16:12 - The House divided: - Ayes: 252 / Noes: 290 - Question accordingly negatived.
Mr Speaker
Order. [Interruption.] Order. Let me say to the House that the substantive matter under consideration reflected in the terms of the motion is whether the House of Commons has been misled in any way. That is the thrust of the matter under debate and the Secretary of State is making a very clear defence of himself, so when Members cavil and inquire whether what we have heard is legitimate, I am guided by advice and I operate on the basis that there is a substantive motion, which is what the whole debate is about and in relation to which the Secretary of State is speaking.
In general terms, the normal principles of “Erskine May” about moderation and good humour apply, but I cannot preclude—[Interruption.] Order. I cannot preclude a Member operating in accordance with the terms of the motion. The Secretary of State—[Interruption.] Order. I require no assistance from the Immigration Minister. The Minister should sit, be calm and listen intently. If he does not want to do so, he can leave the Chamber.
The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not sure whether everyone heard correctly the allegation that was made by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). As I understood it, he accused my right hon. Friend of lying to Parliament. My understanding is that that is unparliamentary language and that it should be withdrawn. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]
Mr Speaker
Members can shout as loudly or for as long as they like, but it will make no difference. I am simply saying that on the advice that I have taken, nothing disorderly has occurred. [Interruption.] Order, Mr Brennan. I simply ask the Secretary of State to continue with his case.
I appeal to Members to exercise restraint in the frequency—[Interruption.] Order. Members must exercise restraint in the frequency with which they intervene for the debate to continue in an orderly way and for there to be a reasonable opportunity for Members from both sides of the House to contribute.
The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
Although I wish that I could say that this has been a good debate, and despite some good contributions to it, it has not been. At business questions, I am asked by Members on both sides of the House for serious debates about matters of interest to our constituents. I contrast that with the miserable, opportunistic debate that we have had today. This has been a wasted opportunity, when we could have been debating issues of real interest to our constituents, such as Syria or the eurozone. Instead, we have been diverted on to this matter.
Let me deal with some of the contributions. The hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) made no distinction at all between the actions of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State before he assumed responsibility for the bid and those that he took afterwards. That was seized on by my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), who said that it would have been astonishing if the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport had had no views on the issue before he took responsibility for it, but that he subsequently made it absolutely clear that he was acting properly and in accordance with the law in dealing with that responsibility.
My hon. Friend also made the interesting point that it was the last Labour Government who changed and expanded the role of special advisers—a matter that has now been referred to Alex Allan. Along with other hon. Members, my hon. Friend referred to the Public Administration Committee report, to which the Government will respond in due course.
Sir George Young
I will make just a little more progress.
The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) made an uncharacteristically partisan speech. He focused on the performance of this Government, but conveniently overlooked all the failures of ministerial performance in the previous one. There was a gap in the account that he related to the House.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr Foster) made it absolutely clear that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State handled the bid by the book, to use his words, and had at several points taken decisions against the interests of News International. He said that one or two issues remained, although as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said, they were not defined. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bath implied that the failure to consult was behind the Liberal Democrats’ decision as much as anything else.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
I am not one of those who has disputed the Secretary of State’s honesty, but there is the question of responsibility for special advisers. The ministerial code states that responsibility for the management and conduct of special advisers, including, but not only, discipline, rests with the Minister who made the appointment. How did the Secretary of State effect that responsibility for the management and conduct of his special adviser?
Sir George Young
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made a statement to the House shortly afterwards and was cross-examined on that specific issue for a substantial time. He explained exactly what his responsibilities were and the action that he had taken.
Sir George Young
No, I will make a little more progress.
I very much regret the intervention that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Despite Mr Speaker’s ruling, I believe that it did nothing to enhance Parliament’s reputation. I very much hope that at some point the hon. Gentleman will consider withdrawing what he said.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) referred to the thoughtful report that his Committee had just produced—before the recent controversy, as he pointed out. He rehearsed the argument for the role of the adviser on ministerial interests being self-starting rather than his having to wait for a referral. The Government will of course respond to that report in due course. He also touched on broader issues to do with the civil service and special advisers.
The best speech from the Labour Benches, if I may say so, came from the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), but he missed the point by not distinguishing between what my right hon. Friend did before and after he assumed responsibility. He produced no evidence at all of my right hon. Friend’s decisions being in any way contaminated by what had happened before he assumed responsibility.
Mr Denham
Surely the issue for today’s debate is not the Secretary of State’s conduct on the merger but how he acted in relation to the provision of information to the House. My contribution did not deal one way or the other with his conduct on the merger; it was about his failure to disclose to the Cabinet Secretary his attempts to influence the decision before it was his responsibility.
Sir George Young
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State dealt with that point substantially in his contribution.
My hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) contrasted the actions of the previous Government with Labour Members’ criticism of the coalition Government, implying that they expect higher standards of us than they expected of themselves.
The hon. Member for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) said that today’s debate was the only opportunity for the House to deal with the matter, ignoring the role of Select Committees, the statement that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made and the urgent question answered by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) made a robust defence of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and rightly made the point that the ultimate decision rests with the Prime Minister. My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) said that the Opposition’s fox had been shot by the exchange of letters published today.
On the matter at hand, the controversy surrounding the Culture Secretary’s handling of the BSkyB bid first arose on 24 April. The next day, the Prime Minister responded to questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time and the Culture Secretary came to the House to give a full account of himself for just over an hour. The following week, the Prime Minister answered questions for 52 minutes, and two weeks ago my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State appeared in front of Lord Justice Leveson for almost eight hours. And yet when did the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) first call for his resignation? At 4.30 pm on 24 April, before a single question had been raised in Parliament and before he had had an opportunity to respond to any of the allegations.
Sir George Young
No. This is what the right hon. and learned Lady said on the BBC—
Sir George Young
When the right hon. and learned Lady was questioned on the BBC on whether she had read the evidence before calling for the resignation of the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, she said:
“I already had formed the view that Jeremy Hunt had acted totally inappropriately even before those emails were published because when I saw James Murdoch’s evidence to Leveson, it was quite clear the Culture Secretary had given James Murdoch to understand that he was not impartial in the bid, that he was on his side”.
The right hon. and learned Lady is a former Leader of the House and I have respect for her, but is that not an extraordinarily ill-judged intervention for a qualified solicitor, a former Solicitor-General and an honorary Queen’s counsel? In what kind of banana republic would a lawyer convict somebody without a shred of evidence and before having had the opportunity to cross-examine a witness? If she is so quick to trust the word of a Murdoch at face value, will she today back Rupert Murdoch’s version of his telephone conversation with the former Prime Minister?
The truth is that the only people who made up their minds before looking at any of the facts were the right hon. and learned Lady and the Leader of the Opposition, not the Prime Minister. She has at least climbed down from the initial demand for resignation. She is now asking for a referral to the independent adviser—[Interruption.] That is the motion on the Order Paper. She has engaged in a humiliating climbdown.
Let us look at the case for referral. The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport has already been referred to, and attended, a forum that is, in a sense, far more rigorous than any process that Sir Alex Allan could follow. What could be more rigorous than eight hours of questioning by an experienced barrister, in public, on TV, under oath, in front of a judge-led inquiry?
Sir George Young
Nothing could be designed by the civil service that could come close to that level of scrutiny.
Sir George Young
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I hope he enhances his reputation by withdrawing the remark he made about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Chris Bryant
I am not going to withdraw anything; I will repeat the accusation. The Secretary of State deliberately misled this House. Why, when the Prime Minister spoke to the House and the Secretary of State answered a written question on 7 September, and on all the occasions to which the Leader of the House has referred, did they choose not to correct the record? The Secretary of State never chose to point out that he had written to the Prime Minister and been in correspondence with him, or that everything he said in the Chamber had been a lie?
Sir George Young
Not only has the hon. Gentleman made an accusation, he did not substantiate it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State answered in his initial remarks all the hon. Gentleman’s points.
A number of Opposition Members referred to the Public Administration Committee report on the role of the independent adviser on Ministers’ interests. The Prime Minister has simply followed the precedent established by the previous Prime Minister. When the Committee recommended in the previous Parliament that the independent adviser be allowed to initiate his own inquiries—precisely the recommendation made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex—the outgoing Labour Government responded:
“it must ultimately be for the Prime Minister to account to Parliament for his decisions and actions in relation to the appointment of his Ministers.”
The Opposition’s charges against my right hon. Friend the Culture Secretary have been answered at length by my right hon. Friend and by the Prime Minister. On the question of misleading Parliament, the Culture Secretary has today responded in detail to each and every one of the Opposition’s allegations and he has swatted them away with relish. On the matter of special advisers, which is specifically referred to in the motion, it is unfortunate for Labour that that subject has been brought up in the same week as the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), sat before the Leveson inquiry and denied, as only he could, any knowledge that his political team briefed against his fellow Ministers and unleashed hell on his Chancellor. Indeed, it was lucky that we could see the former Prime Minister on our TV screens at all given that the air was thick with the smell of cordite from the smoking guns pointing in his direction.
Let me remind the House what the former Prime Minister said on Monday when asked whether his special advisers briefed against ministerial colleagues:
“I would hope not. I have no evidence of that.”
Let us see what the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday to the same inquiry:
“On Damian McBride, when I was a Cabinet Minister, I did raise a specific concern that I had with Mr Brown, I believe in…2008, about some of Mr McBride’s activities.”
As the shadow Justice Secretary said this morning on the BBC, they cannot both be right. It ill behoves the Opposition to lecture this Government on Ministers taking responsibility for their special advisers when the former Prime Minister took no responsibility for what his advisers got up to.
The issues we have been debating today will not divert the coalition from its core task of dealing with the huge deficit we inherited and rebalancing the economy. The Opposition are one party united in their opportunism; we are two parties coming together to sort out the mess they left behind. I urge the House to reject the motion.
Question put.