Bob Seely
Main Page: Bob Seely (Conservative - Isle of Wight)
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
In High Wycombe, joy and celebration abound, because just last Monday, Wycombe Wanderers football club were promoted to the championship. I put on record how proud of them the whole town is. It is a miraculous achievement and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will join me in congratulating them.
The first point I want to make about the Government’s business is that it is time to repeal and replace the Coronavirus Act 2020. I have made my case in a Red Box article in The Times today, and I am very grateful to The Times for carrying it. I am also very grateful to Liberty for its comprehensive and, indeed, abridged briefing, which it provided to Members and which I thoroughly recommend.
What we have seen since I stood over there and made a speech—which I think went fairly viral—in opposition to the range and scope of the Bill, is, as I made very clear, a dramatic expansion of powers being passed in an undesirably swift way. Of course, the Government needed to act in haste in all the circumstances. I do not by any means judge my right hon. and hon. Friends for that. They needed to do it, but they now have the luxury of time over the summer recess and, indeed, new information from what we have learned from the progress of the pandemic. I just say to them that this dramatic edifice of powers and regulations related to coronavirus and public health and their basis in law must now be reviewed comprehensively. Parliament must in future have a chance to scrutinise necessary powers properly, and the public must have confidence that rules are proportionate and have been reasonably made. Conservative Ministers worthy of the name cannot afford to be—and I am sure are not—cavalier about civil liberties. With that in mind, I implore my hon. Friend the Minister to look at repealing the Coronavirus Act and replacing it.
Let me move on to set the record straight for an individual and thereby try to right an injustice. As will become clear, I am the only recourse that this individual has. But I want to start by talking about trade policy, of all things. The UK Government are now embarked on a trade policy that most Members will know about: it will flatten power and make it more accountable to change the structure of power in the world to reinvigorate the global trading system, just at the moment when we need it. The UK is going to catalyse that change, but it is perhaps the biggest politics.
Many of the people associated with the journey of formulating that trade policy, from the days when the Legatum Institute special trade commission was doing that job, and I was working with them, have been exposed to and suffered really vitriolic attacks. Indeed, I would say that I have suffered malevolent attacks. Today, though, I want particularly to defend Christopher Chandler, who is the founder of Legatum and that family of companies.
On 1 May 2018, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) made a speech, the main object of which was Christopher Chandler. I wish to acknowledge the nobility of my hon. Friend’s intent, because any Member of Parliament presented with such a dossier would face difficult questions about what to do with it. He referred to a call for an Intelligence and Security Committee investigation of Mr Chandler, who does not appear in the recent ISC report.
We might, then, ask what Mr Chandler and others did. Legatum, the company that Mr Chandler founded with three partners and of which he is the chairman, commissioned an extensive forensic investigation into the claims by former members of law enforcement and military intelligence. Richard Walton, the former head of counter-terrorism command at the Metropolitan police performed his own independent review of the findings of that investigation and concluded that the allegations made by MPs in the House were totally false. Mr Walton has today briefed me on the reasons why he has drawn that conclusion, and I am absolutely satisfied that the reason why Mr Chandler has not been called to face charges is because there are no charges that he should face. He is an innocent man and, whatever the noble intent of my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight, I am afraid that Mr Chandler has been unjustly dealt with.
Legatum told me today: “When given the opportunity to present the truth, Legatum has overwhelmingly prevailed in 13 out of 14 actions in the UK, resulting in a stream of corrections, retractions and apologies.” This is, then, fundamentally a case of justice. As I say, I believe that Mr Chandler has absolutely no case to answer; it is just that under the system we currently have an individual has no recourse to what is said in the House of Commons, other than a Member of Parliament standing up for them. At some point the House is going to have to deal with the issue of a right to reply.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; I was aware of what he was going to say. He makes a really important point and, respectfully, I listen with care. Clearly, a right of reply may strengthen the credibility of privilege, such that we could see it as a questioning event in the public interest rather than an accusatory one. I am in favour of that, because I want the privileges that we have to have credibility. I hear what he says and I respectfully listen to what he says and to what he says about his friends. I would merely say that parliamentarians who care about the relevance of this place wrestle with what the right thing to do and say is, sometimes in complex and difficult circumstances. Does he agree that we all try to act in the best possible way? If there is work to be done on updating privilege, I am very happy to join that.
Mr Baker
I would not expect my hon. Friend to go any further than that today and I am very grateful to him for what he has said. That will have been heard and I am grateful to him.
In the urgent question earlier, I said something about Legatum’s work on Russia, which I think is honourable and noble. It would be strange indeed if Mr Chandler was connected to Russian intelligence, given that he has put so much investment into fighting the effects of Russian wrongdoing. I have already mentioned trade policy; it is rare indeed that one can say that somebody has facilitated so much benefit to so many people.
Let me say a little more, because Mr Chandler is also a believer in private philanthropy. Since its founding in 2012, the END Fund has facilitated the delivery of more than 720 million treatments relating to neglected tropical diseases, in 27 of the world’s poorest countries. His Freedom fund has liberated 24,277 men, women and children. His Luminos fund has, through its Second Chance accelerated-learning programme, seen 132,611 children brought back to school. Mr Chandler is not a man who should have been vilified; he is an inspiration.
Injustice is not always brought down on the heads of the weak. Virtue does not always belong to the poor. On this occasion, I have had to do something, which would have been far better had I not had to do it, and that is to defend a man who is wealthy and strong, but who has been placed in a position without a right to reply, and it has been necessary for me to stand up today and to seek to set the record straight and to defend his honour. I say again that Richard Walton, the former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, has investigated all of these matters and said, “The allegations made in the House of Commons are totally false.” If you will allow me Mr Deputy Speaker, my last words are from a quote chosen by Mr Chandler himself:
“Truth ultimately prevails where there are pains to bring it to light.”
I have taken those pains today. Let truth prevail.