Ministerial Code (Culture Secretary)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lucas]

I am surprised that the hon. Lady, who is familiar with this matter, supports the fact that there was such huge contact between a special adviser appointed by the Secretary of State and the proponent of the bid. That was not appropriate and did not lead to the perception that the process was fair and impartial.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Is it not telling that the Secretary of State chose to involve a political appointment—a special adviser, who carries out a solely political function—in a quasi-judicial decision? I did a similar job in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which involved judging on competition policy. It is unthinkable that a political adviser would be called in unless there were political motives.

[Ian Lucas]

I, too, was a Minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and I have no recollection or knowledge of a special adviser behaving in that way. I suggest that the special adviser was appointed because the Secretary of State had an agenda to take forward the bid and ensure it went through. The right hon. Gentleman’s conduct after he was given the quasi-judicial role—when the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills had it taken away from him—was designed to present himself as acting fairly, but everyone knows that his agenda was to get the bid through. It is in his texts and actions. All has been revealed.

The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport is not seen as independent and did not act impartially in the process. He will not be trusted in future to act impartially in any decisions he makes. He therefore should not be in office. He has no credibility. If he goes away from the Chamber and thinks about what has happened in the past hour, he will recognise that. If he has any dignity, when he looks at himself in his shaving mirror he will accept that he should not be in post.

As the Leader of the Opposition said today, it is not the Secretary of State who is on trial, but the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has undermined the independent adviser on ministerial interests by his conduct. We heard a classic example of that today. Purely for partisan political purposes, the Prime Minister wrote to Sir Alex Allan, and received a response the same day— [Interruption.] It was orchestrated—no doubt there was communication between the independent adviser’s office and the Prime Minister’s office.

The Prime Minister said from the Dispatch Box that the letter exonerated the Secretary of State, which is not true. The letter says that an investigation would take the matter no further so far as the facts were concerned, but that is not the job of the independent adviser. His job is to make a judgment based on the facts presented to him, which, the letter goes on to say, he is willing to do.

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[Mr Whittingdale]

I am not in a position to know that but it is a question that the right hon. Gentleman can perfectly fairly put to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary. I want at the end of my speech to say what might happen next, if there are still some questions.

[Kevin Brennan]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. On that matter, would it be in order for the Secretary of State to intervene and clarify the issue that has just been raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham)?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

That is not a point of order. It is up to the Secretary of State to do that if he wishes and John Whittingdale has the floor.

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[Chris Bryant]

I am afraid that the issue is the way in which the back channel was organised through the Secretary of State’s special adviser, Adam Smith, of whom the right hon. Gentleman has said there has never been a closer working relationship between a Minister and a special adviser—and we are meant to believe that the information this person was providing to Sky was not material—and the process whereby all the e-mails that were provided made it absolutely clear what was in the Secretary of State’s mind and how he was trying to secure that outcome.

That brings me to the central charges: first, that the Secretary of State deliberately misled Parliament. He told Parliament in March 2011 that he had published

“all the documents relating to all the meetings—all the consultation documents, all the submissions we received, all the exchanges between my Department and News Corporation.”—[Official Report, 3 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 526.]

That was a very, very emphatic statement, which clearly had not been verified, because then, on 7 September, he tried to backtrack a bit—or cover his tracks. In a written answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), the Secretary of State said:

“A search for correspondence from officials, press officers and special advisers to and from all the individuals listed would incur disproportionate cost to collect.”—[Official Report, 7 September 2011; Vol. 532, c. 616.]

He did not choose to correct the previous statement. He chose not to reveal that he had texted James Murdoch himself and had sent a memo to the Prime Minister. Far from exonerating the Secretary of State, the answer he provided on 7 September proves beyond doubt that he deliberately failed to tell the whole truth to this House. It was only the legal powers vested in Leveson that forced the truth out into the open.

[Kevin Brennan]

On that point, is it not a further requirement of the ministerial code that the Secretary of State should be as open as possible with Parliament? His conduct in this matter, and in the instance that my hon. Friend has mentioned, is clearly an example of his not being as open as possible with Parliament.

[Chris Bryant]

This House has regularly excoriated Ministers when they have resorted too swiftly to the argument that it is too expensive to provide the full information, but to be honest, I cannot see how it could have been too expensive to have found the memo that the Secretary of State wrote to the Prime Minister—or, for that matter, the text messages that the Secretary of State sent to the people concerned.

There are some other facts to be dealt with. The deliberate nature of the misinformation is also evidenced by the Secretary of State’s response, following his statement in April this year, to questions from two Back Benchers—both doubtless inspired directly by the Whips, as was the question posed earlier by the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns). When one Back Bencher—helped, I am sure—asked him how many conversations he had had, meaning how many with News International and News Corporation, the Secretary of State said, quite categorically and emphatically, “zero”. When another Back Bencher—a Conservative Member; this did not come out of the blue—asked whether the Secretary of State recognised the conversations attributed to him by Fred Michel, he said:

“I do not. Throughout the bid process, when I got responsibility for it, the contact that I had with Fred Michel was only at official meetings that were minuted with other people present. The fact is that there is a whole pile of e-mails—54 in total—in which he talks about having contact with me, but that simply did not happen.”—[Official Report, 25 April 2012; Vol. 961, c. 543.]

Neither response was unpremeditated; they were deliberately placed on the record. Both are deliberate obfuscations and lies.

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[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to follow the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). I think that his last remarks should be heard by the Secretary of State, who, at the very least, must conclude that there was a gross dereliction of duty in his failure to supervise and properly manage his special adviser on an issue that was not a minor matter for his Department but an £8 billion takeover at the centre of the media dominating our country. It is inconceivable that the Secretary of State was able, as he claims, to allow his special adviser to operate in such a way without ever knowing what was going on. That alone should be cause for him to consider his position.

Secondly, let us deal with this idea, compounded by the Prime Minister today, that Sir Alex Allan’s letter in any way vindicates the Prime Minister’s decision not to send this matter to the independent adviser. The question is not the facts, but the judgment that should be made on the facts. That can be done only by Sir Alex Allan. The case of Baroness Warsi has been referred to him, and the Prime Minister did not suggest today that there were any unknown facts in her case; he wanted the independent adviser’s view on her conduct. That is all Labour Members are asking for in this case—and not a single argument has been given for resisting it.

Many of the facts are known, but I want to concentrate on the part that briefly involved me personally in the saga. As shadow Business Secretary, I was preparing—until the previous Business Secretary was caught declaring war on Murdoch—to shadow this procedure. When the decision was taken to refer it to the Culture Secretary, I wrote to Sir Gus O’Donnell on 22 December, referring to public statements made by the Secretary of State and asking whether, in the light of those statements, Sir Gus was satisfied that the Secretary of State could rule with impartiality on this matter.

As is now well known, Sir Gus replied to me on 22 December, stating, having taken advice:

“I am satisfied that those statements do not amount to a pre-judgement of the case in question”.

That seems pretty clear, and that was the judgment made at the time. The judgment has been relied upon by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State on countless occasions since to justify the Secretary of State’s being asked to exercise that role. It is now clear, is it not, that Sir Gus O’Donnell did not have available to him or his lawyers all the evidence that he might have considered about the suitability or the impartiality of the Secretary of State? Not only that, as the Culture Secretary and the Prime Minister, who relied on Sir Gus’s advice, actively, knowingly and deliberately kept the Cabinet Secretary in the dark about what had been going on between them in respect of matters that were at the very least entirely relevant to whether this Secretary of State was a suitable person to conduct this process.

[Kevin Brennan]

While my right hon. Friend was making this accusation, the Culture Secretary was shaking his head. He now has an opportunity to refute the allegation by intervening. Would my right hon. Friend welcome such an intervention?

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[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.

[Kevin Brennan]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[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.

[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.

[Kevin Brennan]

Will the Leader of the House give way?

[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.