcement of these rules on Members
has surely been to make sure that no one speaks in the House of
Commons without people being aware that he may have some private
interest affecting his views on the subject. If it does not bear
on that, the fact that he has not satisfied public curiosity about
his outside activities or earnings seems to me to have very little
to do with the House of Commons or this Committee.
81. The trouble is that failure to register
is often put to the Commissioner and then at the same time is
given to the press which makes a great deal of it, so any damage
done to the Member is at that stage even before it is dismissed
or dealt with in a more cursory way, but there is no solution
for that.
(Mr Clarke) There is no solution for that. I think
the experience of most of the Members of Parliament against whom
complaints have been made—and it is becoming a fairly honourable
list; the more publicity conscious of our colleagues will soon
be disappointed that they have not yet appeared in this list of
people complained against—is that they first realise they
have been complained about when they read about the complaint
in the newspaper. There is nothing you can do about that but the
story runs if it is followed up by the fact that a solemn inquiry
is to be held and the Member is to appear before the Committee
and so on, and eventually a report with these imposing blue covers
appears solemnly analysing the conduct of the Member. If it turns
out that he has technically failed to register something that
he should have registered, then a minor reproof is issued that
the Member was technically at fault. In some cases, this minor
reproof is written up in a fairly racy way outside. Strangely
enough, the Member for whom I had most sympathy was Ken Livingstone
who was accused of a failure to register. As far as I could see
in the report, he was actually being made subject to new rules
rather than the established ones and he was subjected to blazing
publicity about his alleged fall from standards of conduct on
complaints which turned out to be made in the name of a man who
did not know he had complained at the volition of Ken Livingstone's
then political opponents.
Mr Williams
82. Could I follow up on this topic of frivolous
and vexatious. As a Committee, we are desperately worried about
this because there is no doubt that there has been to a lesser
extent frivolous but more importantly vexatious and deliberately
malicious references. Our problem has been that, when we discuses
it internally, we keep running across the argument that of course
one of the most fundamental rights of the House of Commons is
the right to free speech. It seems to me that to identify frivolous,
a lesser problem, and vexatious, a very serious problem, is not
to stop people exercising their freedom of speech, it is subsequently,
having used their freedom of speech, to face the consequences
if they have misused their freedom of speech. What is your view—I
suspect that you have already implied it—and what do you
think should be done where, a Member having used the privileges
of this House to say what he wishes to say—and right we
are to protect it—is then found to have done so under one
or other of these categories?
(Mr Clarke) In the case of a complaint against the
conduct of another Member which is trying to provoke a hearing
before this Committee, if it is obvious that it is frivolous and
vexatious and I would include, on a quite bipartisan basis, if
it is obvious that it is solely motivated by party politics and
by no serious belief that there has been any breach of conduct
on behalf of a Member, then it should be the complainant who gets
the mild reproof from this Committee in the form of a short one
line response saying that it has considered the complaint, that
it regards it as of no serious foundation and that it believes
it was unwise for the Member to make the complaint. I am not sure
whether you are trying to get me to the wider question which is
a problem for this House, which is what I regard as the growing
abuse of privilege on the floor of the House. There are people
who get up and make personal attacks on non-politicians sometimes,
again sometimes at the request of a newspaper in order to justify
safe publication outside, of allegations against individuals.
That annoys people and I have occasionally myself become annoyed
at listening to people doing it. That is a much bigger question
which I would probably like more notice of. The problem is that
there are occasions when Members use that privilege in the public
interest. There are occasions when some scoundrel outside has
silenced every critic and only a Member of Parliament can safely
make the allegation. The use of that privilege against Robert
Maxwell, for example, at the right time might have led to avoiding
a great deal of public damage. So, I would not want to stop Members
of Parliament having the privilege. Occasionally, I think Members
should be reproved when it is obvious that they have done it clearly
frivolously, sometimes in the course of some private squabble
of their own with the person they are attacking.
83. I was not looking at the wider question
though I am not saying that that is something that should not
be looked at. In our context, we are aware of the fact that we
are used as a stepping stone, in some cases, for journalists to
be able to make allegations because the fact of a reference having
been made is itself reportable.
(Mr Clarke) As is the nature of the allegation.
84. When they report that fact, they are getting
legal cover from the reality that it is a factual event. This
has been a quandary for us and it is a particular quandary for
the Commissioner as to how to deal with it because she wants,
on the one hand, to be open with the press about the fact and,
at the same time, she does not want to damage Members unnecessarily.
However, as long as you can get someone to refer a case on the
minimum of evidence to this Committee and as long as you can get
corroboration that it has been referred, then although often it
is trivial—sleaze headlines start this escalation in the
use of language and sleaze applies to anything, even something
mildly wrong in the view of some people—my personal opinion
is that we do have to act against Members who do this deliberately
without due evidence and without back-up evidence, though some
of my colleagues hold different views on that. I turn to another
matter because I want to ask the question of you that I asked
of John Major, something which has been at the heart of some of
the misunderstandings that have occurred in relation to cases
we have dealt with in the last two years. It goes back to the
original Nolan Report. Nolan effectively laid down the ten commandments
of good conduct for Members, one of which the Commissioner has
referred to on various occasions which is the requirement to be
open and honest. Obviously we all hope that we are open and honest,
but there are occasions when people might quite rightly not be.
According to Nolan, that applies to the whole area of an MP's
life, not just his conduct in relation to the House of Commons,
which has led to a situation where there has been a difference
of interpretations. To take something that is not a real case
and the one that I put to John Major, if I rent a car and do not
disclose to the owner of the car that I have a bad record of car
accidents—touch wood I do not—to my mind, that is
dishonest and certainly not open but it is also not a matter for
this Committee, it is a matter for the hirer, the court, the lawyers,
the police and the individual concerned. It is not a matter for
this Committee. However, when we went back to the Neill Committee
because many of us were concerned about this absolutely all-embracing
interpretation of purity which few in this country could aspire
to, to my surprise, the reply came back from the Neill Committee
that they meant it to be as wide as that. To my mind that is unrealistic
and it leads to a great deal of tension between this Committee
and the Back-Benchers because we are now having to work to a set
of rules which encompassed conduct beyond conduct as Members of
Parliament. Would you regard that wide interpretation as being
a realistic or a proper rule in relation to judging Members' conduct
or would you relate it more closely to work in relation to Parliament?
(Mr Clarke) I have had a chance of reading the first
transcript of the exchange you had on this yesterday with John
Major and it came as a new point to me and I shared your surprise
that Lord Neill himself had given the advice that he had. I tend
to agree with the point you were making as you asked the question.
It seems to me that we are going very wide here. The question
arises as to whether it is an illegal act; it may be seriously
illegal, seriously criminal, or it may be something like a traffic
offence. There is every range in between. It seems to me that,
when an allegation is made against a Member, it is for the prosecuting
authorities, the police and the relevant authorities, to make
an inquiry. I do not see how this Committee can be expected to
do anything until they have come to a conclusion. If a Member
is successfully convicted or loses a civil action in circumstances
which cast very serious doubts about his honesty and his behaviour
or perhaps even his misuse or attempted misuse of his position
as an MP, I think that should come straight before the Committee.
Members have been suspended or expelled in the past once they
have been convicted of dishonest behaviour and I suppose that,
in modern circumstances, this Committee would be the first place
where that would be considered and then this Committee would make
some recommendation to the House about how the Member should be
treated. I do not know whether Lord Neill really intended what
he appears to have said, but it seems to me that anybody who has
complaints about the personal conduct and behaviour of a Member
of Parliament on any occasion is going to start turning up and
complaining to this Committee which may mean that somebody with
a personal quarrel or some neighbour who objects to the way that
the Member keeps his garden or someone who has been in an altercation
with a Member of Parliament in a public house seems to be almost
invited to come along and use this Committee to embarrass his
celebrity enemy. Lord Neill's advice seems suddenly to go through
an amazingly broad brush interpretation of general standard of
open honesty. Hitherto, the difficulty has been that we then go
back to the words of the rules with amazing pedantic, sometimes
commonsense-free detail in the way we apply some of the rules
Lord Nolan laid down. My view is the same as yours that the sort
of things that get anybody into trouble outside should first of
all be dealt with by the people outside who normally deal with
those things. Then, if a serious blot on the reputation of the
Member has emerged, this Committee should decide what steps the
House should take once it has discovered what sort of Member it
has in its midst.
Mr Levitt
85. I think that, under normal circumstances,
everyone on this Committee would agree with you that the idea
that a leader of the opposition would indeed be influenced by
the occasional free use of a gym would be absurd. In this particular
case, we were talking about the provider of a service by someone
who is seeking his party's nomination for a high office, so therefore
there may have been the perception of a desire to wish to influence
the leader of the opposition. Would it be wrong to take those
circumstances into account and, in that case, to actually take
up the case and investigate it?
(Mr Clarke) I think so because I do not agree with
that interpretation. These people were all very well known and
they were political colleagues, they were in the same political
party, so for one member of a political party to let a Member
of Parliament have the use of his gym is, I suspect, the kind
of thing that goes on all the time. If you were to search the
House of Commons—and it does not apply to me, I hasten to
say—I should think you would find that some Member of Parliament
has, on some occasion, lent a holiday home to another Member of
Parliament. The idea that this might be seeking some political
advantage is very far-fetched. Whether or not Jeffrey Archer was
going to get the nomination as Conservative candidate for mayor,
I do not think depended on the fact that he lent his gym to the
leader of the Conservative Party occasionally and I do not think
that any sensible person in this House could possibly have imagined
that it would and I do not think that any reasonable member of
the public would. However, it was written up by those who either
dislike Jeffrey Archer or dislike William Hague or both as if
there were some sinister connection here revealed by vigilant
journalists. That was one which I am afraid I personally regarded
as just silly.
86. That leads me to my second question which
is, at the moment, a serious allegation will be of course investigated
but should we put an onus on those making allegations that they
should provide a threshold of evidence for those allegations?
At the moment, if the allegation is serious enough, an investigation
may well follow.
(Mr Clarke) I suppose you could apply the test of
whether there is any prima facie evidence or any evidence to support
this allegation and I imagine that the Committee do throw out
cases where you are met with a vehement denial from the Member
of Parliament and where there is no indication whatsoever of there
being anything to support the allegation. I do not remember one
happening quite like that where someone has been accused of something
without there apparently being the slightest grounds. The ones
I had in mind were where the allegation, so called, is probably
true but the answer that most politicians and most sensible Members
of Parliament would give is, "So what? What influence can
this possibly have had on the conduct of a Member of Parliament
if what you say is true?" I hesitate to go on about my own
case but that was my reaction to the allegations against me. The
only reason that anybody knew that I had not paid my hotel bill
was because somebody wrote to me asking what I had paid for. The
Bilderberg conference is surrounded by slightly green ink conspiracy
theories so people write to you about it and somebody asked me
the question and I wrote back saying that I had paid my own air
fare and then discovered that some Greek sponsors, whom I could
not recall, turned out to have paid the hotel bill for everybody
so that, when I came to pay my hotel bill, it had been paid and
I left. If you like, that was true. I think the Committee should
have said, "So? What has this unknown Greek done that has
somehow possibly led to political advantage being obtained with
Tony Blair and Ken Clarke when they found that, fortunately, this
conference was sponsored and they did not have to pay for the
hotel?" Especially when certainly I had paid my own air fare
to get there in the first place. I had attended a political conference
and flown home again. I had done nothing else. I did not even
know the identity of the company, no doubt, which had paid the
hotel bill.
87. I think the reason why you do not hear of
the most trivial complaints is because they do not actually reach
this Committee because the Commissioner filters them out before
they even reach us. I am sure a proportion of them are indeed
written in green ink, but some of them do originate not from Members
of Parliament but from journalists and people in the media and
we have a scenario where we are carrying out sometimes highly
complex investigations and a running commentary on those investigations
is carrying on to a greater or lesser degree of informed sources
in the press at the time and clearly that can be very frustrating
for this Committee, particularly when the commentary that is going
on is wrong. Is there anything that we can do about that?
(Mr Clarke) You will get in terrible trouble with
the press if you started trying to invoke some privilege on behalf
of the Committee that this was to be regarded as sub judice and
not liable to comment until you report it. The only answer that
I suggested in my letter and the only answer that occurs to me
still is that, in cases of that kind where it is plain on the
whole that the process is being used by somebody outside for political
or personal advantage to themselves by attacking some politician
they wish to damage, if the Committee could nip it off at the
bud quicker so that really there is no point in continuing to
consider this, that would be fine. I am not submitting this with
regard to all these complaints; I have a list in front of me of
all the reports you have issued. Obviously there have been several
complaints in this Parliament which are quite serious if true,
particularly the classic ones of people failing to disclose that
they have a personal or financial interest in an issue which they
keep taking up and they do not disclose it. For as long as you
and I have been in this House, Chairman, people have been at times
thrown out for that, certainly when they have canvassed the interest
in question before going in to the House of Commons and raising
the issue. I remember that at least one Member was expelled for
doing that. You can have very serious ones but the range is now
so ridiculous and most of the complaints are, in my opinion, frivolous
or unimportant and, if they could be nipped off quickly, you would
avoid this running saga of garbled accounts of the investigation
constantly implying that some leading political figure is under
suspicion of misconduct.
Mr Levitt: It would certainly be our
desire to deal with them quickly in many cases.
Mr Lewis
88. Talking there about nipping it in the bud
and asking the Committee to do that, where vexatious complaints
are being made by Members of Members, do you see a role for the
two Front Benches or indeed the Whips Office usual channels or
whatever to actually do the nipping in the bud before it reaches
the Commissioner?
(Mr Clarke) I would hope that they would both try;
it would make a great deal of sense if the two Front Benches agreed
that they were not going to make party political points. Half
the outside world would then suspect that some monster conspiracy
was taking place again because I am afraid that we have reached
the situation where there are people outside who believe that
some Augean stable exists here that has to be cleaned out, so
to be told that the two Front Benches have agreed that they are
not going to take on complaints against the Cabinet or the Shadow
Cabinet would instantly give rise to conspiracy theories of a
ridiculous kind but, in so far as they had an influence, if they
could stop the more maverick Back-Benchers on both sides thinking
it gives great party political advantage to their party by hurling
some absurd allegation against a leading figure on the other side,
that would help. Every party around this table knows which of
our colleagues on our own side are perfectly capable of making
frivolous complaints for party political purposes and it should
not be difficult for the two Front-Benchers to do their best to
sit on such people.
89. It is not just the leading Members who are
the subject of the frivolous and, more worryingly, the vexatious
complaints, so taking your point that it could look as though
we are off the scales a little, I think there is a very real possibility
that the real problem could be put out by the advice that I am
suggesting.
(Mr Clarke) I certainly do not want to sound elitist.
It is true that there should not be one rule for leading figures
on both sides and one for everybody else, but I think it is the
party politics which leads because, if you look at this list of
people who have been complained about, practically all of them
are on the Front Bench and an awful lot of Cabinet and Shadow
Cabinet Members are involved simply because there is more party
advantage if you can embarrass somebody who is a large public
figure and you can get a bigger splash in the newspapers if you
attack some large figure. There are also some Back-Benchers who
have been subject to some extremely unfair and frivolous complaints.
Mr Bell
90. We know that so many of the complaints are
from Labour MPs against Conservative MPs or vice-versa, but Lib
Dems do not seem to be involved and Independents are not on the
roll of honour at all. It is surely not that the rules are too
tightly drawn or that the Commissioner is being too zealous because
she is not, it is just the nature of party politics, but something
could surely be achieved by a Whip cease-fire, could it not?
(Mr Clarke) I hope so. All of us have views on the
nature of contemporary party politics. I think that nowadays a
great deal of it is imitating American-type politics with the
belief that negative campaigning is the only effective campaigning.
That became all pervasive in the 1990s as a belief held by many
people on both sides. I actually think that it is wrong and one
of the few sensible things that happened in the recent American
presidential election was that both candidates appear to have
cottoned onto the fact that there was no evidence that the public
really did enjoy negative campaigning as much as it was thought.
In some of the smaller states in America in the 1990s, it reached
the stage that anybody running for office was going to face personal
allegations about his private life and his financial affairs from
his opponents, in the case of America, whether or not there was
the slightest foundation for them or not. There was a slight tendency
in the atmosphere here in the mid-1990s for that to creep over
here. Do not get me wrong, in case somebody makes a party point
against me, there were problems of sleaze in the last Parliament
and you are the obvious person to ask the question, but even that
became ridiculous. The serious sleaze which was not dealt with
adequately was why this Committee was set up and why we have a
Commissioner. She has subsequently been asked to deal with all
kinds of ridiculous minor non-sleaze and a kind of open season
on most MPs and I trust that the Committee is trying to pull back
from that now.
91. Do you think there is any sleaze in this
Parliament?
(Mr Clarke) There has been sleaze in Parliament for
as long as I have been in it and I expect there has been sleaze
since the days of Simon de Montfort. I actually think there is
a remarkably small quantity of it. I think if you look at the
experience of most political public bodies in other parts of the
world, there is probably less here than almost anywhere. The only
other countries that has ever struck me as producing extraordinarily
high standards of public conduct are the Scandinavian countries,
but even they have had their moments. I also think it is important
that we do not become complacent. If we are lucky enough to have
fairly sleaze-free politics, that could easily and rapidly change.
My worry is that, in America for example, it has now become so
habitual to accuse everybody of being a crook that you get the
serious situation where no honest man or woman will embark upon
a career because they know they are going to be accused of being
a crook and only the more shameless crooks run for office in some
of the backwaters of American politics.
92. Would you accept that the public will forgive
us if they perceive our procedures are too rigorous but not if
they are not rigorous enough?
(Mr Clarke) I would hope so but I am not sure that
this discussion is one that takes place amongst many members of
the public and I began by quoting a recent opinion poll which
we all recall. I think that, at the moment for a whole variety
of reasons, the public are more apathetic about and more cynical
towards politics than at any time I recall. There is a whole raft
of reasons for that. It has a great deal to do with the nature
of our political debate and all kinds of things. I think this
problem of allegations of misconduct has contributed to some extent
to that and this party political exchange of allegations does
not give anybody party advantage. It just leads a number of the
members of the public to say, "They are all the same",
by which they mean they are all on the make and none of them are
there for any reasons of genuine political conviction.
Mr Bottomley
93. Having read the confidential arguments about
MPs' financial interests in 1950 and having read the book, "MPs
for Hire", I do not think our problems started in the last
Parliament and I do not think they are finished. Taking it as
a foundation that there need to be some rules for openness, what
is more important is that we should know what an MP has been involved
in rather than that he should necessarily be stopped from doing
something and that we should leave it to the electorate to decide
if they want an MP providing they have the basic knowledge but
is it reasonable to assume that it is all right for somebody like
Jimmy Goldsmith to fund election candidates all around the country
because, if they were elected, we would know not whose pocket
they were in but whose views they shared and whose money they
used to get there?
(Mr Clarke) Yes but we have taken that too far. On
your first point, there is nothing new and we will not dwell on
history any further, but it is certainly the case that, when I
was elected, there were some people who behaved seriously badly
on both sides of the House of Commons—not many but there
were some. Parliament used to work on the basis that the Bar worked
on when I practised as a barrister in that, as a young member,
you were rapidly informed by your colleagues who the crooks were
and I see Alan Williams nodding his head. Everybody knew who the
scoundrels were and every young member was advised to keep well
away from them and, if they made a mistake and were caught, they
were thrown out. The Chairman nods as well. That was a tremendously
British, self-policing sort of club-like atmosphere which is now
completely and utterly impossible. Now you have to have proper
procedures. The general requirement is to be open and that we
should know everything and then it will all look after itself.
That everybody should share the clubland knowledge that only Members
of Parliament had before is attractive in a way but I think it
is rapidly being turned—and once again this has happened
in America—so that, if you go into politics, you have no
real right to privacy and, in the interests of protecting against
abuse, everybody should be entitled to read about anything they
wish to know about your sex life, your financial affairs, what
you do outside the House of Commons and so on, and a great deal
of the drive for more information about politicians is fed by
the desire of the media in this highly competitive age to get
more information of that kind because there is no doubt that what
the public like to read about sportsmen, politicians and other
celebrities is all about their sex lives, how much money they
are earning and what their private activities are. I say that
there has to be some approach to openness and information which
concentrates on what is the legitimate public interest, not what
is satisfying public curiosity.
When it comes to support from people outside
and donations to candidates, yes, I think we should all know about
that, but the recent rule saying that everybody who gives more
than £200 to a political party should have it declared is
giving rise to an immense paper chase as all these things are
doing and they will put people off from giving ordinary donations
because again the construction behind it is that people only give
money to political parties to get some personal advantage and
that to give money to political parties is a slightly shady/dishonest
thing to do. I think big donations should be revealed. On the
other hand, we brought that upon ourselves because the political
parties have spent so much time trying to kill each other's source
of funds. It is now impossible for a publicly quoted company to
give money to a political party and it is virtually impossible
for a trade union to give as much as they used to, so that politics
has become a game for very rich people who give large donations.
The public disapprove of that but give no indication of having
any idea as to how they expect their democracy to be paid for.
It does not only involve a number of rich men giving large donations.
It has gone right down and I have just read some advice saying
that, in the forthcoming Election, anybody who gives more than
£200 has to be listed and revealed and we have to tell all
these people that they will be listed and revealed and vast amounts
of paperwork will be produced and the local papers will no doubt
go through trying to find any of them who is some kind of a scoundrel.
94. The point is that you do not think someone
openly funding a number of candidates ought to be prohibited because
I think you would probably agree that if someone secretly spent
£25 million funding candidates all around the place, the
candidate or the donor ought to reveal it.
(Mr Clarke) I think the candidate should reveal any
particularly large donation and then the public can judge for
themselves whether the candidate was right to take money from
a large donor like Mr Goldsmith or Paul Sykes who made it a condition
that the candidate changed his views on a particular subject before
giving them money. That happened in the last election and had
quite a lot of publicity at the time. My understanding is that
the old rules about lobbies spending money at elections have been
changed by a ruling of the court so that a number of animal welfare,
environmental and other groups are now free to spend money for
or against a candidate without having the permission of the candidate
or his agent. I am in favour of the strict spending rules in constituencies,
although they are sometimes too strict in that I think the amount
should be eased a little more regularly than it has been. It would
be a rather bizarre situation if the candidates themselves are
confined to a limit which is very strict and have to disclose
all their donations but their constituency is full of posters
by some interest group visibly denouncing them with no spending
limits whatever and no obligation to disclose who has given them
money for it. I have not checked that before coming but I think
that is correct. So, you will have europhiles, eurosceptics, pro-life,
pro-abortion rights, environmental, animal welfare and other groups
perfectly free to target Dale Campbell-Savours and decide that
they disapprove of his views and they are going to spend a great
deal of money trying to get him out. That is deplorable and, if
they are allowed to do that without anybody knowing who has put
the money up for the attack on Dale Campbell-Savours, in my opinion
it will be unfortunate. I do not know why I chose Dale Campbell-Savours.
95. Perhaps the only answer is to stand on the
line of `I cannot be bribed'. Would you now deal with the question
of the press that comes up every now and again. Would you agree
that the role of the press is to suck up all the dirt, try to
sort out what matters and then to make it available? There is
no defence against the role of the press.
(Mr Clarke) Every politician attacks the press and
I always claim that I attack them less than other politicians.
It is always an unedifying spectacle when one hears another politician
attacking the press. They are there to be a nuisance and they
are there, actually, to err on the side of making sure that politicians/governments
are not held in an excessive degree of awe or respect. I think
they could be more responsible. I sense, in the run-up to this
Election, that our press, if anything, is going to be even more
partisan on both sides and even more likely to regard themselves
as campaigning for their particular cause, sometimes in a far
less attractive way than the parties would campaign themselves
if they were left on their own, and that we are going to have
more of this going in, throwing mud and everything else because
it also has the effect of selling newspapers, if you have the
scoop and you are the first one to allege that some leading figure
has actually been up to no good. Unscrupulous newspapers, if that
is the approach they are adopting, will of course save these things
for the day before the Election.
96. It is probably better to have a system with
the Commissioner looking into an allegation where there is some
evidence to justify it rather than to have trial by press and
then reach the single final verdict.
(Mr Clarke) I would certainly agree with that but
I am not quite sure how you would achieve that. Trial by jury
is now having to compete with trial by the press quite frequently.
People are acquitted but are named as guilty and people are found
guilty but are immediately acquitted by the press and all the
old rules about sub judice and so on appear to be very, very relaxed
now in criminal and civil cases.
Mr Campbell-Savours
97. When you give a speech, what would it be
about?
(Mr Clarke) If I give a speech for a fee?
98. Yes; very briefly, just a heading.
(Mr Clarke) Usually, if I have not been misled about
what they want which has happened once or twice, the speeches
where I charge a fee are where I am giving my views on the economy,
international economy and finance. The circumstances where I would
expect a fee are where I am addressing an audience assembled by
some firm of accountants or a bank where I am addressing people
who are themselves bankers, treasurers or investment fund managers
and they wish to hear me talk about my views on the global economy
or the British economy or the European economy or about the financial
markets. Usually, you find yourself on a card where other alleged
experts and pundits are appearing, all of whom are being paid
a fee for preparing a speech or lecture and coming along.
99. Could you very briefly—and we are
short of time—say if the contents of speeches for which
you are able to charge a fee in any way relates to your membership
of the House of Commons, your activities in the House of Commons,
matters and knowledge that you have acquired as a Member of Parliament
or which might be deemed as connected in any way with Parliament.
(Mr Clarke) I do not think, as you will have seen
from my letter and I have conducted this argument for some time
along with quite a number of other Members of the Panel, I am
there in my capacity as a Member of Parliament. I do not think
I am giving parliamentary advice and I am not acting in my capacity
as a Member of Parliament.
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