Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
TUESDAY 6 DECEMBER 2005
MR DAN
CORRY
Q100 Mr Jenkins: So it was not your
job or duty to guard the Minister's back in any way, shape or
form?
Mr Corry: You do your best on
that as well. It is quite a job.
Mr Jenkins: So I do not think there is
any more I can ask the witness in that case.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Mackay?
Q101 Mr Mackay: Mr Corry, you were
the senior Special Adviser to Stephen Byers?
Mr Corry: I think the system in
this Government is that most Secretaries of State have two special
advisers and I was one of them. I was not senior.
Q102 Mr Mackay: And you had presumably
built up a reasonably close relationship with Mr Byers because
you had been with him at Trade and Industry and he elected to
have you moved with him to Transport?
Mr Corry: Yes, I had worked with
him for a number of years.
Q103 Mr Mackay: And your relationship
was presumably close?
Mr Corry: Yes, as with most people
I have worked for, I had a professional relationship. I do not
go out to dinner with the Secretaries of State I work for and
so forth, I do the job, but I knew him, the way he thought and
his policy approach, yes.
Q104 Mr Mackay: If that was not the
case he would not have invited you to move with him to Transport?
Mr Corry: I would like to think
he thought I was good, I knew my stuff, I knew my policy, I could
get into issues easily, I could deal with complicated policy issues
(which you have to do in the Department) and that my advice was
useful to him on policy issues.
Q105 Mr Mackay: Compared to us modest
backbench MPs, you had a considerable salary for doing this job,
and rightly so I might add.
Mr Corry: We could have a long
chat about salaries, I can tell you that is absolutely not the
case.
Q106 Mr Mackay: But you then presumably
went to the Select Committee because you would have been of help
at that Select Committee to your Secretary of State, otherwise
there was no point in you going there?
Mr Corry: The reason I have tended
to go to select committees—in my experience officials and
Special Advisers are of absolutely no help to the Secretary of
State when they give evidence. Almost all of them these days I
notice give evidence on their own. They have people behind them
but who almost never do anything. The idea you can get given a
note halfway through is ridiculous and most Secretaries of State
do not want that. The reason I usually went to select committees,
and it is the reason why I used to go and sit in debates in the
House, was much more to get a sense of the mood of the House and
in that case the mood of the Select Committee. If you are trying
to advise Ministers sometimes you do have to have a feel of how
the House is feeling or how the select committees are feeling.
You can read the transcripts but the best thing is sitting at
the back to get a feel of what the mood is. I think that is helpful.
Q107 Mr Mackay: That is extremely
helpful, Mr Corry, to establish why you were there.
Mr Corry: I do not recall. There
may be another reason.
Q108 Mr Mackay: There must be some
reason why a senior, highly paid—
Mr Corry: Can I object to you
saying it is highly paid, honestly if you want to see my salary
at the time you can, but I think this is really a bit out of order.
Chairman: Mr Mackay would like to put
his question.
Q109 Mr Mackay: Yes, I would like
not to be interrupted by the witness. I think the witness ought
to be reminded that he is before the Privileges Committee of the
House of Commons and should behave accordingly, so let us try
again. This senior Special Adviser came to a meeting of the Select
Committee with the Secretary of State. He has said how busy he
is, Sir George, he has said how many different jobs he had to
do, so presumably his time was very precious and there must have
been an important reason for him being at the Select Committee,
and I think Mr Corry, before his outburst, was trying to tell
us that the reason he was there was to gauge the mood of the Select
Committee and gauge the political mood of Parliament to see all
the nuances on this particular issue of Railtrack. Can I confirm
that is right?
Mr Corry: It was an important
event for the Secretary of State and, as I say, I went to these
events sometimes and I did not to others. Exactly why I went that
particular day I do not know but it would have been very high
profile at the time, I guess, and therefore it was useful to be
there to get a feel for what was going on.
Q110 Mr Mackay: It was very high
profile, as you say, and it was therefore important for you as
one of two senior Special Advisers to be there. By your own admission
you were not there to sit behind him and to give him notes back
and forth but to take a view of what was happening from a political
and also a strategic and policy dimension for the person that
you were personally responsible for as Special Adviser and, at
the time of Mr Grayling's questions which were very clear and
with your knowledge of what you quaintly call "scoping commissions",
you did not notice that there was a major error, fundamentally
a wrong answer given?
Mr Corry: I have said the answer
that I probably would have given if asked that question and you
have got to make a judgment as to whether that is fundamentally
different from what Stephen Byers said.
Q111 Mr Mackay: I think that conclusion
has already been made by Mr Byers and everybody else and is taken
as read. Would you accept that one of your duties in the best
sense is to protect the back of your Secretary of State as a Special
Adviser, to look after him, to make sure that nothing goes wrong?
Mr Corry: It is part of what you
try to do. My main job in the different jobs I have done as Special
Adviser is to do my very best on policy advice, obviously coming
with a political background, as you say, appointed by the Secretary
of State. Secretaries of State get into all sorts of problems
in their lives and on the whole it is not always the Special Adviser's
role to try and get them out of them. So I have not tended to
see that but I think the point you are making, which is obviously
totally fair, is I was at that meeting, Stephen Byers said something
which you are arguing in a sense should have made myself and the
other officials who were there very nervous because it was so
diametrically different from what the truth was, I do not recall
it, I am afraid, as I said before; clearly we did not. That is
all I can say really.
Q112 Mr Mackay: But as a political
appointee you were there to look after his interests or were you—
Mr Corry: When you get a contract
as special adviser it does not say "you shall look after
their political back". Different people do the job in different
ways. I think people employ me mainly because I am a policy person
and have been for a long time rather than I am fantastic at watching
the backs of Ministers. Maybe I have not done a very good job
in that.
Q113 Mr Mackay: Mr Corry, you just
said you are a political appointment, you are not a career civil
servant, you are a political appointment, indeed a personal appointment
of Mr Byers when he moved from Trade and Industry to Transport.
Mr Corry: Yes.
Q114 Mr Mackay: And on that basis
you must have been at the Select Committee to look after his interests.
So can I ask you the question would you have been aware when you
attended the Select Committee that to mislead a Select Committee
of this House was a very, very serious matter and if gone uncorrected
would lead to a breach of privilege, which is why you and I are
sitting in Committee Room 13 this morning?
Mr Corry: Absolutely. On select
committees Ministers should sit there and tell the truth as they
see it, absolutely.
Q115 Mr Mackay: So I find it difficult
to understand, bearing in mind the job you were doing, that afterwards
you did not point out to the Secretary of State that he had made
a mistake and that would have given him the chance to have corrected
it and you and I would not be here today.
Mr Corry: All I can do is surmise.
Clearly I and the officials who were there as well did not feel
that he said something that was wrong. We might not have said
it like that. I have said how I probably would have said it, but
it was not something that clearly made us all jump. I am afraid,
as I said, I do not recall it, so I am just surmising really from
what I know.
Chairman: Thank you. Mrs Browning?
Q116 Angela Browning: Mr Corry, you
said that you attended the Select Committee really to gauge the
mood of the Select Committee and that when occasionally you attended
debates in the House it was your perception of the mood of the
House and how they were responding to the debate. What was the
action you would take? What was the purpose of that? What would
you do then if for example you sensed a hostile House or a hostile
Select Committee? What was then the function that you carried
on?
Mr Corry: That is a good question.
I do not think a specific action came from this. It would just
be more in helping one think about what Ministers might want to
do next or whatever. It would just add to a bit of knowledge.
I think if you just try and sit in an ivory tower as a special
adviser completely and you never have a sense of the place where
Ministers are having to go and speak in the House, you probably
lose something in your ability to work with Ministers, so I think
it is quite important.
Q117 Angela Browning: You have told
us that you have little recall of how you perceived that meeting
to go as a Select Committee but it has already been raised with
you that the very next day there was a point of order on the Floor
of the House.[2]
Would your antennae seeking to identify mood swings in the House
have alerted you to the fact that something was not quite right?
Mr Corry: I am afraid I just do
not recall this at all. That is all I can say. It sounds a bit
pathetic but I really do not remember it at all. Why that was,
I do not remember. I do not know whether someone else was dealing
with the issue, whether I was on other things that were happening
that meant it was not me it was someone else who was worrying
about things. I am afraid I just do not know.
Q118 Angela Browning: How involved
were you in the briefing for the Minister? I assume that officials
would have prepared the written briefing that went into the folder
but how involved would you have been in discussing with Mr Byers
preparatory to the Select Committee?
Mr Corry: Again I am sorry I have
to preface it by saying I cannot recall but generally it would
not usually be that much. Usually Mr Byers would tend to do his
own preparation as it were. He would have the briefing for whatever
select committee or thing like that he was going to and he would
tend to read through it and if there were things he was not sure
about he would often ask for another note or something about that.
Sometimes he would have officials or advisers in just to run through
a few tricky questions. That is his style and from my experience
most Secretaries of State I have worked for it tends to be their
style rather than big meetings where they rehearse the whole thing
and so on.
Q119 Angela Browning: Would you have
been present at such a pre-meeting?
Mr Corry: Probably, probably.
2 HC Deb, 15 November 2001, col 1010. Back
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