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Al-Yamamah Arms Agreement

I certainly do not wish to have an unnecessary disagreement with the hon. Gentleman, and it is quite clear that there were real issues of public interest, in terms of national security, that weighed heavily on the Attorney-General. Indeed, the Attorney-General made it quite clear that, before making his decision, he called in the papers—he described graphically how he pored over them in his office for three days, reviewing the matter—and had discussions with the intelligence services, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, I think, and the British ambassador in Riyadh about the possible impact on national security, and therefore on the public interest. Under our constitution, the Attorney-General is the guardian of the public interest consideration in matters of prosecution. That brings me to a second issue: in describing the Attorney-General’s reasoning, and when considering how he arrived at his view, one must ask whether he was being frivolous, or had gone on some bizarre frolic of his own, or was trying to deceive Parliament. I have to say to the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey that we should bear in mind the current state of the middle east, the importance of the state of our relations with Saudi Arabia, the current terrorist threat, the argument that close relations with the Saudi Government are important, and the fact that it appeared that the Saudi Government found the investigation irritating, to put it mildly—and we would almost certainly have needed their co-operation to bring the investigation to a satisfactory conclusion, because witnesses would have to be found in Saudi Arabia to establish the facts. All those factors make the Attorney-General’s reasoning appear perfectly credible. This is not a criticism of the Attorney-General, but I was left in no doubt that his intervention must have had a major bearing on the conclusion that the director of the Serious Fraud Office eventually reached; I have always assumed that that was the case. If I may say so to the Solicitor-General, I do not consider that in any way improper. Still, the Attorney-General is perfectly entitled to say that, at the end of the day, it was the director of the Serious Fraud Office who took the decision, but I do not think that the Government ever suggested that the Attorney-General did not hold widespread consultation with all interested parties—quite legitimately, under the Shawcross rules—before arriving at the decision, or that he did not discuss the matter with the director of the Serious Fraud Office, who then went off and made his decision.