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Intelligence and Security Committee

I tried to answer the hon. Gentleman in the best way I could. I have no objection to that at all. Sitting to his left is the right hon. Member for East Hampshire, who chairs the Committee when he has to. He also speaks on behalf of the Committee when the Committee agrees, and he does so in a robust and effective way. However, I fear that when parties are in opposition they tend to think that such chairmanship is a good idea, but when they come into government they do not. That is another matter, however. It is easy for some of our critics—I am sorry to include in their number some right hon. and hon. Members who chair parliamentary Select Committees and Joint Committees—to drive their tanks on to the lawn of the ISC and fire shells at the structure and performance of the Committee. They know, of course, that the nature of the material that we work with limits severely our ability to return fire, however frustrated we might feel about it. Just because our reports do not go in for sensational soundbites, that does not mean that we have not done a thorough job in arriving at our conclusions. There are others in this House who for perfectly noble reasons, I am sure, project themselves as the tribunes of liberty and transparency. Some of those great tribunes are not above stirring the pot by dropping dark hints to their friends in the media that members of the ISC should be regarded as little more than the placemen of the Prime Minister. I will not convince them otherwise, but I want to say to them that I have had experience of no other group of individuals who have displayed more independence of spirit or more determination to uncover the truth than I have in the ISC. It is a Committee that can withstand ill-informed attacks on its integrity and motives, not least because it does not indulge in the kind of party political point scoring that flows so often from the leaking and backdoor briefings that are among the chief curses of Committees of this House. If we on the ISC have concerns about the independence of the Committee, they stem not from the motives and abilities of its members but from the nature of the ISC's relationship with the Whitehall administrative machine. On pages 4 and 5 of our 2009-10 annual report, we have described how, over the last 12 to 18 months, it has become very clear to us that there are some within the Whitehall bureaucracy who, for reasons of their own, have not understood or have refused to accept that the independence of the ISC is sacrosanct. Some of them have given the impression that they regard the ISC as an irritation—a problem that they could well do without. Inside the Whitehall machine they think of us as a thorn in their side, which is ironic, because outside Whitehall we are told that we are not a sufficiently sharp thorn in their side. I have little doubt that some Whitehall insiders, like some right hon. and hon. Members, believe it would be far easier to turn the ISC into a Select Committee, but that, as I tried to explain earlier, would be about as useful as a chocolate teapot. That is almost certainly the reason why, during the past 18 months, life for the ISC secretariat has been distinctly uncomfortable and, at times, very unpleasant and threatening. The ISC does not take kindly to such behaviour. We are not a Committee to be "steered", "guided" or manipulated by means of any other Whitehall cliché; we are a statutory and independent Committee of parliamentarians, and we speak as we find. Let me make it clear that when I talk about Whitehall insiders, I am not talking about the Committee staff or the agencies that we oversee. It is the Committee's experience, for example, that the harder we investigate and question the agencies, the better they understand the need to be fully accountable. Although it may sound paradoxical, they understand the need to be more transparent within the so-called circle of secrecy that encompasses most of their work and the Committee's work. The intelligence and security agencies understand full well the value of an ISC that is robust, well equipped and determined. They know that without effective and independent oversight they will fail in their vital task of maintaining and strengthening the trust that the people of this country have in them. The agencies can rarely defend themselves publicly when they are attacked. They are a sitting target for anyone describing themselves as a campaigning journalist; for certain—and it pains me to say this—high-profile defence lawyers who appear not to be overly concerned about throwing mud at them, presumably in the hope that it will influence the public mood in favour of their clients; for some of the less scrupulous non-governmental agencies with axes to grind; and for 1,001 conspiracy theorists from the judiciary to the clubhouse. The agencies realise that our heightened oversight is in their own interests; it is in their own interests to be properly held to account. But they and we will never convince the British people that the agencies are being held properly to account if there is one iota of doubt about the independence of the ISC.