Crispin Blunt
Main Page: Crispin Blunt (Independent - Reigate)(7 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Speaker
Order. I would prefer to save the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) as a specialist delicacy of the House. We will come to him in due course.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady has made the best case she can, and I thank her for that.
Crispin Blunt
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is pursuant to the point of order raised by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) yesterday. There has been a further development, increasing the seriousness of it, which you acknowledged yesterday. On Monday, The Guardian reported the central recommendation of a draft report being put to the Committees on Arms Export Controls. The meeting to consider this was held yesterday in private. On Tuesday, “Newsnight” produced exerts of the text of the draft report, and that was the excepts subject of the hon. Gentleman’s point of order.
Yesterday, the Committees met and resolved to report the matter to the Liaison Committee. As I understand our procedures, the Liaison Committee will have to consider the matter and decide whether it should be referred to the Privileges Committee, which would then have to decide whether and how to pursue this matter. Subsequently, last night, “Newsnight” reported extracts of the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) and me, which can only have come from the consolidated list of amendments circulated to members of the Committees on Tuesday.
Separately, Patrick Wintour in The Guardian today—this was put online at 00.01—reported the number of amendments we had tabled to the report, a fact which was not reported on “Newsnight”. “Newsnight” chose to contextualise the amendments tabled by the right hon. Gentleman and me in the light of our previous membership of the all-party group on Saudi Arabia, work I did in the middle east 12 years ago and the right hon. Gentleman’s record of supporting employment provided by the British defence industry. “Newsnight” emphasised that none of this was improper,
“but it gives you a sense of where people stand”.
In parallel, members of the Committees received between 1,500 and 2,000 emails on Tuesday and overnight, which appear to have been organised on someone’s behalf by Avaaz, a self-styled global citizens movement, which was aware that the Committees were meeting to consider this issue. The right hon. Gentleman believes one of them was from a constituent, but my office did not identify any constituents before it called the organisation to invite it to desist.
Mr Speaker, this amounts to a prima facie case of a deliberate campaign to influence a Select Committee, relying on in-confidence information provided by a Member of this House or their staff. Conceivably, the information could have come from Committee staff, but I think you would agree that that is highly unlikely. I cannot recall an example of such deliberate and repeated leaking of information in our time in the House.
Will you confirm, Mr Speaker, that it would not be open to the Privileges Committee, if this is referred to it, to call in the police, as this is not a criminal matter, but that it would be able to call on the services of private investigators? They would have the capacity to interrogate the electronic records, including deleted emails, relating to potential sources for this confidential and private consideration by Committees of matters, in this instance, of the greatest seriousness, involving life and death issues and the employment of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens. Will you encourage the Liaison Committee to consider this as a matter of urgency, and confirm your view of the seriousness of this attempt to undermine the work of Select Committees?
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I have participated in only two meetings of the Committees on Arms Export Controls, because three other members of the Defence Committee have been nominated as our regular attenders; I have total confidence in them. May I, however, express my disquiet about something I learned only yesterday? The draft report, which is very one-sided, was produced without any heads of report discussion prior to the drafting of the report. That means there was no opportunity for members of the Committees who dissented from the thrust of the report to raise their objections and try to reach consensus before a draft report was produced and then leaked in a very sensational way. I must say, as someone who has been at one remove from the operation of the Committees, that something went terribly wrong with the procedures, because there should have been room for consensus to be built before any such one-sided report was leaked. I say that as someone who is highly critical of Saudi Arabia and in some sympathy with some of the arguments in the draft report.