CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE FOREIGN SECRETARY AND M. GOUNARIS.

HL Deb 11 December 1922 vol 52 cc349-56

THE MARQUESS OF LINCOLNSHIRE had given Notice of the following Question:— To ask His Majesty's Government whether the Foreign Office endorses the allegation made by the Earl of Birkenhead in the House of Lords on December, 7 that the correspondence between the late M. Gounaris and the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston was never circulated to him and other members of the late Cabinet; and if the documents were not so circulated whether they have any explanation to offer.

The noble Marquess said: My Lords, on Thursday last when the House rose the few members who were present left, I think, in a state of something like bewilderment. The noble and learned Earl, Lord Birkenhead, had a Question on the Paper in which he asked the Government whether the correspondence between M. Gounaris and the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, as published in theSunday Express, was authentic. He then read the letter of M. Gounaris, who, as we all know, is no longer living, and he was about to read Lord Curzon's reply, when Lord Beaverbrook rose to state that Lord Curzon of Kedleston's letter was not published in that edition of theSunday Express. Later in the debate he gave his reason for this. That reason was one which seemed to suggest itself to the members of your Lordships' House also. So far as I remember—I forget the exact words—he said that it would not have been right to publish that letter inasmuch as the noble Marquess was out of the country engaged on a difficult and delicate mission, or words to that effect.

Then the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, asked a not unnatural question—If this letter was not published in one of the great Sunday papers, where did the noble and learned Earl get the information? The noble Marquess said— Will the noble and learned Earl tell us where he has obtained a copy of the letter he is going to read? The, noble and learned Earl preferred not to answer the question, but he said, "I accept the responsibility of quoting this answer at, once," which he then proceeded to do. I must say that I do not intend in any way to make continent of any sort, description, or kind upon what those letters contained.

Subsequently, we had the official answer to the Question. It was that the quotations from M. Gounaris' Note, which appeared in theSunday Express, were exact and that the summary of the Secretary of State's reply was substantially correct. That, would appear to have settled the matter, but the noble and learned Earl went a bit further. He moved for Papers and then made an announcement which, I think, somewhat startled the House. He said, as regards the Paper containing these letters— I am confident that I never saw that letter. I am confident that this most grave matter was not circulated to me. He turned to the noble Viscount, Lord Lee of Farehain—the noble viscount, the Duke of Marlborough and the noble and learned Earl were at the time the only occupants of the Front Opposition Bench— and asked him whether he had seen it, and proceeded— My noble friend Lord Lee of Fareham tells me that he never saw it. And he continued by saying that had that document been circulated he would have asked for a Cabinet meeting. He also explained what he would have done in the circumstances, but with that I need not trouble the House. But he went on to say— Think of the misfortunes and horrors that would have been avoided had such advice— that is, the advice which he indicated— been given. We had not the opportunity, because I never saw the letter, nor did, so far as I know, any one of my colleagues. Then the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, rose to make his reply.

The noble Marquess has been leading the House with much courtesy and ability, and I think there was a good deal of sympathy with him on this occasion, for it appeared to others, as it did to me, that this Question had been somewhat prematurely forced upon him. The noble Marquess was not a member of the late Government, and it occurred to some of us that it was a little hard that he should he called upon to explain what had happened, rightly or wrongly, in a Government of which he was not a member. I do not know whether I am correct or not, but it seemed to me Os though there was more than he was prepared to state to the House at the moment, and that he was, apparently, in some official difficulty in saving what he knew. Therefore, all he said was that he thought that probably the noble Earl would find that, if not in his own case, at any rate in the case of his more important colleagues, this correspondence was circulated. He left it at that. The matter dropped for the time and we all went home, slightly bewildered upon the second point. I have no desire to take up the time of the House further, but I hardly think that any of us would agree that the matter should remain as it is, and, therefore, with great respect, I ask His Majesty's Government the Question that stands in my name on the Paper.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY)

My Lords, I am very much obliged to the noble Marquess who has just sat down for the extremely courteous way in which he has put his Question in the House. It is quite true. that, in speaking on Thursday, I was rather reluctant to go an inch beyond what was absolutely necessary in answering the Question put to me by the noble and learned Earl, because I am of opinion that the less that is said publicly of the confidential arrangements between one Minister and another ill a Government, even a Government with which I had no connection, and the relations between the public offices and the Ministers of the Crown, the better. I was anxious, therefore, to say no more than was absolutely necessary. I have had, of course, an opportunity of consultation since then, and I think that what I shall be able to show will be sufficient, though it will be very brief. I should like to preface it by saying that of course I am absolutely at issue with the noble and learned Earl in what he said the other day, yet I shall not for a moment suggest he said what he did without thinking it to be absolutely true.

The answer to the Question is as follows:—Your Lordships will remember that in the course of his observations on Thursday the noble and learned Earl used the following words— I am confident that it— the document or documents he read to the House— was never circulated. He went on— I have never seen it before. Finally, he said— I went to the late Prime Minister and asked him, and he is quite emphatic he hail never seen it before. The facts are as follow: M. Gounaris' Note, dated February 15, was received in the Foreign Office on February 16, and was circulated to the Cabinet in print on February 24. Lord Curzon's reply of March 6 was circulated to the Cabinet in print on March 9. Both these documents are in the files of the Cabinet Office, and the records of the Foreign Office show that they were circulated in the usual way to the Cabinet.

THE EARL OF BIRKENHEAD

My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Marquess for the composure and the moderation which he has employed in circumstances which, so far as he is concerned, do not, I agree at once, lack provocation. I desire to make it quite plain in the first place that he has in this respect, and perhaps in another, a grievance with the necessary form of the Question which I asked—a form which was directed against a Government of which he was not a member, and for whose acts and omissions he had no responsibility at all. But I must ask leave to remind the House, before I come to this question of circulation, of the circumstances in which, and in which alone, I thought it proper to take the responsibility of raising this Question at all.

There appeared in a newspaper which gave before the Election, throughout the Election, and since the Election, a very great deal of support to His Majesty's present Government, and which exhibited, during the period which I have described, a great deal of hostility to the late Prime Minister—there appeared, with sensational headlines, the suggestion that M. Gounaris had written a tragic letter, a suggestion that the omission to deal adequately with that letter might have been responsible for much that had happened, and then a covert and, as I think, most unfair attack upon the late Prime Minister couched in the form of a question: "Did Mr. Lloyd George know?" This letter of M. Gounaris to Lord Curzon was given withverbatim accuracy, as we know now, in the newspaper. I did not know, when the noble Lord, Lord Beaverbrook, intervened in the course of my speech to state that theSunday Express had not published Lord Curzon's reply, that a summary, however short of Lord Curzon's reply had appeared in theSunday Express which contained the only paragraph in Lord Curzon's reply which had any importance from the point of view which I was examining. That paragraph was the one already read to your Lordships in which Lord Curzon said that he hoped that the Greeks would be able to support their position until certain contingencies had been realised. I state this at the outset, because I wish to make plain what were the circumstances that induced me to raise this matter at all.

But that deals with the merits of the question, on which I would say a brief word when I have dealt with the question of circulation. The only concern I have in the matter of circulation— and it is a very deep one— is that I should put myself completely right with your Lordships as to the statement which I made, and, in order that I may do so, I will tell your Lordships the circumstances, so far as they were known to me, and the inquiries which I myself made before made the statement in the House to which the noble Marquess has referred. in the first place, I am absolutely confident that I never set eyes on either of those letters myself until the moment when they were put into my hands after I had read the first of those letters in theSunday Express.

I should, I think, add this, in order to be completely candid in the matter so far as my own personal case is concerned, that I was, as your Lordships know, for some eighteen months before the date on which these letters were written suffering from a growing and anxious affection of my eyes, now I hope happily arrested, which, for some eight or nine months, made it quite impossible for me to read myself, except on very rare occasions, any written matter at all, and prevented me, for the same period, from writing anything in my own handwriting. Your Lordships may remember that it was about a week after the date with which we are now dealing that I asked leave of your Lordships to absent myself for some considerable period from my duties as Lord Chancellor in order that I might seek the advantage of a change for my eyesight. Those circumstances, of course, did not prevent my reading or becoming acquainted with my Foreign Office Papers. Had they done so, I should not have thought it right to continue in my Office at all, because no Minister has any right, in days so grave as those with which we were then confronted, and with which the present Government is perhaps confronted to-day, to remain in Office if he is suffering from a physical disability of a character which would prevent him acquainting himself with such grave matters.

In these circumstances, and in order to save my eyes, I was in the habit of going through the Foreign Office Papers with scrupulous accuracy, so far as I knew them, two or three times a week, with a colleague, a man who was in the main in close agreement with Inv views on foreign affairs, and who was good enough to place before me, in great detail, all the contents of the Foreign Office boxes. It would be an astounding circumstance to me if he, having received if, had omitted to go through this, as he was good enough to go through all the Foreign Office Papers. When I read this letter I was so astounded at its contents that I went immediately to the late Prime Minister and said to him: "I am sure I never saw this letter before. Did you see it before?" He told me that he was quite certain he had never seen it before. He invited me to consult his private secretaries, which I did. They were at the time equally emphatic that they had never satin the letters before, either of them, and that they had never sent the letters to the late Prime Minister for his consideration.

I also inquired of the then Secretary of State for War, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, who, of course, was most deeply concerned. He said: "It is a letter to which I should have attached the greatest possible importance, because it would have had to be put before the Army Council as possibly, and indeed almost certainly, modifying the military position at Chanak. I can find no trace of it at the War Office, and my recollection is clear that I have not seen it before." I then went to Sir Robert Horne, and I asked Sir Robert Horne, who was equally definite in his confirmation of my recollection that the letter had not been circulated. Your Lordships heard Lord Lee of Fareham— the noble Marquess, Lord Lincolnshire, was in error when he said I turned round to Lord Lee and asked him—when I was speaking, interpose to say that he had never seen the document before. Sir Alfred Mond and Mr. Fisher are both confident they had never seen the document.

I mention these facts, not, of course, because I should dream of challenging the statement made, now that attention has been explicitly directed to it by the Foreign Office, but because, as I have said, I should have been most unwilling to have it supposed by any noble Lord in this House that I should have made myself responsible for that statement without having inquired, I may say without exaggeration, from, I think, every one of my colleagues who does not happen to be a member of the present Government, and I should certainly have asked any of my then colleagues who were members of the present Government had I happened to meet them. I took the trouble of making all these inquiries from almost every colleague of first-class importance who was associated with me at the time under consideration. It is undoubtedly clear that in two, and perhaps three, of those cases the Papers in question have been discovered in the boxes or returned Papers of the Ministers concerned. I omitted to say that I consulted Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who gave me the same clear and confident opinion that he had never seen the letters. Mr. Chamberlain, on the floor of the House of Commons the other day, said that he would be astonished if it were discovered that he had ever seen them. The only reason I have for making this plain is that I have borne for many years a position of great responsibility in your Lordships' House, and I should deeply deplore if any noble Lord thought that I had not made inquiries. I made all the inquiries I could.

I accept unreservedly the statement made by the noble Marquess that these Papers were circulated. Whether the explanation is to be found in the fact that the circulation was to some extent a limited one, or in the fact that it was only a circulation to Ministers more important than myself, I do not know. But I am bound to accept the statement unreser- verily, and as I do accept it, it follows that I must express my sincere regret to every person at the Foreign Office, from the highest to the lowest, who was concerned with the duty of circulating the document, for a statement that may have appeared to have reflected on the competence and fidelity with which he discharges his duty. I have to add, that I regret extremely that I should have made a statement so confidently in the presence of your Lordships which, when the facts are fully examined, is found to be without foundation.

As to the policy which is involved, and the difficult matters which arise upon it, there is, and must be in the future, much that has to be said. But I have carefully considered the matter and I have reached the conclusion, which your Lordships will no doubt welcome, that an admission of error and a controversial resumption of the political issues involved go ill together, and I am anxious to leave upon your Lordships' mind the impression that I desire to-day to do nothing but express my regret to those upon whose adequate discharge of their duties my statement may appear to have reflected. I leave it there with the expression of my regret.