Security Services (Accountability) (Hansard, 3 December 1986)

§ Mr. Tim Brinton (Gravesham)
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I seek your advice on a matter concerning the Adjournment debate. The hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) will talk about the security services. I seek your advice in view of a letter from the noble Lord Rothschild that will appear in tomorrow's edition of the Daily Telegraph. Is it not right that the hon. Member should be extremely careful, in view of the fact tht the noble Lord Rothschild's letter states that the director-general of MI5 has unequivocal evidence that Lord Rothschild was not and never had been a Soviet agent——

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Harold Walker)
Order. I cannot rule on what an hon. Member may say. I cannot rule on a hypothesis. The hon. Member should wait and see.

§ Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow)
Further to the point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker——

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. I have just ruled that it is not a point of order.

§ Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Hackney, South and Shoreditch)
I welcome the Minister to the debate. Unlike the Minister, I have had access to secrets. I have been positively vetted and I have attended courses organised by MI5 at Curzon street. Ironically, I have been security cleared for the debate, but the Minister has not.
Today, an ideological difference emerged between the Labour party and the Conservative party. The Labour party believes that MI5 and M16 should be accountable to Parliament and to the public. The Conservative party says that that accountability should be to a select number of Ministers drawn from the Executive—that is, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, and the Home Secretary.
I should have thought that there could have been agreement on this matter. Bearing in mind that the proceedings in the Australian court have damaged the reputations and integrity of the Cabinet Secretary, the Attorney-General and the Prime Minister, and bearing in mind the contempt in which some members of MI5 and MI6 now hold those three persons because of the harm that that court case has caused to their services, surely the time has come for the Prime Minister to put country before party and pride and to abandon these proceedings.
Lord Rothschild was correct when he told Peter Wright that he thought that the Prime Minister was inexperienced and could not handle these matters properly. I am bound to say that I think that the problem is much graver than that. If there is to be accountability to Parliament, and if there is even to be democracy, Ministers or Prime Ministers should not lie to Parliament. That accusation that an hon. Member lied is so serious that it cannot even be made in the House. We have to say that Ministers or Prime Ministers deliberately and seriously misled Parliament. That is the charge that I level against the Prime Minister and can prove against the Prime Minister. In Hansard of 26 March 1981, column 1079, the Prime Minister——

§ Mr. Nicholas Soames (Crawley)
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Have I not just heard the hon. Gentleman make the gravest charge against the Prime Minister, namely that she has misled—or, further, lied to—the House? Is that not a grave and serious matter?

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
: That construction can be put on the remarks of the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore). If that was his intention, he must withdraw the expression.

§ Mr. Dalyell
Further to the point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker——

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Member must resume his seat.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
The allegation that I have made against the Prime Minister is that she has misled the House of Commons. I believe that that allegation is perfectly in order.

§ Mr. Soames
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker——

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. I am dealing with a point of order. If the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch is alleging that the Prime Minister deliberately misled the House, he must withdraw his remarks.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
I respectfully argue, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I know of no reason not to suggest that the Prime Minister has misled the House of Commons. The word "mislead" is not, in my respectful submission, out of order in "Erskine May" or in the terms of the proceedings of the House. If we could never say that a Minister had misled the House, we could never criticise a Minister at all.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. The House rests on the assumption that we are all honourable Members. Although it may be in order to recognise that an hon. Member may inadvertently mislead the House, it is not in order, and has recently been so ruled by Mr. Speaker, for an hon. Member to accuse any other hon. Member—a Minister or otherwise—of deliberately misleading the House. If the hon. Member is seeking to persist in that, I must tell him that he must withdraw.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
I shall use any word that you care to mention, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but——

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Member is responsible for his own words. I am responsible for judging whether they are admissible. It is for the hon. Member to withdraw the words he used if he is saying that the Prime Minister has deliberately misled the House.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
I shall withdraw those words and any other words that you care to mention, Sir.
On 26 March 1981, following an investigation after the publication of the Chapman Pincher book, the Prime Minister said: The case for investigating Sir Roger Hollis was based on certain leads that suggested, but did not prove, that there had been a Russian intelligence service agent at a relatively senior level in British counter-intelligence in the last years of the war."—[Official Report, 26 March 1981; Vol. 1, c. 1079.] That statement was untrue on an important matter of national security. The proof that it was untrue is as follows. First—I advance this only as a matter of corroboration—I ask the House to turn to an article in The Times written nine months later, on 12 December 1981, by Mr. Chapman Pincher. He said: 1057 Mrs. Thatcher's statement…has been analysed by some of the former investigating officers. They have found at least six areas where it is grossly at variance with the facts as they knew them. I have subsequently discovered that one of those officers was Mr. Peter Wright.
Speaking of the inquiry into the inquiries into allegations against Mr. Roger Hollis, Mr. Chapman Pincher said that they did not arise out of the war. He said: In fact they were undertaken because so many MI5 operations in the 1950s and 1960s went so seriously wrong that they could be explained only if there was a high-level spy still in the organisation. That statement, I subsequently discovered, is true in as far as it states the reasons for the allegations and investigations made against Hollis. What were involved were the operations of the 1950s, and 1960s and not anything that happened in the war. The Prime Minister, when she made her statement on 26 March 1981, knew that.
Indeed, I go further. The Prime Minister had received a letter from the hon. Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken)—I spoke to the hon. Gentleman this evening and told him that I would mention this—dated 31 January 1980. That is three months after the right hon. Lady's statement about Blunt and six months before she is said to have met Lord Rothschild. The hon. Member for Thanet, South told her in that letter that suspicion arose out of the operations and foul-ups of the 1950s and 1960s—indeed, as late as 1964. My investigations reveal that some of the information in the letter from the hon. Member for Thanet, South was, in fact, new to the Prime Minister.
In the court case in Australia, Sir Robert Armstrong repeated the Prime Minister's statement of 26 March 1981 in a series of sworn affidavits. He said that the investigations into Sir Roger Hollis had arisen out of the last years of the war. He knew when he swore those affidavits that that statement was untrue, and in a series of heated exchanges in the Australian court the judge replied to Mr. Turnbull: Your point was that there was a deliberately misleading statement in the House… The point is there. It is made. The case is made by Mr. Chapman Pincher, by the hon. Member for Thanet, South and his sources, which are good and reliable, by Mr. Peter Wright, by Sir Robert Armstrong and by subsequent investigations. In making that statement on 26 March 1981, the Prime Minister traduced the democratic process.
I should now like to turn briefly to Sir Robert Armstrong, and I shall begin by observing that, when a country sends its Cabinet Secretary on a 12,000-mile journey to mislead a foreign court, that is surely the nadir of moral bankruptcy. Sir Robert Armstrong said that he was "economical with the truth". Some people would say that he privatised it; that is to say, if he can get away with not telling the truth, he is prepared to do so. He kept telling the judge in that trial that he did not know about this important security matter——

§ Mr. Soames
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Surely it cannot be right for the Floor of this House to be used as a forum for the character assassination of one of the highest public servants in the land who is currently representing the Crown before a court in another country. Can it be right that the character of this good man should be assassinated by an hon. Gentleman during an Adjournment debate?

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Mr. Speaker has recently drawn attention to the problems that arise when allegations are made in the House about someone who does not have the right or the opportunity to seek redress for his grievance about the allegations made against him. We should be very cautious, but so far I have not heard on this point anything from the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) that I could rule out of order.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
I am grateful for that ruling, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall not be bullied by Government Members—[Interruption.]—and I shall not be deflected from the truth by cynical and callous laughter.
Sir Robert Armstrong kept telling the judge that he did not know about this or that important matter of security. I find that odd, because, since the time of Harold Wilson's Government, the Cabinet Secretary is the principal civil servant for security matters. If he does not know what is going on, it means that the Prime Minister does not know. If there is no knowledge of what is going on, there is no accountability. That is assuming that Sir Robert told the truth in the Australian court when he said that he was ignorant of the matters about which he was being cross-examined.
I shall now come to the matter of Lord Rothschild. In order to get to the bottom of this cloudy issue one must seek to understand the possible motives of Lord Rothschild in his conversations with Peter Wright. Those in the know who advise me know a lot more about this matter than I do, and they tell me that there are three possible motives for Lord Rothschild seeking to get Wright to encourage Mr. Chapman Pincher to produce his book.
First, they say it is possible that Lord Rothschild still thought that Sir Roger Hollis was a spy and that the Government had come to the wrong conclusion. My advisers do not think that that is likely, but they say it is a possible motive. Secondly—this leads me directly to the point just raised, though I must say that I knew about it before then—they say it is possible that Lord Rothschild was protecting himself or a third party. Those in the know tell me, and I believe that they are right, that Lord Rothschild was not the fifth or sixth or seventh man or, indeed, a spy at all.
They say that there is a third possibility, and in my view it is the most intriguing and possibly the correct one. They say they believe that Lord Rothschild was attempting to create a cause celebre by which some short-term instability would be created inside the security services in order to create more political control in the long term. The question is simple. Did the Prime Minister know about that? Did she authorise Lord Rothschild to do and say what he did? Unless Lord Rothschild was so authorised, whatever his motives, he was in serious breach of the Official Secrets Act 1911. That is the point that Conservative Members refuse to examine. The fourth matter relates to the Attorney-General. I am in some difficulty in this respect, because I have a sneaking and fairly high regard for the Attorney-General and I will not traduce him in this debate as I might otherwise have done. I am very sorry that Sir Robert Armstrong traduced the Attorney-General for a week without correcting his comments about the Attorney-General. There are some questions that the Attorney-General must answer. Why did he tell William Heinemann, Mr. Wright's publisher, in October that he should drop the Australian case and save his money 1059 because the Prime Minister and Mr. Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister, were going to fix the Australian courts? Is it appropriate conduct for Prime Ministers of two countries to fix the Australian courts——

§ Mr. Soames
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman has now said on the Floor of the House that the Attorney-General suggested that a court in a foreign land was going to be fixed. Is that not a fundamental breach of privilege in this House? It cannot continue.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
I am not sure that I followed the point that the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch was making. However, I thought that his point was rather different from that put to me in the hon. Gentleman's point of order.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
The second question that I would like to ask is, is it appropriate for a Law Officer to talk about foreign courts and those possibilities in those terms? I understand that, if the matter had been left to the Attorney-General, he would not have tried to stop the publication of Mr. Wright's book. That was basically the Prime Minister's decision. Surely, under the conventions of our constitution, before the Attorney-General tried to re-write them with his bogus distinctions between criminal and civil actions, he should have been consulted. He was not consulted about the publication of Mr. Chapman Pincher's book, but who were the lawyers who gave the advice in that case? They must have been responsible to some Minister, either to the Attorney-General, the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister. Who will accept the responsibility for their curious advice—the unnamed lawyers or one of the Ministers?
If we sum up the facts of the case and examine the conduct of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Rothschild and the Attorney-General, we discover that their actions show that the security services are out of control, that there is no proper accountability and that national security is not safe in the Prime Minister's hands.
In response to that, we should take two steps. First we should set up a Select Committee, not of both Houses, but of the House of Commons—the democratically elected Members of Parliament. The members of that Committee should not simply be drawn from existing Privy Councillors, most of whom will at some time have come from the Executive. They should be drawn from existing Privy Councillors and Back Benchers who would have to be made Privy Councillors and would have to be positively vetted.

§ Mr. John Carlisle (Luton, North)
Including sacked Parliamentary Private Secretaries.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
At least sacked Parliamentary Private Secretaries have been positively vetted; that is more than the hon. Member for South Africa can claim.
Secondly, that Select Committee should be advised by a parliamentary security commission, which should have the power to investigate on behalf of the Committee and also on behalf of those who lay complaints against members of the security services. That is a sensible and modest proposal which arises out of this shabby episode, and I hope that the Minister will agree to it.

§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. David Waddington)
I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman was not in the House for much of this afternoon's debate, but it means that I can be excused for repeating some matters that have already been dealt with today.
I must first say that anyone answering such a debate is constrained in what he can say because he must stick to the practice of not commenting on security matters. The House also knows that I am under a further constraint because I cannot comment on matters in issue in the case in Australia. Of that case I shall say only that the Government are defending the principle that former intelligence agents owe a lifelong duty of confidentiality. I think that that is something that any sensible person can understand.
I am bound to say that I was deeply shocked by the frivolity displayed by some Opposition Members this afternoon, who seemed to think that it was a huge joke that we had failed to prevent the publication in Ireland of a book by another former agent. These are not matters for frivolity. The attitude of Opposition Members, including the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore), cannot increase the standing of the House in the country. All that they have succeeded in showing is a determination to make whatever mischief they can, regardless of the interests of the country.
What the hon. Gentleman said this evening hardly improves the argument for greater disclosure of security matters to a Select Committee. I would think that what he said completely destroys any argument there might have been for disclosure of information to such a body, on which he could sit.
The real issue is that there obviously cannot be complete openness about those responsible for the nation's security. If we are to keep our defences against espionage and terrorism, secrecy is essential. There is obviously a public interest in seeing that the Security Service carries out its duties properly, but such public interest in the oversight of the Security Service must be satisfied by something other than a process of chequebook journalism.
The established practice—and it is not necessarily the wrong practice just because it is long established and has been followed over the years by Governments of the Right and the Left—is that the responsibility for these matters should fall upon the Home Secretary of the day, who in turn is accountable to Parliament.
It is said that there should be some external oversight, but a number of questions have to be asked and answered. First, what form of external oversight will preserve effectively the necessary secrecy of Security Service operations and the necessary confidence in that secrecy?
Secondly, what form of external oversight can be devised that will not blunt or diminish the very personal responsibility of the Home Secretary of the day to this House? Thirdly, given the constraints under which it would have to operate, would any new body actually be able to meet the concerns expressed and thereby serve any useful purpose?
That brings me to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary this afternoon. A barrier of secrecy must be drawn between the Security Service on the one hand and the debates in this House or on the front pages of newspapers on the other. But then the question is, on which side of that dividing line would a monitoring 1061 body sit? On the secret side? How would that help public accountability? Even if it were a Select Committee of this House, what good could it do if all that it could say was that it was satisfied that all was well without being able to produce evidence of methods of operation to which it had been given access? If it was not given access to those operations, how could it satisfy those who are so anxious to find out more about the operations of the secret services?

§ Mr. Soames
I entirely accept my hon. and learned Friend's comments about operational matters, but could there not be a role for a Security Commission which had oversight rather than hindsight in respect of administrative measures, which might have prevented the situation in which Mr. Wright finds himself?

§ Mr. Waddington
I was hoping to come to some of those matters later. My hon. Friend heard what my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said this afternoon. It may be possible to return to those matters later when there is less froth and less nonsense being talked in the House by Members such as the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch. We may then be able to return to these issues in a sane and sensible mood, but tonight I do not have time to do more than point out the evident absurdities in some of the arguments advanced by hon. Members such as the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch.
There are difficulties if the body is to be on the secret side of the fence, as it were, but if it sat on the public side of the dividing line it is hard to see how it could perform any useful function at all.
Various suggestions have been made as to the kind of body that could carry out a reviewing role. The right hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dr. Owen) made one suggestion earlier today. Others have included the Security Commission mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Mr. Soames). As my hon. Friend knows, the Security Commission is a panel of people called upon ad hoc to report on particular matters. It does not attempt to provide a continuous monitoring of the security services. If it were given a wider public monitoring role its membership would need to be supplemented in a way that might make it little different from, say, a committee of Privy Councillors. What is certain is that any of those suggestions would tend to blunt—because they would share it—the heavy responsibility to the House which rests on the Home Secretary of the day. That is an important obstacle. There may be a way round it, but so far it is very difficult to see one and I have certainly heard nothing today to suggest a ready route around it.
Some of those who argue for some form of external oversight talk as though the present arrangements left Parliament wholly uninformed. That is evident nonsense. There has been greater openness under this Government than ever before. In view of certain remarks made tonight, 1062 perhaps I should prove my point by spelling out again some of what was said by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary this afternoon.

§ Mr. John Carlisle
Talking about the remarks made by the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore), should it not be noted that the hon. Gentleman was sacked for leaking secrets from the office of the then Secretary of State for Energy, and admonished by the Prime Minister of the day, so the House should take virtually no notice of what he has said this evening?

§ Mr. Sedgemore
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was not sacked for leaking any documents from the office of the Secretary of State. It is typical of the hon. Gentleman that he cannot distinguish between the truth and lies.

§ Mr. Waddington
I do not intend to get involved in these matters, save to say that the whole of the hon. Member's conduct tonight has done no credit to him or to anyone else and he cannot complain if he is attacked on the Floor of the House.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the Minister to stand there and seek to back up the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Carlisle), who has deliberately misled the House about what happened to me when I was in government? Can Ministers act with Back Benchers unable to distinguish between truth and lies? I ask you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for the same protection as that for which those hon. Members have asked. That dreadful Minister there does not know the difference.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Unless I misunderstood the Minister, I did not hear him make the allegation about which the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) complains.

§ Mr. Sedgemore
The Minister condoned the allegation, and he knows it. I believe, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you should protect Back-Bench Members from that kind of conduct from that kind of Minister. It is not acceptable.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. I think that the Minister is seeking to respond to the hon. Gentleman's allegation.

§ Mr. Waddington
There was no allegation, but some may notice that it is always the bullies of this world who shout the loudest when they get kicked back.
I was just reminding the House of some of the important points——