---

Speaker's Committee on the Search of Offices on the Parliamentary Estate

I am one of those Members, together with the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), who put my name to the amendment tabled by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell). I like to feel that there is a consensus growing for an approach on that basis that will give much more effect to Mr. Speaker's statement last week, allow for a quicker inquiry, and allow us to look straight away, in proper order, at some of the issues of principle rather than the details of continuing police investigations. I agree with the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) that this should be approached in a non-partisan way. I usually enjoy the party rancour in this place, and realise that it can often be a useful way of checking the Government, but on this occasion it is totally unsuitable. I hope, as I see discussions taking place on the Government Front Bench, that even at this late stage there might be some reconsideration. I ask Members to imagine what would happen if the two principal parties had been on the opposite sides of the House when this incident occurred and the Met police got it into their heads to start proceeding in this way. I regret to say—I will not name names—that some Back Benchers on my side of the House would make a speech like that of the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) and dutifully rally round, saying, ““This is a routine issue—what are we wasting our time for?”” and defending his Front Benchers. I think that we would be hard-pressed to find many Labour Members, if they were sitting on the Opposition Benches, who were not beside themselves with rage if a shadow Home Office spokesman had been arrested in these circumstances and treated in this way. I do not want to personalise this, but I first met the Leader of the House when she was the legal adviser to the National Council for Civil Liberties. That is when I first had dealings with her, although she probably does not remember. She was a pretty feisty, radical lawyer in those days, and I have to tell her that she would not conceivably have made the speech then that she made an hour or two ago—she would have been leading demonstrations outside about the behaviour of the Government in confining matters in this way. I realise how annoying leaks are. They are not always heroic, although one can find the heroic examples of Churchill, Sandys, and so on. They cause great distrust, break up the teamwork in an office, and cause great annoyance to Ministers, as I know. In fact, most leaks come from other Ministers and their political advisers, or are authorised by them. The civil service always gets very indignant when leak inquiries are set up, because that is where they usually come from. I well remember the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) getting leaks about child benefit that he shared with me, as an Opposition spokesman, from time to time. I am sure that those leaks came from Barbara Castle, or with her authority. Similar examples have multiplied in this Government over the past 10 years. We addressed the whole matter because of the problems that we had over the criminal law when foolish decisions were made to prosecute Clive Ponting and Sarah Tisdall, who had been leaking material from the Ministry of Defence on security issues, and one of them was acquitted by a jury on the public interest defence. We decided that the Official Secrets Act and the panoply of the relevant law should relate only to national security. The law was changed precisely to avoid the outrage that occurred on this occasion. We cannot anticipate all the inquiries, but by now the police or the Government would have briefed us on any aspect of this matter that would support a stronger view being taken. No crime has been committed; it is a disciplinary offence inside the Department. Nobody is going to be prosecuted. If any prosecution is brought, it will fail because the public interest defence is absolutely self-evident. Indeed, there will be outrage in this House if a prosecution succeeds, and that should have been apparent from the word go. I do not know what the timing of the debate is, so I shall try to be brief. I do not think that anybody here is in favour of totalitarian government. The partisan stuff on both sides is quite absurd; no one on this side is running spies inside the Government and no one on the Government Front Bench is advocating a police state. At the moment, we have a House of Commons where everybody is in favour of parliamentary democracy, which I could not have said 20 years ago when the Militant Tendency had members in our midst. I think that we are pretty safe now. We are, however, in danger of being led by an increasing air of carelessness and indifference to basic rules. We all respect the rule of law, but sometimes we do not pay too much attention to it in some of the legislation that comes before the House. Anger, rage and unfavourable press comment always affect Ministers, but we now have an intolerance of dissent and an inability to take those brickbats that has led to a minor version of Henry II's expressions of rage about Thomas à Becket. In this case, it must have been, ““Who will find and dispense with this turbulent priest for me?”” At every stage, as somebody said earlier, people should have thought better. The permanent secretary should not have called the Cabinet Office in, and certainly should have stopped them talking to the police. In her statement, the Home Secretary said she agreed with the view of Sir David Normington that it was necessary to request police assistance. I am sure that she regrets that bitterly. She was already in trouble with leaks, but when she agreed to that, he got her into a lot more trouble. I am worried about the Met, given their behaviour in the so-called ““cash for honours”” case, and the case of the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain). When the police are called in they should not think, ““Here's a good public interest case. We'll get a lot of good publicity out of this; it'll be a good high profile thing.”” They should have said to the Cabinet Office, ““This is not a matter for us. Go away and sort it out inside the Department itself.”” When the matter came to this House, we were not prepared for it. Instead of letting the police in to search an office, somebody should have made inquiries. It has been revealed that there was no clear process enabling that to be done. Of course, if someone arrived and said that a Member was being investigated for a normal criminal offence, I would expect the Serjeant at Arms to give the police officer in question the keys, to send someone to escort him and his officers, and to arrange for them to be provided with tea and sandwiches while they carried out the necessary searches. What if they inquired and were told that there was no warrant, or if they had inquired and were told, ““This is all about leaks from the Home Office””? We need to re-establish processes whereby in those circumstances the Serjeant at Arms, without hesitation, shows them to the door and gets them dispatched. What will happen if we duck everything today, and accept a Government motion plainly designed to kick this into the long grass? They believe that the best thing to do is to get the matter beyond Christmas, let the police spin it out a bit, and hope that it will all die away, as it did in the case of the right hon. Member for Neath. No one will hear any more about it because the fuss will have died down by the time a report comes out. We need an inquiry now. We need one that does not have an in-built Government majority, which is independent and which advises the House on how we deliver our scoundrels to justice while ensuring that our more diligent Members are protected when they carry out their work.