Contribution
I am going to pause for a second. Let me say first to the Minster that I think everyone who spoke remembered the victims. After the sound of this political gunfire is long forgotten, they will still be suffering the scarring of what happened to them as a result of Mr Epstein’s behaviour, and I would say to the Minister that, without U-turns or whatever, he should say to his Prime Minister that at the next possible opportunity, at that Dispatch Box, he should apologise to those victims for what the Government have done to date.
Secondly, let me say to the Minister that he is highly respected in the House. I see him almost as the last Spartan at Thermopylae, full of arrows as he stands there trying to defend an impossible position. It is a position in which a number of us have been ourselves, so I have some sympathy for him. The simple truth is, however, that I found it very hard to reconcile what he said about this clearance process with what I know was known by the agencies as long ago as 2008 about Mandelson’s behaviour, connections and the like, and the clear possibility of kompromat, to which one of my hon. Friends referred.
There seem to be two possibilities. What often happens with direct vetting is that the agencies produce a series of risks for a Minister, and the Minister—in this case the Prime Minister, I assume—decides that those risks are worth taking. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that the vetting process was completely broken, and somehow or other it did not detect all those things that were in plain sight. That strikes me as implausible. I am afraid that what this Minister has told the House does not seem to figure, especially when it is added to what was said by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee about the report from the propriety and ethics team being produced effectively without the FCDO’s input, which is—again—absolutely astonishing.
The House itself has been remarkably unanimous, with one exception. The Leader of the Opposition made a characteristically sharply focused speech, and she made a number of comments with which, almost uniquely, the leader of every other party here agreed. She said that we needed the information and we needed the accountability. What does that mean? It means something that was highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton): we need the release of all the documents. There is no need to hide behind security, because there is no national interest security issue. The issue is whether the system is working, and we cannot know unless we see those documents. We need the Ministers involved, and the advisers involved, to appear before the relevant Select Committees and to answer questions on this matter—and, if the Minister wants to hide behind security, they can even do that in camera, as long as it is done properly and they have the opportunity to test some of these assertions.
The Minister and others received a great deal of good advice from a number of people, most notably the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but from others too. They said that these problems are bad enough when they are to do with the original error, but they get worse in the cover-up. They get worse if people do not actually admit what has happened. Honesty is not just important in this; it is also a survival characteristic for the Ministers involved.
As I said, the Minister is the last Spartan at Thermopylae. He has not been sent here with the weapons to deal with this. He has not been sent here with the answers to the questions that we all properly have. I will finish as I started, by reminding him about that Bill that the Government announced today. On the Order Paper it is described as a
“Bill to impose a duty on public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness; to make provision for the enforcement of that duty in their dealings with inquiries and investigations; to require public authorities to promote and take steps to maintain ethical conduct within all parts of the authority”.
That is what we expect, and frankly, if we do not get the answers—by the sounds of it, we are not going to get them—we will return to this matter. The entire Opposition will return to the matter, and I suspect some Members from the Minister’s own party will return to the matter. I guarantee that I will be seeking to make sure that Ministers too are covered by the Bill, and when it eventually passes next year, I will be looking at what happens.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the appointment process and the circumstances leading to the dismissal of the former United Kingdom Ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson.