HC Deb 26 November 1962 vol 668 cc31-42
Mr. Wigg

Mr. Speaker, I wish to raise a point of order of which I have given you and the Secretary of State for War notice.

I wish to draw your attention and that of the House to an irregularity which occurred during the winding-up speech by the Secretary of State for War on Friday afternoon. In the course of the debate I had asked for the appointment of a Select Committee to inquire into "Operation Vantage", the Kuwait operation of July, 1961. In his reply, the Secretary of State for War quoted a letter from the Commanding Officer, 11th Hussars, and he also quoted another letter from a commanding officer whom he did not specify. I would point out that neither letter bears a date.

There is this further fact. The only unit of this force which was in the Middle East was the 11th Hussars, who were there in special circumstances. It was stationed in Aden, and one squadron was already serving in the Gulf at Sharja, and therefore not considered to be much in need of acclimatisation. A second squadron was sent from Aden and because it was roughly in the same area suffered only 2 per cent. mild cases of heat illness.

The proceedings of the House in this matter are governed by what is set out on page 460 of Erskine May. For the benefit of hon. Members, perhaps I might read what it says. It says: Another rule, or principle of debate, may be here added. A Minister of the Crown is not at liberty to read or quote from a despatch or other state paper not before the House, unless he is prepared to lay it upon the table. This restraint is similar to the rule of evidence in courts of law, which prevents counsel from citing documents which have not been produced in evidence. This principle is so reasonable that it has not been contested … That Ruling was the subject of a further Ruling by your predecessor, who, on 31st March. 1952, ruled as follows: The rule in this House is analogous to the rule in courts of law, that the tribunal—in this case the House—should have the best evidence in front of it. In that case, if the laying of one letter or citation of part of the correspondence would, in fact, give a misleading view of what has actually transpired, then it would be necessary to lay the whole of the letter or the whole of the correspondence."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 31st March, 1952; Vol. 498, c. 1356.] The War Office has undertaken a survey by the Army Operations Research Group of factors affecting the health and efficiency of the troops in "Operation Vantage". Therefore, my submission that there should be a Select Committee, if the right hon. Gentleman cares to reject it, must now rest on the whole of the evidence before the House of which the opinion of the Officer Commanding, 11th Hussars contained in the letter quoted is only a part.

My submission is that the right hon. Gentleman, having quoted the letter from the Commanding Officer, 11th Hussars, is now in duty bound by the rules of the House to produce not only the correspondence, but all the analogous matters, including the survey of the health and efficiency factors, which is in the files of the War Office.

It is my further submission that it is impossible, the Army being organised as it is, for the 11th Hussars letter to have reached the Secretary of State for War without a great deal of other correspondence at all levels. I suggest for your respectful consideration, Mr. Speaker, that if the Minister sends out what is tantamount to a questionnaire, and if he undertakes a survey and agrees in his wisdom to quote part of it, it is his duty to lay the whole of that survey before the House so that the House and the country can come to a fit and proper judgment. I await your Ruling, Sir.

Mr. Speaker

I can say what the rule is, but I do not think that I am qualified to say what its application is in this case. I will explain what I mean.

The Minister quoted from what appeared to be two letters of a kind really constituting public documents, and I would conceive that the rule of the House in that context would require him to lay the whole of each of those letters, unless he is saying, of course, that these are documents the rest of which is of such a nature that their disclosure would be inconsistent with the public interest. About that I would not know at all, and that is on the assumption that these are accepted to be public documents in the sense of documents to which our rule applies.

With regard to the rest of the matter, supposing there be—I would not know—a series of parallel documents so that the position is that the quotation from only two of them would be liable to give a false impression of the whole, then I think that our rule is that the rest should be laid, subject, once again, of course, to objection being taken, if it be the Minister's desire to take it, that their disclosure would be inconsistent with the public interest.

That is our rule, and I cannot rule further on its application to this case because I have no knowledge of what documents are in existence.

The Secretary of State for War (Mr. John Profumo)

Mr. Speaker, I am very ready to lay both the letters from which I quoted, in their entirety, before the House. I referred to only two letters—I have not referred to any other documents—and I am, naturally, prepared to lay those letters before the House.

Mr. Gordon Walker

Mr. Speaker, to apply your Ruling, would not it be necessary for us to be able to discover whether these two letters were part of a correspondence—for instance, if they were answers to a questionnaire, or anything of that kind, or part of a general correspondence? I do not see how we can apply the Ruling you have given unless we are given that information, too.

Mr. Speaker

I think that the difficulty is inherent. Clearly, I cannot know what the circumstances are. That makes me think that, obviously, the Minister, in each of these cases, must be the judge and not the Chair, because the Chair has not the material on which to form a judgment.

Mr. Grimond

Further to that point of order. May we have your help, Sir, in extracting from the Minister whether, in his view, these other documents are relevant to the matter under discussion?

Mr. Speaker

On my Ruling I think that the importance of that matter would be apparent to any Minister who must govern his conduct by his view of those facts.

Mr. Hale

Mr. Speaker, may I direct your attention to column 1669 of HANSARD, which contains the Minister's reference to these letters, in which he specifically said: We all get letters, but I do not want to weary the House with too many letters."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd November, 1962; Vol. 667, c. 1669.] In other words, he said, by implication, that he had the whole series of letters, that he had no desire to conceal their contents, and that he was going to quote from only two of them.

With respect, may I also draw your attention to the fact that in the Angola case, the Minister said, "I am very sorry I quoted from a letter by mistake. I had forgotten the rule. I would not have quoted from it had I known that the rule would be raised, and I apologise", and his apology was accepted by the House. But here is a case where the Secretary of State for War came to the House deliberately to reply to a long submission that had been made in writing previously by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) on the facts, deliberately to reply to the speech that he knew my hon. Friend would make, and of which my hon. Friend had given him particulars.

The right hon. Gentleman came armed with documents, knowing the Angola rule and knowing that the matter had been determined by the House within the last few months, and he deliberately quoted sections from those letters and is now unwilling even to rise, in accordance with the indication that you obviously addressed to him in your Ruling, and explain the circumstances. He hopes to avoid laying letters which might justify my hon. Friend's criticism. [Interruption.] The Minister is not entitled merely to shake his head. Surely it is his duty to explain to the House why he is not going to comply with the wish of the House and with his duty to it.

Mr. Speaker

I do not think that the hon. Member is raising a question for me.

Mr. Crossman

Perhaps, Mr. Speaker, you will be good enough to look at the following page of Erskine May, which states: A Minister who summarises a correspondence, but does not actually quote from it, is not bound to lay it upon the table". That refers clearly to the whole correspondence. In this case the Minister has not summarisd a correspondence; he has quoted from it. Does not Erskine May clearly indicate that not merely the two letters but the whole of the correspondence is now to be laid on the Table?

Mr. Speaker

That does not depart in the slightest way from what I said just now. The question is whether the other documents of the so-called series are of such a nature, or are so parallel, that a selection of a reduced number from the whole would be likely to give a false impression. All that is a matter of which I cannot know.

Mr. B. Harrison

Mr. Speaker, cannot we get over the difficulty quite simply, provided my right hon. Friend gives an undertaking that the two letters from which he has quoted extracts give the true sense of the whole of this correspondence?

Mr. G. Brown

The difficulty that the House is in seems to be, Mr. Speaker, that you have clearly ruled, as I understand it, that if these letters form part of a correspondence—part of a series—or if they are related to other documents which form one whole, unless the Minister wishes to claim security, in which case he presumably would not have quoted from the letters at all, he is bound to lay the whole of the related correspondence.

I thought that you went on to say that the Chair could not be expected to know whether such a series existed, and that only the Minister could know that. In those circumstances, are we not bound to ask for a clear statement from the Minister telling us whether these two letters form part of a correspondence, and whether they have been extracted either from a report or from a group of letters? If that is the case, will the Minister now observe your Ruling and lay all the rest of the documents?

Mr. Speaker

My Ruling was—if I may make sure that the right hon. Gentleman is not carrying me a little further than I went—that if the circumstances were such that a selection would be likely to give a false impression of the whole, it would then be the duty of the Minister to lay the rest of the documents. But I said that in the circumstances I thought that the Minister should be the person who had to decide.

Mr. Profumo

I want to clear this matter up. One difficulty is that few of us were present when the debate took place, and a reading of a report of it gives a slightly false impression. The reason why I did not quote the whole of the second letter was—as I am sure hon. Members who were present will remember—that the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg), quite rightly, because he had made a big case, had spoken for one-and-a-half hours, and had had practically the whole debate. I was left to sum up not only in respect of his serious allegations, but also in respect of the rest of the debate.

I therefore quoted from the second letter only such paragraphs as I thought were germane to the argument that I was making. I was also explaining to the hon. Member for Dudley, who had made these allegations—and they had been widely reported in the newspapers as having come with his seal on them, and his argument is with the Sunday Express and not with me—how badly these things reacted upon the soldiers.

I quoted two letters specifically in the context of that argument from two officers who commanded troops in the Kuwait operation. I quoted quite spontaneously and did not extract them from any wider serious of documents, or from a report. I did so merely to show that two commanding officers resented the fact that these criticisms appeared to have been made, and had asked my hon. Friend and I if we would try to put the position right in public. They are the only two letters which affected this argument. They stand on their own.

As to the rest of the information which we gleaned after this operation, I summarised that in the speech that I made in winding up the debate, and I stand by that.

Mr. Gordon Walker

Is the Minister telling us that no other commanding officers wrote letters on this matter? He says that two did. Does he really say that they stand alone, and that no other commanding officer wrote letters or reports on this sort of thing?

Mr. Profumo

I have received no other letters from commanding officers on this aspect. That is what I told the House.

Mr. Wigg

In order that the House may judge between us, may I put forward one or two matters for consideration? First, on Friday afternoon there were no fewer than four Front Bench speakers in succession, so there was ample time far the Minister to speak—and he knows it quite well; he knows that the time that he rose to speak was the time that he had arranged.

As for the newspaper articles, here I must make an allegation which impugns the right hon. Gentleman—

Mr. Speaker

I have no power to allow the hon. Member to make a speech about it now. If he is going to contribute something to help in connection with the point of order that he has raised I will eagerly listen to him, but he must not make a speech.

Mr. Wigg

The Minister has made the point that he was replying to certain newspaper articles which he said had been widely ascribed to me. The articles appeared on 2nd September. At four o'clock on 4th September I visited the War Office, with the right hon. Gentleman's full knowledge, and discussed the matter with the Under-Secretary and made it quite plain that I took no responsibility far the articles. All that I had said about Kuwait was in HANSARD.

Last Tuesday, at the Minister's request, I visited the War Office and, in the Under-Secretary's room, and with his private secretary present, I gave him in detail the points that I was going to make in the debate. Last Thursday night he telephoned me at home, and we went over it all again. He then made no point about these letters, or about the newspaper articles. Once he had quoted the letter—and I emphasise, with respect, that it was from the 11th Hussars, the only unit that comes out of the report well—the was under an obligation, in honour, to place before the House for its information the survey of the factors about the efficiency and health of the troops which was carried out by the Army Operational Research Unit.

With respect, I remind the House of the Ruling given by Mr. Speaker Morrison, that if the citation of a letter, or the citation of any part of it, would be a disadvantage, it would be necessary to lay the whole of the letter or the whole of the correspondence. This is where he says that the House should form a judgment. It is my submission that as the right hon. Gentleman chose to quote one letter from one unit that was favourably placed—or two letters, if the right hon. Gentleman insists—he should place before the House the whole of the survey which he himself has had carried out, which would enable the country and the House to judge between us.

Mr. Speaker

We cannot conceivably debate this matter now. I do not wish to withdraw or add to anything which I have said this afternoon in stating the rule. I cannot apply the matter further myself, and I am afraid that it must rest there.

Mr. S. Silverman

On a point of order. Is not the effect of your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, that the question whether the House shall be placed in possession of part or of the whole of the relevant evidence concerning a matter which we are discussing, as far as it is contained in correspondence, is now transferred from the Chair to the Minister? Is not the effect of your Ruling that it is for the Minister to say what is in the public interest and that it is for the Minister to say what is confidential, and that it is now for the Minister to say what does or does not form part of a series of letters? If this is so, is not the protection which the House was providing for itself in its custom now handed over without appeal to the Minister in charge?

Mr. Speaker

I said at an earlier stage that in the operation of the Ruling certain matters must be for the decision of the Minister, because the Chair is not in possession of the facts on which it could rule. That must always have been so. I hope that the House will dispose of this matter soon.

Mr. Gordon Walker

You will agree, Mr. Speaker, that we do not want this precedent to be changed in any way. The Secretary of State has not told the House that this did not form part of a correspondence. He said—I listened carefully to his words—that these two letters were the only two which bore on this particular aspect. It is quite possible for two letters alone to bear on some particular aspect and yet to be part of correspondence which bears on the whole general issue. If this went without any challenge we might find that next time we should have to prove that something bore only on a particular aspect and was not part, as is now the case, of a general correspondence.

Mr. Speaker

The point is this: is it so parallel—in the sense of a series of documents of which I spoke—to the documents quoted from that there is some chance of the selection of only certain documents out of the mass creating a false impression? I suppose that if the mass dealt only with other aspects of the problem, that would be one set of circumstances in which it would not be so parallel, but I cannot judge these cases. I have stated the rule, and we must not depart from it.

Mr. Grimond

The House appreciates your difficulty in normal cases of being able to judge whether a series of letters is a series or not, Mr. Speaker, but in this case they were described as a series by the Minister himself. He went out of his way to say: This is one of a series of letter which we received. It is difficult for the House to believe that he mentioned this knowing full well that the letters had nothing to do with the point in question. It was a strange phrase to use if his argument was that these letters had nothing to do with the point made by the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg); it was strange, in those circumstances, for him to go out of his way to say that it was one of a series—and that is the word which he used.

I think that the House should be told whether it is within the Minister's power, having said that a letter was one of a series, then to refuse to lay the series, on the ground that this letter dealt with only one small point in the series. He has made no claim that public interest prevents the rest of the letter from being laid. I could understand it if he did that, but he has not done that. He says that it is a series—presumably dealing with a particular matter—but he adds, "I take it upon myself to lay only two letters because those are the only two which, in my view, deal with the point at issue." Is that the position?

Mr. Speaker

The point is that no one but the Minister can say, because no one but the Minister has the knowledge, whether there is peril that this process of selection might give a false impression. He is the only person who can answer that. If he gives the wrong answer, I suppose that the House will deal with him, but it is no good pressing the Chair about it. The Chair cannot do more than state the rules.

Mr. M. Foot

May I ask the Minister, through you, Mr. Speaker, a question? I understand that he is not claiming security or protection in any of these matters and that there is no question of security applying to these further letters or to the document concerning the investigation which the War Office made but which has also not been published. Do we understand from the Minister that he is not claiming security grounds on either of those matters? Is he not prepared to reconsider the matter, therefore, and to come before the House again tomorrow? Will he not make a fuller statement proposing to publish the further letters which exist, or better still, to publish the whole documents of investigation which the War Office has in its keeping?

Mr. K. Thompson

On a point of order. Has it been our practice to allow questions to be addressed to Ministers allegedly through you, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker

It has never been the practice. We must bring this discussion to an end.

Mr. Gordon Walker

As reported in column 1668 of the OFFICIAL REPORT the Secretary of State said: This is one of a series of letters which we received. In your original Ruling, Mr. Speaker, you used the word "series". Could we not, therefore, ask the Secretary of State through you, or in whatever way is proper, whether he meant it when he said that this is one of a series and how he reconciles that with what he has said today? If this is one of a series, as I understand your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, the whole lot should be laid. The Minister said: This is one of a series of letters which we received."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd November, 1962; Vol. 667, c. 1668.]

Mr. Speaker

No more magic attaches to the word "series" in my Ruling than that which I ascribed to it. Whether the Secretary of State, when using the word "series", meant what I have today described in my Ruling is not a matter which I can answer. We must get on.

Mr. Wigg

On a point of order. The House itself must seek some protection. The Minister is not exactly a free agent. Once the Minister has said—as he did, in effect, by nodding his head—that there is no privilege in the survey undertaken by the War Office and that he does not intend to plead security in this matter, then your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, is that it is obligatory on his part to table it. What I sought to bring to your attention at the beginning of these proceedings was an irregularity because, under the rules of the House, once he has quoted these documents the Minister is under an obligation to place the whole of the correspondence on the table.

May I help you to draw this matter to a close? If the Minister does not do this, it is my intention to place a substantive Motion on the Order Paper which reflects upon his personal honour and his failure to discharge his duty as a Minister.

Mr. Speaker

I shall be interested in what the hon. Member proposes, but I take the view that if the matter is to be pursued it must be pursued in some proper way. I am not prepared to hear more about it this afternoon on points of order, because we have had a full discussion of what the rule is, as I have stated it.

I call Mr. Farr to make a personal statement.