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Intelligence and Security Committee

I am not going to join in any criticism of the Chairman of the Committee, because he gave a trenchant and powerful speech and, as I explained earlier, he has been a good friend of mine for 21 years, and I am not going to be nasty about him just as he is leaving the House. I would not do that anyway, because he was clear in his speech about the difficulties that the Committee has been facing. I have no dogmatic view about where the chairmanship of the Committee should lie. In a Committee of this kind, I think that that depends much more on the individual than on the party that they belong to. Also, I am not sure that the Opposition would necessarily want to take the chairmanship of this Committee, if that meant that they would lose a chairmanship elsewhere in our Committee system. I have no fixed view about that, however, and we can listen to representations about the matter in the future. I should like to proceed with the procession of tardiness that I was going through in my speech. An even better illustration of it is the fact that the 2008-09 report that we are debating today has already been superseded by the Committee's next annual report, which it submitted to the Prime Minister a week before he allowed this one to be released, and which was made available to Parliament at about 10 o'clock this morning—at least, that is when I received it, only a couple of hours before this debate began. That is insulting to the House of Commons, to the intelligence services and to the Committee. It is another example of the mounting incompetence that the Government have demonstrated on these matters. I note that the right hon. Member for Pontypridd has complained about the delay, pointing out that the 2008-09 report is considerably out of date as a result, which also does little to reassure the public and Parliament that we are being kept fully abreast of any relevant issues. In his comments in the report published only this morning, he also complained that it has been""a matter of grave concern to the Committee"" that its""independence has been threatened over the last twelve months"." That is a striking thing for the Chairman of the Committee to feel constrained to say. None of the members of the Committee, from any part of the House, strikes me as being an unreasonable or strident person, so the fact that they could become so angry about a matter that is generally approached in a cross-party spirit of working together speaks volumes about the conduct of Ministers or ministries in that regard.