Cabinet Committees (Hansard, 11 December 1995)

§ 3. Mr. MacShane
To ask the Deputy Prime Minister what Cabinet Committee meetings he chairs.[3281]

§ The Deputy Prime Minister
I chair the Cabinet Committees on Competitiveness, on the Co-ordination and Presentation of Government Policy, on the Environment and on Local Government.

§ Mr. MacShane
Four Committees. That is some work for a grown man, and it helps to explain why the rest of the country now considers that the Deputy Prime Minister, with the right hon. Member for Peterborough (Dr. Mawhinney), is now working principally on party political work at taxpayers' expense.
Can the Deputy Prime Minister, as chairman of the Committee on the Co-ordination and Presentation of Government Policy, explain to the House why a draft of a Cabinet document by Lord Mackay was erroneously briefed to The Daily Telegraph, thus forcing a humiliating public retraction from the Lord Chancellor?

§ The Deputy Prime Minister
The hon. Member knows that that is a very considerable misrepresentation of what actually happened. He will also know that the Leader of 682 the Opposition has unleashed on this country the most sophisticated misrepresentation of Government policy by people who have learnt transatlantic techniques of media manipulation and are paid by the Labour party day after day to misdirect and misinform the British public.

§ Mr. Jenkin
Has my right hon. Friend ever changed his mind about nuclear weapons, or about the need for standards and testing in education, or about nationalisation—

§ Mr. Campbell-Savours
On a point of order, Madam Speaker—

§ Madam Speaker
I shall take points of order after Question Time; but perhaps the hon. Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) will now come to the point that he is making.

§ Mr. Jenkin
Does not my right hon. Friend's record make him worth a million Labour party members on any Cabinet Committee?

§ The Deputy Prime Minister
I agree with the thrust of my hon. Friend's question, but I differ in one respect. It is not Opposition Members who have changed their minds; it is the leader of the Labour party who has changed his mind. As anyone who sits in the House knows, the only issues that ever excite the Opposition parties are the same ones as have always excited them: those that fundamentally attack the prosperity of the enterprise economy, those that increase the trade unions' ability to wreck our economy and those that pander to the worst excesses of an envious society.

§ Mr. Simon Hughes
Will the Deputy Prime Minister do a little better now than he did when answering the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane)? Will he answer the question instead of just having a go at the Opposition? Will he tell the House—this is, after all, a matter of public concern—what he is doing to find out how a draft speech was released before authorisation by a senior Cabinet Minister? What inquiry is being held? What responsibility does the right hon. Gentleman have for the actions of the Lord Chancellor or of the chairman of the Tory party in the Cabinet?

§ The Deputy Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman will know that the chairman of the Conservative party is a valued and upright member of this Conservative Administration. He is quite able to explain for himself, as he has often done in the past—as has the Lord Chancellor. There is no point in my adding to explanations already clearly put in the public domain.

§ Mr. Prescott
Did the right hon. Gentleman authorise the Tory party chairman to instruct Conservative central office to brief The Daily Telegraph on Lord Mackay's speech? Will he confirm whether the Lord Chancellor ever intended to warn the judiciary not to overstep its powers? Was such a statement ever contained in a draft prepared by the Lord Chancellor? Is it not time someone made a public apology to the Lord Chancellor?

§ The Deputy Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman has been listening to the spin doctors of the Labour party. These matters have been fully explored by my right hon. Friends. If the hon. Gentleman wants to pursue them further, he can table specific questions to the people responsible; he will be told again what he has been 683 told before. The hon. Gentleman is deliberately trying to misrepresent events, in compliance with the worst excesses of his party's manipulation machinery.