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Mr. MacShane: The hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) has many friends in the House and I hope that he will be promoted to the shadow Cabinet one day, although I do not know who will be removed to make way for him. I repeat what I said when I talked about ministerial oversight: I am content with the oversight of my right hon. Friends the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. They form a good trio and we do not require extra Ministers to duplicate their work.

Tackling these threats is not only a matter of intelligence collation and assessment by national authorities, but a matter of co-ordination with other countries. It requires joint law enforcement operations and renewed international efforts to address the underlying grievances and insecurities that provide terrorists with new recruits and fuel the appetite of regimes for the world's deadliest weapons. It is an intimidating array of challenges, but the Government will pursue them with unrelenting vigour because the security of our citizens at home and overseas demands no less.

An effective Government response to the threats that we face requires effective intelligence agencies. The ISC has shown, yet again, that through the way in which it conducts its work, it contributes both to the effectiveness and accountability of our intelligence effort. On behalf of not only the Government but the whole House and the country, I thank the Committee and all its members for their work.

2.35 pm

Mr. Michael Ancram (Devizes): I start by saying that we quite understand why the Foreign Secretary is unable to be with us today. Many of us have occasionally found ourselves in the same circumstances and, given those circumstances, I am rather relieved that he is not here. I hope that the Minister for Europe will stop off on his way to Gibraltar and give the Foreign

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Secretary our best wishes for a speedy recovery. When he arrives in Gibraltar, I hope that he will explain to the people of Gibraltar what he meant when he told a Spanish newspaper recently that Gibraltar was not British territory. I am sure that he will be met with rapturous applause if he tells them that again.

With debate still raging about the Government's use—or abuse—of intelligence material, today's debate is not only important but, one that falls at an especially appropriate moment. The subject is serious, and balance and sensitivity are required. Although openness and democratic accountability are important, there is a need for discretion at the same time, if only to protect intelligence officers and their sources. Striking that balance is key, and the House's ability to do that has been greatly assisted by the detailed scrutiny undertaken on its behalf by the Intelligence and Security Committee. I pay tribute to the Committee, under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor), for its important work and the informative report that it issued.

Reading the report is sometimes something of a surreal experience due to the omissions that were deemed necessary. I am not sure how one should pronounce asterisks in the House, but paragraph 28 illustrates the surreal nature of the report better than others. It says:

"*** continues to deliver considerable value to GCHQ and it may exceed its design life. As a consequence, GCHQ expects to extend the expected life of *** and make the corresponding accounting changes. *** will start later this year. The Committee wishes to record the significant contribution that *** makes to intelligence collection."

And so would all of us, if we had the first idea what "***" was.

Andrew Mackinlay: May I interrupt and break up the cosy consensus between the two Front Benches because I think that the Committee is not a servant of Parliament? As the right hon. Gentleman is on the subject of asterisks, I draw hon. Members' attention to the glossary of terms on page 3 of the report. It says that CNI stands for "Critical National Infrastructure", and so on. The glossary is very helpful because it gives the meaning of "***"—or dot, dot, dot. One looks with great anticipation to find out what dot, dot, dot means, and the answer in the glossary is dot, dot, dot. The whole report is dotty and barmy. It should not be defended and people should not pretend that it represents a satisfactory oversight of our security and intelligence services. It is a sham.

Mr. Ancram: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree with my serious point that when the Committee reports on its current inquiry, I hope that it will be neither asterisked nor dot, dot, dotted.

Dr. Julian Lewis: I, too, noticed the omission on page 3, and I might be able to enlighten the House to an extent. All the acronyms in the glossary are in alphabetical order, so whatever the missing organisation is, it comes alphabetically between FCO and GCHQ. The organisation almost certainly begins

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with the letter "F". I thought that it might be a shady Northern Irish organisation, but I have decided that "F" probably stands for "forty-five minutes".

Mr. Ancram: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that helpful and deductive piece of work. I shall certainly ask for his assistance when I try to complete The Times crossword in future.

To be fair, the Government's response concedes that one of the purposes of oversight is to identify potential problems—indeed it is. Let me start with a major current problem. In a nutshell, when is a report that is published and described in Parliament as "an intelligence report" not an intelligence report, and how is Parliament supposed to know that? One of the most important links between the intelligence services and Parliament must be trust.

Hon. Members who are not within the security loops need to be able to place credence in that which they are told is intelligence. I refer the House to February's dodgy dossier, mentioned in paragraph 82 of the report. We were told that it was "further intelligence", and so, presumably, was the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, who went on to tell the UN that its detail was "exquisite". We now know that that was not the case. The document was partly cut-and-pasted material from the internet and, far from being an intelligence service or even a JIC production, its authors were the ubiquitous Mr. Alastair Campbell and a small band of acolytes.

The ISC report states that unlike the September dossier, this dossier had not been cleared by the JIC prior to its publication or checked by the relevant agencies. As if to confirm that, the Foreign Secretary somewhat quaintly described it to the Foreign Affairs Committee as "a horlicks". That, however, was not what the Prime Minister told the House. After the dossier's publication on 3 February, the Prime Minister said:

"We issued further intelligence over the weekend about the infrastructure of concealment. It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services."

He went on to say:

"It is the intelligence that they are receiving, and we"—

the Government—

"are passing on to the people."—[Official Report, 3 February 2003; Vol. 399, c. 25.]

The Prime Minister's statement could hardly have been clearer, but as we now know from the evidence of Mr. Campbell and the Foreign Secretary, the dossier was not intelligence. The Prime Minister misled the House. Whether he did that deliberately, knowing that the document was a Downing street concoction, or unwittingly, because Mr. Campbell had not seen fit to tell him, does not actually matter. The House, on that occasion, had been if not exquisitely, certainly comprehensively duped.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. David Blunkett) rose—

Ann Taylor (Dewsbury) rose—

Mr. Ancram: I will give way to the Home Secretary when I have made my point. I want to develop it because it is serious. I will also give way to the right hon. Member for Dewsbury whose report I mentioned.

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As I said, the Government should not underestimate the seriousness of the issue. There can be no graver offence against the House than to deceive it by manipulating or misrepresenting intelligence information. The House, which does not enjoy the benefit of intelligence briefings, must be able to rely on the word of the Prime Minister on intelligence. In my view, the Prime Minister has an overriding duty not to mislead the House on matters of intelligence. The Prime Minister's statement was therefore serious. He is, in a sense, the trustee of intelligence on behalf of the House.

Mr. MacShane: Cheap.

Mr. Ancram: The Minister says that, but his colleagues behind him are nodding because they know that I am making a serious point. It cannot be brushed aside. If we are to have confidence in what the Prime Minister or the Government tell us about intelligence information in the future, how and why the Prime Minister misled the House on this occasion—[Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. These are very serious matters and I ask the House to deal with them seriously. Let us have no more interventions from a sedentary position. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will give way to the Home Secretary in a moment.

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