House of Commons - Standards and Privileges

Select Committee on Standards and Privileges Second Report

Written evidence received by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards

1. Letter to the Commissioner from Mr Dan Whittle

I am writing to make a formal request for an investigation of the entries in the Register of Members' Interests for Adrian Flook MP and John Horam MP.

As you may have seen there has been substantial press coverage of the donations of Bearwood Corporate Services, a vehicle of Lord Ashcroft, to various Conservative Party candidates and the two MPs who are the subject of my request.

Press reports have repeatedly suggested that donations from Bearwood only come after an interview or meeting with the recipient of any possible donation. If this were true in the case of the two MPs concerned then I feel it must surely fall within section 4(a) of the register.

Neither MP has registered any of the donations. I understand they claim this is because these are simple donations to their association and nothing to do with them personally. However, given the reported process involved in securing the donation this seems seriously open to question.

23 February 2005 Dan Whittle

2. Letter to Mr John Horam MP from the Commissioner

Complaint by Mr D Whittle

I enclose a copy of a letter I have received from a Mr Dan Whittle in which he complains that you have failed to register a donation you or your constituency association have received from Lord Ashcroft through his company Bearwood Corporate Services.[8]

As you will know, Members are required to register under category 4 (Sponsorships) of the Register of Members' Interests:

a) donations of more than £1,000 received by their constituency party organisation which are linked either to their candidacy at an election or to their membership of the House; and

b) any other form of financial or material support above £1,000 received as a Member of Parliament from a single source.

In both cases multiple donations of more than £200 are registrable if they total more than £1,000 in a calendar year. Such donations must be registered within 28 days of their receipt.

The relevant provisions can be found in paragraphs 25-27 of the Guide to the Rules on the Conduct of Members. Members' obligations in this respect were the subject of Standards Advice Note 5, which was circulated to all Members by my office at the end of last year. Failure to observe these obligations is, of course, a breach of the House's Code of Conduct.

In his letter, Mr Whittle refers to press reports which suggest that you or your constituency association have received a registrable donation from Lord Ashcroft through his company Bearwood Corporate Services. I enclose a copy of articles which appeared in the Mail on Sunday on 20 February and in the Guardian on 23 February, in which it is alleged that you or your association have received the sum of £6,094 from Lord Ashcroft.[9] Also enclosed is a copy of a table which Mr Whittle says he compiled from the Electoral Commission's register of donations which purports to indicate the total amount donated and the dates on which the donations were paid.[10]

As Advice Note 5 makes clear, donations to constituency party organisations have to be registered if there is some clear and personal linkage between the Member and the donation. The Mail on Sunday and the Guardian reports suggest that Lord Ashcroft has picked and interviewed those to whom (or to whose local organisations) he has made donations. Other press reports (e.g. in the Independent of 23 February) suggest that Lord Ashcroft has given money to candidates with business plans that had impressed him.

I should be grateful if you will give me your response to Mr Whittle's complaint. It would be helpful if you would say in this context whether you or your constituency party organisation have received a donation of more than £1,000 directly or indirectly from Lord Ashcroft. If you have, it would also be helpful if you will say in what circumstances it was received and whether you were in any way personally involved, for example in its solicitation or encouragement. Have you met Lord Ashcroft in, say, the last 12 months, in this or any other connection?

I look forward to hearing from you and am enclosing a note I hope you will find helpful which sets out the procedure I seek to follow in relation to complaints.[11] If you would like advice or would prefer to discuss Mr Whittle's complaint, please do not hesitate to contact my office on the number above.

10 March 2005 Sir Philip Mawer

3. Letter to the Commissioner from Mr Adrian Flook MP

Thank you for your letter to me of 10 March asking for my response to the complaint made by Mr Dan Whittle of the Labour Party. I am sorry it has taken me a few days to respond, but I hope you will appreciate that I have taken these allegations very seriously and wanted to ensure that the answers I have given you were the fullest possible. This necessitated checking the computers in my offices, both in London and in Taunton.

I first heard of the allegations via Tom Baldwin of The Times who called me at 17.45 on Monday 21 February when he accused me of not registering the payments in the Register of Members' Interests made by Lord Ashcroft through Bearwood Corporate Services to my local Conservative Association.

I was worried that I may have transgressed the Rules of the House and despite it being late in the afternoon, I immediately contacted and spoke to the Chief Whip, the Conservative Party's in-house electoral law expert as well as to Stephen Gilbert who I know as he was a former campaign director for the Conservative Party and who I also knew had had a role in helping Lord Ashcroft in choosing which Associations should receive funding.

All three of them expressed surprise that these allegations could be levelled at me in this manner and all three assured me that their reading of the Rules of the House did not mean that I have to register the gifts made to my Association in the Register. The next day I learned from the same journalist that the source had given up trying to place the story in the papers and was going to make a complaint directly to you.

In your letter to me, you point to paragraphs 25-27 of the Guide to the Rules on the Conduct of Members and I am especially aware of the Standards Advice Note 5 as it was raised at a meeting of the Conservative Parliamentary Party's 1922 Committee which I attended just before Christmas last year. At that meeting there was some discussion as to what the Advice Note meant in relation to what Members would in future have to declare, but as I recall the point about retrospective declarations was never raised. Since I have not 'solicited or encouraged' the donations from Lord Ashcroft or his company I did not give it a further thought.

I can confirm that the Taunton Constituency Conservative Association has indeed received all the £8,387.50 that Mr Whittle has written to you about and on the dates on which these donations were made, however I can not agree with his assumption that there is 'some clear and personal linkage between me and the donation'.

It can be said that I was aware that a request for a donation was going to be made as my local constituency agent, Mr Rodney Pilgrim, who also spent some of his time looking after my office, approached me to tell me that he had seen a press report that Lord Ashcroft was keen to help marginal constituencies. He said he was going to apply on behalf of the Association. He rightly raised this suggestion with me in case I might have had an issue with the Association receiving money from Lord Ashcroft. As Lord Ashcroft is a former party treasurer and a peer of the realm, I felt in no position to either encourage or discourage the Association and its agent from applying as like many other constituency associations there is always a constant struggle to raise funds.

As this was now sometime ago, following receipt of your letter, I could not remember whether I was in any way responsible for, say, signing the application or even making the requests for the payments. I have therefore taken the time to check through my files, both hard copy and digital. I can find nothing that shows I was involved in any way. The Association files do however show that the budget for the funding was made by Mr Pilgrim on behalf of the Association and that each request for funding was between them and Lord Ashcroft's agent, Stephen Gilbert.

In the attached papers to this letter, there is a 'business plan' put together by Mr Pilgrim as well as copies of the requests for each payment he made to Lord Ashcroft through Stephen Gilbert.[12] As you will see, I was not privy to the plan or to each request for money. Like all MPs I am a member of my Association, yet I have never been involved in its running. Although my office shares the same address, it is physically separated from the Association as it is on a different floor. * * * To summarise, I was made aware that an approach to Lord Ashcroft was to be made, which was then carried out, but that is as far as my involvement went.

I can also categorically confirm that I have never met Lord Ashcroft nor been in any communication with him or even spoken to him. I did receive an invitation last summer to attend a party he was hosting, but I declined the invitation. He has never written to me nor used any intermediary to ask what I may think on a particular matter or to influence what I think in any way.

I am of course extremely grateful that Lord Ashcroft has been so generous to the Taunton Association and I feel it important to point out that these donations have each been declared to the Electoral Commission in the right way as each one was received by the Association.

Although I do not believe that I had a role in encouraging or soliciting the donations, should you as Commissioner believe that Advice Note 5 does necessitate my putting in an entry to the Register and that it also refers to historical payments, as all of them were received by the Association on or before 1^st November, then of course I would be very happy to make a late entry and be most apologetic to you and the House for not having done so earlier.

However, for the record, I would like to confirm that there has never been any attempt on my behalf to deceive the House, especially as these donations were made public in the correct manner and indeed even referred to in press reports, I am told, as early as last Autumn.

I would appreciate discussing this matter with you further if you consider there is a need to and so I await your further instructions.

24 March 2005 Adrian Flook MP

4. Letter to the Commissioner from Mr John Horam MP

Thank you for your letter of 10 March about the donation to my constituency association from Lord Ashcroft through his company Bearwood Corporate Services.

The facts are as follows.

About a year ago I became aware that Lord Ashcroft was making donations to Conservative Associations in marginal seats. Thinking that the Orpington Association might qualify (the majority over the Liberal Democrats at the last General Election being 269) I contacted his representative, Stephen Gilbert, and asked him to consider Orpington as it was a marginal seat. He rang me back in due course indicating that Lord Ashcroft would match any funds raised by the Orpington Association and spent on campaigning pound for pound up to a maximum of £10,000.

Following this on two occasions last year, in May and October, I wrote to Stephen Gilbert including details of invoices and costings for campaigning initiatives in Orpington and asking him to contribute half. The two amounts combined came to £6,094.

I should perhaps explain that we have no agent in Orpington and therefore organizing campaigning activity of this kind largely falls to me.

The details of these two donations were duly forwarded to the Compliance Officer at Conservative Central Office, and as a consequence became public knowledge. I met Lord Ashcroft for the first time in January of this year, and thanked him personally for his donation.

I was aware of category 4 (Sponsorship) in the Register of Interests, particularly subsection (a), but considered that since the donation from Lord Ashcroft was entirely because Orpington was a marginal seat, and had nothing to do with the fact that I might be the candidate at the next election or that I was an MP, it was not necessary to register it under my personal interests.

You have drawn my attention to Advice Note 5, which came out last November. I must confess that I did not read this when it came out because I assumed the situation would remain unchanged. However the wording used here includes the phrase "or a donation which has been solicited or encouraged by the Member." This seems to me to significantly extend what should be included, and certainly it could be argued that I at least encouraged Lord Ashcroft to make a donation to the Orpington Conservative Association.

If this is correct I should have added the Ashcroft donation retrospectively to my list of interests and if this is the judgement I will certainly do so.