Contribution
This House stands tall when those across it find common cause in speaking for the people. Our authority is derived from just that. There is immense wisdom present in the House today, and probably even greater wisdom that is not present, but that is not the essence of the root of our authority which is derived from our election, and when the House finds its feet in the way personified by the speech of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), the message broadcast from this place more broadly is that MPs do not merely dance to the tune composed and conducted by the Treasury Bench, or indeed the Opposition Front Bench, but are capable of making judgments of the kind that she epitomised in making her contribution earlier.
I have been part of this process. I will not say that I have sweated blood, but I have certainly spent a great deal of time on it, as has my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright). Over the past weeks, I have seen more of my fellow members of the Intelligence and Security Committee than I have of my own family, as we have trawled through immense numbers of documents.
Following that process, I want to make five points. The first is that the Humble Address—there is a debate to be had about the appropriateness of Humble Addresses; we have rehearsed parts of that debate today—was absolutely explicit in its instructions to the ISC. It empowered the ISC in a unique and unprecedented way to examine those documents concerning international relations and national security pertaining to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the ambassador in America. I do not accept the arguments about the withdrawal of documents and about precedent, because this particular Humble Address empowered the ISC in an unprecedented way.
It did so on 4 February, in expansive terms. There is a case to be made that the Humble Address was too permissive, but that is not for us to debate now, for that was the debate that took place then. For example, it talks about all “electronic communications”, yet we have seen nothing of the videos, recorded messages or other kinds of electronic communications that clearly might be salient to our consideration of whether Peter Mandelson should have been appointed at all, and why he was appointed.
The Humble Address gave the ISC that instruction, and so it is important to make it crystal clear that the ISC is a Committee of Parliament with unique and special legal powers, and those legal powers extend beyond any other Committee of the House and enable the Committee to look at the most sensitive matters of all, such as STRAP documents. I would argue that such documents are as sensitive as, and in many cases more so than, anything that we might have been offered as a result of the Humble Address providing that instruction to us, yet the Government took the decision not to make available to the ISC the vetting file associated with Peter Mandelson. The argument used was that if they did so, it would have a chilling effect on the whole vetting process.
I regard that as specious because it confuses scrutiny with disclosure. The ISC was never going to disclose any of that material—a point made by its former Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). It was a matter for the Government to have faith in the ISC—as the House clearly did—or at least for the Government to reflect the faith of the House in providing all the relevant material to the ISC. But let us leave that to one side.
The Minister might want to come back to this, because my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam, who sits on the ISC with me—indeed, he is the deputy Chairman of that Committee—came to the House with an urgent question, explicitly requesting that the Government return to the subject of the Humble Address to see whether they wished to amend it, to legitimise their decision not to provide that information. The Government chose not to do that. In other words, they chose not to ask the House for consent. That is a highly questionable decision and, frankly, I think the Government will come to regret not coming back to obtain that consent.
Let us move on to my second point. I will not say too much about this, but it is now known—it is in the public domain—that the ISC did receive a summary document. Indeed, some of that summary document has found its way into the public realm by means of a national newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, which clearly had access to information. We heard earlier that there may be an inquiry into how that information found its way into the press, but we were told that that information would not be available in the second tranche of information, even in redacted form, because it was required by the police. However, we do not know when the police made that inquiry or when they decided that the information was vital to their investigations, and we have been given no rationale as to why they might have come to that decision so late in the process. Had they made the decision earlier, we would have saved a lot of time, and the expectation that we might have seen more about vetting would not have been fixed in the minds of Members of this House.
It is important that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is crystal clear about when that request from the Metropolitan police was made, and it would be helpful if he could give us some indication of why. Clearly he could not compromise the investigation or any subsequent legal action, but giving the House some indication of when and why the police changed their tune, as it were, in respect of the summary of the vetting file would be highly desirable.
Let me move on to my third point, which concerns mitigation. I said that there were five points, and I know you are counting them, Madam Deputy Speaker.