Following questions to the Secretary of State for Wales on 7 July, Members raised with me points of order relating to the matters on which the Secretary of State can be questioned following the transfer of powers on 1 July. This issue also applies to questions to the Secretary of State for Scotland. I should emphasise that I do not wish the rules relating to questions to become unduly restrictive; but a fundamental rule relating to questions is that they must relate to matters for which Ministers in this House are responsible.

I also note that the Procedure Committee, whose report on the procedural consequences of devolution has still to be debated, recently concluded that the rules for questions must recognise the fact of devolution and limit the range of permissible questions to Ministers at Westminster.

Where matters have been clearly devolved to the Scottish Parliament or to the Welsh Assembly, questions on the details of policy or expenditure would not be in order. Where Secretaries of State have a residual, limited or shared role, questions should relate to that role.

Examples of such limited areas of responsibility are: information that the United Kingdom Government are empowered to require of the devolved Executive; matters that are included in UK legislation relating to Scotland; all primary legislation relating to Wales; matters subject to substantive liaison arrangements between UK Government and the devolved Executives; operation of any remaining administrative powers.

In the case of reserved matters that are the responsibility of other Government Departments, questions should be tabled to the relevant Secretary of State. If questions are inappropriately directed to the Secretaries of State for Scotland or Wales, I would expect Ministers to transfer them to the responsible Department in the usual way.

These guidelines follow directly from the decisions of the House in enacting the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998, and will ensure that priority is given to questions on those matters for which Ministers here are responsible. The House will also be greatly helped if Ministers confine their answers to matters for which they have responsibility.

I have offered this guidance to the House to enable the Table Office better to advise all Members on orderly questions. Once the House has had a chance to debate the fourth report of the Procedure Committee and the House has had some experience of the operation of the rules, I shall, of course, review the terms of my ruling.

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. May I ask whether Lord Steel of Aikwood, as the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, will also put before Holyrood the same stringent guidelines—the mirror image reversed—so that if we obey the rules that you have, understandably, set out, Madam Speaker, the same rules will be obeyed by the Holyrood Parliament? Have there been discussions along those lines?

I always inform the House first, and I have just done so. The guidance will be sent to Holyrood now that I have made my statement. These are not stringent rules. I have tried to be helpful to the House and to Ministers. These are simply guidelines until we have the fourth report from the Procedure Committee debated and until we see how things work. Perhaps we can then look at matters afresh. As I have said, I shall review these guidelines.

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. Is there any mechanism whereby you can ensure and guarantee to the House that any legislation brought before the House by a private Member or by the Government is in no way unduly influenced by money changing hands, or by threats of money changing hands in one way or another? Is there a mechanism whereby we can ensure that, so that the legislative mechanism is seen not to be unduly influenced by wealthy people making threats, even to the Government of the day?

I have considerable responsibilities, but I fear that they do not go that far. Of course, we have the Neill committee on which we rely a great deal. Perhaps that is a matter that the Neill committee may consider in the coming months.

Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker.

I am sorry, Mr. Kaufman. I have dealt with the point of order. There can be no further point of order.

With your permission, Madam Speaker, I shall make a personal statement.

The Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, in its eighth report published on 29 June 1999, considered the first special report of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs on a premature disclosure of reports on Sierra Leone. The Standards and Privileges Committee concluded that my action as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in making available to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office a draft of the Committee report was

"a serious interference with the select committee system",

and that my conduct fell below the standards that the House was entitled to expect from its Members.

I believe that all hon. Members should accept reports of the House that are critical of them, and of course I do so. I therefore apologise to the House for my actions in this matter. With your permission, Madam Speaker, I shall now withdraw from the House.

Thank you, Mr. Ross.

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I have just been to the Vote Office, and the Northern Ireland Bill that has just been presented is not available to right hon. and hon. Members. The Vote Office tells me that it has been told that the Bill may be available by 9 pm this evening, but that there is no guarantee of that.

I understand that the content of Bills and when they are debated in the House is a matter for the Government and not for you, Madam Speaker, but I wonder whether you have some power to help Back Benchers. The Bill may literally affect the peace of the realm. We are told that the Government expect it to go through all of its stages tomorrow. Have you the power to specify a time beyond which it would not be acceptable for the Bill to be made available to Back Benchers, if indeed it is to be considered tomorrow?

Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. Can you also advise the House how you envisage that it will be possible for hon. Members properly to consider such a Bill, properly to consult those who may legitimately be interested in it, and more crucially, properly to table amendments? how can the House have time to consider the original text of the Bill and the text of any amendments that may be tabled? Your advice is essential in this case, because there seems to be a great danger that the House will get itself into extreme difficulty in legislating properly, with such absurd time constraints placed on it.

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Order. The Leader of the House and I are quite capable of dealing with the matter so far.

Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. Of course I understand the anxieties expressed by right hon. and hon. Members, and I respect in particular the concerns of Back-Bench Members who have not been involved in the detailed discussions.

It may be helpful to the House to know that discussions are proceeding to try to get the Bill as strong and as robust as we can, so that there will broad agreement. The Leader of the Opposition and other relevant, closely involved parties are being kept informed and involved in those discussions. We hope that the Bill will be available in time for amendments to be tabled before Second Reading. That can be facilitated if the House agrees a motion that the Government have already tabled for decision later today.

rose—

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Order. May I just reply to those points of order. I am not in a position to delay tomorrow's legislation in any way. I am aware that Bill is not available—I made inquiries myself—but that is not unusual, as hon. Members of long standing will be aware. It is not disorderly, and it is no discourtesy to the house, not to have a Bill ready at this stage. That has happened on a number of occasions and we have heard what the Leader of the House said.

Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. I understand—and, indeed, I know from my own experience—that sometimes Government Bills are produced to the House when they are not in their final form. I cannot immediately think, however, of any example of that being the case when a Bill was to be put through all its stages the following day. I have to say through you that, as a Back Bencher, I want the protection of the Chair against those arrangements, which the Leader of the House tells us are being made in corners and behind Benches, even if they are being made with the most distinguished Members of the house. Your protection is for the vast majority of Members—the Back Benchers, who have as much right, duty and responsibility as the Front Benchers to consider the legislation.

The right hon. Gentleman might put those points about his dissatisfaction with matters in the Second Reading debate.

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. My point of order arises from your statement, which will be very much welcomed in Wales, and I hope that we can avoid the confusion of last Wednesday. It has been suggested that Members representing constituencies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should no longer vote on matters affecting England only and that the House would act as an English Parliament on certain occasions. You will recall that we were all elected as representatives of the United Kingdom. Could you give some guidance, now or possibly in the future, on what the conduct of Members of Parliament should be when matters affecting England only come before the house?

I expect all Members who have been elected to the House to participate in all the procedures of the house. Whether that means going into the Lobby or not is up to them. It is not for me to determine whether Members should vote, but as far as I am concerned, they certainly have the right, the privilege and the responsibility so to do.

On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I am sorry to return to this matter for a moment, but it is of considerable importance. The Northern Ireland Bill has been presented, but its Second Reading is not until tomorrow, when all stages will be taken. May we have the assurance that you, or whoever is in the Chair, will ensure that manuscript amendments will be accepted by the Clerks at the Table? That is imperative. Members may wish to amend the Bill, even if there has been agreement on it between those on the two Front Benches.

I am very tolerant of such things, but that is a matter for the Chair. When the amendments come in, I shall certainly look at them and be as helpful as I can.

Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. Whatever the precedent may have been, is it not unsatisfactory in terms of the proceedings of this House—quite apart from the time scale involved—for the Government to have presented a Bill that is not yet in its final form? Surely the time has come for Bills to be presented to the House in a form that the House can debate.

I have already indicated to the House that that is not a disorderly practice. Other Governments have presented Bills in a similar way. If there is a strong feeling among Members about Bills being ready when they are presented for First Reading, that is a matter for the Procedure Committee.

The House is grateful to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) and his Committee for the report and for the work that went into it. Its conclusions, which we are invited to approve, are divided into two: those that relate to the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), and those that relate to the Foreign Secretary and his Department. I do not propose to dwell on the former; the hon. Gentleman has recognised the offence and has apologised. If the House approves the motion, which I support, he will be punished by suspension and the incident will inevitably cast a small shadow over his future career, but the House is, by tradition, forgiving, generous and non-vindictive in such circumstances. I propose to respect that tradition and to say no more about him.

The bulk of the conclusions, however, are not about the hon. Member for Dundee, West; they are about the Government. With respect to the Leader of the house, the Select Committee and the Houseare entitled to a fuller explanation of what is said about them than the formal moving of a motion.

The second part of the report is symptomatic of how the Government have treated the House of Commons and its institutions. The hon. Member for Dundee, West has at least apologised for what he did to the Select Committee; the Government have not, despite having been asked to do so on several occasions—and they should. They used information, to which they knew they were not entitled, to denigrate a Select Committee report before it was published. As Andrew Parker wrote in the Financial Times on 24 February,

"Tony Blair, Prime Minister, and Mr. Cook went on the offensive to rubbish the report on the morning of publication, describing its criticisms as disproportionate and unfair".

As my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) pointed out at the time, that was before the report was published.

The Foreign Secretary, when invited to apologise on 24 February, refused to do so; nor has he done so in his correspondence with the Select Committee, published in the report. It is typical of his high-handed approach, as is his refusal to attend this debate. He should have apologised, not least in view of the history of problems between him and the Select Committee, which goes back a year to his refusal to respond to its requests for information, and his assertion that the Select Committee had not unearthed a single piece of information not already highlighted in the Foreign Office's own inquiry. If the Foreign Secretary cannot express regret about how the Committee was treated, the Leader of the house, who has a broader responsibility, which I believe she takes seriously, should do so on the Government's behalf.

Before the right hon. Gentleman gets too carried away, I remind him that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary gave unprecedented access to Foreign Office papers and telegrams, which no Minister in the previous Government ever gave or would have dreamed of giving.

The Foreign Secretary should apologise to the Select Committee and to the Housefor how he treated one of its institutions, and I regret that he has not done so.

May I deal briefly with page xv of the report and the role of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee? he is not criticised in the report and I do not criticise him myself. He was good enough to ring me this morning and to explain the background to the final paragraph on that page, which is an extract from a letter from the Foreign Secretary dated 17 March. It says:

"On the day before publication the Chair of the FAC gave a full briefing to Andy Henderson, the head of the FCO Parliamentary Relations Department, making clear that the bulk of the Report's criticism would be27/6/2549 aimed at senior officials. Mr. Henderson minuted that exchange to officials within the FCO."

The questions that arise from that are: first, whether the briefing did take place and, if so, whether it was done with the knowledge and authority of other members of the Select Committee; and, secondly, whether it is common practice for Chairmen of Select Committees to do that in advance of publication. I also pose the question whether the hon. Member for Dundee, West might have referred to the briefing when he spoke after the Foreign Secretary's statement about the leak on 25 February.

The motion says nothing about paragraph 27, which refers to changes in the ministerial code. The Committee asks the Prime Minister to amend the code, and to notify the Committee and the house. Today's debate would have been the right time and place for the Leader of the Houseto respond to that recommendation, instead of moving the motion formally and saying nothing. Has the code been modified and, if so, how? What has happened to the recommendation in paragraph 29, where an undertaking was given on what would happen once the Committee had reported? have those instructions been issued?

Can we now assume that the Foreign Secretary has abandoned the argument that he put in his letter dated 17 March, which was dismissed so conclusively and unanimously by the Committee? I was surprised, as I expect other hon. Members were, to hear the Foreign Secretary assert on the "Today" programme that any Member could sit in on any Select Committee hearing, even when it was deliberating on its report. I trust that we shall hear no more of the spurious defence that the hon. Member for Dundee, West could have gained advance knowledge of the report in that way.

I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman again, but a moment ago he asked about the ministerial code. As the wording of the motion makes plain, the Government accept the report and have accepted the recommendations about the code, and the Prime Minister will review the code in that light. As the motion says that we accept the report, it did not seem necessary to take the time of the Housefurther to elaborate on that.

That is not acceptable. The ministerial code is an important document. It has been changed, but we have not been told how or when it was changed. The right hon. Lady should have told the House at the beginning exactly what action the Government were taking in response to the Select Committee's recommendation.

This whole sorry episode is symptomatic of the way in which the Government and some of their supporters treat Parliament. They seek to bypass, marginalise and undermine it. The leaking of a Select Committee report and its use by Ministers is a short circuit of the system, and it renders less effective one of the instruments of the House that holds the Executive to account. Given the Government's majority, it is even more important that the constitutional checks are not overridden.

Today's debate is about one of the most blatant breaches of one of the conventions of the house. There have been other developments, such as the making of announcements outside the house, the dramatic increase in the number of special advisers, and the use of the Government information service for political ends, which was the subject of a recent debate in the house. Those are signs of an arrogant Government who believe that they no longer have to account for themselves in the Chamber. I had hoped that the Government might have learned some lessons from this sorry episode, but their response so far leads me to doubt that.

3.51 pm

My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary is not criticised in the report. He was under the impression that any Member of Parliament could go to a Select Committee, and that used to be the position. I frequently had to consider what would happen if somebody came into the Public Accounts Committee and witnessed a deliberative meeting. I concluded that I would ask that Member of Parliament to leave, and that if the hon. Member did not leave, I would adjourn the meeting, being prepared to meet on a subsequent occasion.

Standing Orders were changed following the realisation that that was the situation. Not all of us know about these changes. It was some time before I realised that the Standing Order had been changed in that way. The Foreign Secretary was not criticised for that: we pointed out that he was under a misapprehension, and we dealt with it accordingly.

The House has heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), who made a clear and unreserved apology. We welcome that, and respect him for it. The eighth report of the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges follows two special reports from the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, which reported that my hon. Friend had admitted to sending a draft of our report on Sierra Leone to the Foreign Secretary in January, and to speaking to the Foreign Secretary's political adviser about the Committee's final conclusions. He had then resigned from the Committee, and we welcomed his acceptance of responsibility.

The Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the matter was serious, and that such actions were likely to constitute a substantial interference with the Select Committee system. The Select Committee on Liaison, which I chair, took the same view. It subsequently came to light that my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West had also sent to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office the final version of the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on foreign policy and human rights. The Department had also received a draft of the Committee's report on European Union enlargement, although we did not know how it got it.

The Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the possession by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of early versions of its first three reports of the present Session was likely to constitute substantial interference with the Select Committee system. Again, the Liaison Committee took the same view as the Foreign Affairs Committee, and we set out in our report the circumstances surrounding the leak of the Sierra Leone report. If I may, I shall summarise them for the benefit of the house.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West, who disagreed with the course of the Committee's inquiry, faxed a draft of the report to the Foreign Secretary's private office some time in the second week of January. At that time, the Committee was still informally considering successive drafts. My hon. Friend also sent a copy to the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), who did not show it to or discuss it with anyone. The draft report was seen by the Foreign Secretary's political adviser and by a number of officials before it was brought to the attention of the Foreign Secretary and the permanent under-secretary on 1 February. Meanwhile, the Foreign Affairs Committee proceeded to finalise the report, and it was published on 9 February.

The hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) raised the question of a possible leak with you, Madam Speaker, after Question Time that afternoon. You advised him to pursue the matter in the Committee, which he did. The Committee wrote to the Foreign Office, asking whether it had received a copy of the report before its publication.

At the beginning of the Committee's next meeting, on 23 February, my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West admitted responsibility for the leak. The matter was then referred to the Standards and Privileges Committee. After we had begun our inquiry, we postponed consideration until the end of the Kosovo conflict, given the work load of the Foreign Office at the time. We received written evidence from my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and the Clerk of the house, and took oral evidence from certain Foreign Office officials who had seen the report, including the permanent under-secretary of state himself. We gave my hon. Friend the opportunity to appear before the Committee before we finalised our conclusions, but he indicated that he did not wish to do so.

I must emphasise that the Standards and Privileges Committee's conclusions were agreed to unanimously. That has been a characteristic of the Committee, as it was in the case of the more than 600 reports of the Public Accounts Committee, which it was my privilege to chair between 1983 and 1997. There are two main kinds of unanimity: that which results from acceptance of the facts disclosed, and that which relies on fudge to accommodate the various interests involved.

I have been irritated by comments that the Committee was dominated by Labour. In accordance with our rule, its composition reflects the composition of the house, which itself reflects the wishes of the electorate. The Committee certainly does not operate on a party political basis. It contains Labour Members, Conservative Members, a Liberal Democrat and an independent, and all subscribed to the report. There is unanimity on all our reports—including, incidentally, the report on my right hon. Friend the Member for hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson)—and that unanimity is genuine. Moreover, during the Committee's discussions, members sometimes criticise others who belong to the same party. We should nail the claim that the Committee is party political.

The most important aspect of the leak of a draft report to a Minister is the risk that the Department concerned might attempt to influence the considerations of the Committee concerned. That would indeed strike at the heart of the examination of the Executive by a Select Committee: it would constitute a perversion of the system of inquiry. We are satisfied, however, that it did not happen in this instance.

In a letter to us, my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West wrote:

"it became blindingly obvious to me that my actions in sending a copy of the draft Report to my two colleagues had effectively ruled out any opportunity that I had had of submitting substantial or indeed any amendments to this Report".

That is, in fact, what happened.

I am aware of the depth in which the right hon. Gentleman looks into matters such as this. The Houseis grateful for the service that he gives the Committee.

The right hon. Gentleman said that the briefing did not affect the Committee, but does not pre-knowledge of a report in a Department allow that Department to issue a presentation to the press and other media? In this instance, did not that presentation constitute a definite rubbishing of the report before it had even been published—or, at least, at the very moment of its publication? That cannot be to the advantage of those who have spent many months reading the report, and seeing what has been said. Is it not a weakness that we must overcome?

It is a weakness that has been around for a very long time. It should be remembered that the contents of final, confidential, revised documents are frequently relayed 48 hours before publication. Those involved have an opportunity to present their case. In any event, the very fact of an investigation alerts people who are being condemned, or traduced, or being dealt with in some other way, and gives them an opportunity to present their case—and they have a pretty good idea of what that case will be. I do not think that this is a particular problem, but as I have said, if it is, it has been a problem for a long time. Anyway, the Foreign Secretary confirmed that no one at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had any contact with my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West between receipt of the draft and completion of the final report.

At this point, perhaps I should remind the House of the position of those who wish to attend a private meeting of a Select Committee. Until a few years ago, it was possible for any hon. Member to attend such a meeting, but Standing Order No. 126 now allows the Committee to prevent such an intrusion. Therefore, a Minister who is also a Member of the House is not now able either to attend or to see the papers of a Select Committee that the Committee does not want him to see. That is the safeguard that we have now, which did not used to be present.

On 1 March, you, Madam Speaker, asked us to consider the general responsibilities of a Member who received a leaked draft report. We concluded:

"The Committee … entirely shares your view that the fundamental responsibility of a Member who finds himself or herself in this position must be to act in a way which does not impede the committee in the discharge of its responsibilities to the house. In our judgment the Member ought to make no use of leaked committee papers and should return them without delay to the clerk of the committee."

We agreed that the Prime Minister should amend the ministerial code, to require Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries to comply with that guidance. I welcome my right hon. Friend's announcement that he will review the wording of the code in the light of the report.

I should like to make it clear that the report makes no personal criticism of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary or the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd). Clearly, it would have been preferable if they had sent the leaked drafts straight back to the Committee, but, at the time, they did not have the benefit of the advice that we have given the House on the subject. The draft report had been in the Foreign Office for several weeks before the Foreign Secretary was even told about it.

The Committee examined the responsibilities of officials who receive leaked Committee papers. The permanent under-secretary of state, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the head of the Department, explained to us that no guidance had been available before we made our ruling—it had been understood that it would have been wrong to make use of the papers, but not that they should be returned. We concluded:

"The duty of any official who receives leaked committee papers is exactly the same as that of a Member, namely to make no use of them and to return them without delay to the committee clerk".

Sir John Kerr told us that the Foreign Office had accepted that the guidance issued to Members should also apply to officials, and that other Departments were following that lead. We welcome that very much.

We note that Sir John had proposed that the guidance would be that officials in receipt of a leaked draft should return it to the Clerk of the Committee via the Minister. The Committee disagrees with that. The Minister has no business to see a leaked document. We concluded that the correct course of action should be for the official to return the documents directly to the Clerk of the Committee and to notify the Minister that he or she has done so.

Our Committee will examine the details of that guidance when it is produced. We share Sir John's hope that implementation of those instructions throughout Whitehall will deter potential leakers. Our position is clear:

"any unauthorised use of unpublished select committee documents received by a Department will in future be regarded by this Committee as a contempt."

I turn to the conduct of my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West. It is the Committee's considered opinion that such leaks strike at the heart of the role of Select Committees as independent and efficient scrutineers of the Executive in a number of ways. Those leaks undermine trust within a Committee. A report from an earlier Privileges Committee pointed to the

"damage that leaks had created among Members on committees by undermining their mutual trust, one for another."

That is the basis of Select Committees. Members meet and it is only when they have trust for each that they are able to come to conclusions based on the facts. Over time, if a Select Committee is working well, that will become the basis of proper scrutiny by that Select Committee.

We went on to point out that Committees' morale could decline if some members showed scant respect for the rules of privilege or for the loyalty of colleagues who do not betray confidential matters. We agreed with our predecessor Committee about the destructive effects of leaks, and concluded that my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West,

"as a member of a select committee charged with scrutinising the actions of a Government Department, disclosed confidential committee papers to a Minister in that Department without the knowledge of the other members of the committee and without the committee's approval. This was a clear breach of faith with the other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee which, as he recognised, made his position untenable. Moreover, it tended to undermine the Committee's authority by calling into question its independence from Government influence."

The House should be in no doubt that leaks from Select Committees to the Government are a most serious interference with the Select Committee system. In fairness to my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West, he did own up straight away and stood down from the Committee, so that no suspicion fell on any of his colleagues. We arrived at the conclusion that my hon. Friend

"must have known at the time that what he did was wrong"

For all the reasons that I have outlined, we unanimously agreed that he should apologise to the House by means of a personal statement—which he has done honourably—and that a suspension for 10 sitting days was appropriate.

It is a grave matter for the Committee to recommend that the House should impose a suspension on a colleague, and it is a conclusion that we reached after much deliberation. My hon. Friend has explained that he disclosed the draft report to the Foreign Office because he profoundly disagreed with what his colleagues on the Select Committee were doing, and that he wished to alert Ministers to the fact that their Department would be criticised. There is no excuse for those actions. It is our firm view that what he did fell below the standards that colleagues on the Select Committee—indeed, all hon. Members—have a right to expect.

I ask the House to uphold our conclusions, and to approve the Committee's eighth report.

4.7 pm

I do not wish to make any comment on the conduct of the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross). He has accepted the Committee's judgment, and there is little more to be said about that.

My comments will be directed, in the context of the eighth report, to the conduct of the Foreign Secretary, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, of the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), and of the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs—the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson).

So far as the Foreign Secretary is concerned, the Committee's report is, in fact, quite damning. It deals with him at paragraphs 24 to 27. At paragraph 26, the Committee considered in detail the defence that he advanced for his conduct, and the conduct of those for whom he is accountable, in receiving and retaining draft reports of the Select Committee. The Committee, without qualification, rejected that defence. It seems to me to follow absolutely and inevitably from the Committee's findings that the Foreign Secretary was guilty of contempt of the house.

I have of course listened carefully to what the Standards and Privileges Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), has said, but I find his explanation for the lack of a specific finding in relation to the Foreign Secretary very far from convincing. That explanation may well go to mitigation of the Foreign Secretary's conduct, but the defence that he offered was rejected without qualification. The Foreign Secretary should, therefore, at the very least, apologise to the House for his conduct. His failure to do so and his absence from this debate themselves reinforce and aggravate the contempt that he has shown the house, and illustrate most vividly the contempt that the Government as a whole display for the house.

Is there not a distinction between what the right hon. and learned Gentleman calls "holding the House in contempt" and being in contempt? he has accused the Foreign Secretary of being in contempt. Will he explain why—and under which rule?

The hon. Gentleman is quite right to suggest that there is a distinction between the two kinds of contempt. However, I believe that the Foreign Secretary is guilty of both kinds. The reason—which the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) has asked me to specify—is simply this: in his evidence to the Standards and Privileges Committee, the Foreign Secretary advanced a defence as to why he should not be accused of having held the House in contempt. That defence was rejected out of hand by the Committee. The logic, therefore, is that the Foreign Secretary was indeed in contempt of this house, and the explanation given by the Chairman of the Committee, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, while it may go to mitigation, does not affect that point.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has great experience, but he completely misunderstands the term "being in contempt". He is simply talking rubbish.

That is an assertion, rather than an argument. I invite the hon. Gentleman to look at paragraphs 24 to 27 of the report, where he will find ample justification for the points that I am making. Similar criticism applies also to the Minister of State.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman points to paragraphs in the report which refer to the Foreign Secretary. Paragraph 26 states:

"It is the case that there is no precedent for regarding the disclosure of a draft report to another Member as a contempt."

Will he take that on board and stop going down this alley?

The fact that there was no precedent for regarding particular conduct as a contempt does not begin to mean that the conduct on the occasion in question was not a contempt. That is the point.

I thought that what the Committee said was quite clear—that it was not a contempt, but a misunderstanding. The Foreign Secretary thought that he could go to a Committee, as indeed I thought for some time after the introduction of Standing Order No. 126. Many Members still assume that they can go into a Select Committee. That was the view that we rejected—it had nothing to do with contempt. The Foreign Secretary thought that he had that right, and we said that he did not.

Even if that rule had not been changed, that would have been a fanciful and far-fetched reason for receiving a leaked report from the Committee and retaining it for a period of time.

he did not.

The Foreign Secretary did receive such a leaked report, and he did retain it. He saw the report, and he did not return it. Even if the rule allowing hon. Members to attend Select Committee meetings had not been changed, it would be fanciful to suggest that that would have been an adequate defence. However, the rule had been changed, and the Foreign Secretary was capable of discovering that. He has not come to the Committee or to the House to say, "I am very sorry. I now know that the rules have been changed. Had I known, I would not have retained the report. I therefore apologise for the fact that I behaved in that way, in ignorance of the fact that the rule had been changed." That might have been an acceptable response. However, we have had no response of that kind, no apology and no recognition that what the Foreign Secretary did was wrong.

That is not the only aspect of this affair that merits close scrutiny. The first report from the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs referred to parliamentary questions relating to the time at which the Government might have had sight of the Committee's report on Sierra Leone. The report said:

"Though the answers to these questions are germane to the leak from the Committee, we express no opinion on them since this is a matter which the Committee on Standards and Privileges may wish to consider."

The Committee went on to draw particular attention to the Foreign Secretary's answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) on 23 February. To appreciate the full significance of that question, one needs to look at the Minister of State's answer of 16 February, which is reproduced at annexe D to the report. The Minister of State was asked when he first saw the Select Committee report. He said that the report was first drawn to the attention of the Foreign Office when the Clerk collected it from the Select Committee on the morning of publication.

On 23 February, the Foreign Secretary for the first time gave a full account, putting up his hands and coming clean about the extent of the leak and his knowledge that the report had been seen by officials and by the Minister of State. The Foreign Secretary has claimed that the answer given on 16 February was "accurate, factual and correct". I do not believe that any objective commentator could possibly support that claim. He implicitly conceded as much in his answer of 23 February.

The question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham was not about leaks or about when the Foreign Secretary received the report. It was about statements made by the Foreign Office to the media. If he regards it as a sufficient discharge of his duty to answer questions accurately, factually and correctly, as he suggests, there was no need for him to disclose information about the leaked report in answer to my hon. Friend's question. He did so only because he knew that the game was up, as on that very day the hon. Member for Dundee, West put up his hands and made his admission. On 16 February, Foreign Office Ministers thought that they could get away with it, so they gave an answer that was completely at variance with the facts as they knew them to be; but on the 23rd, when the game was up, they came clean.

The Government make much of openness. In his introduction to the ministerial code of conduct, the Prime Minister said:

"In issuing this Code, I should like to reaffirm my strong personal commitment to restoring the bond of trust between the British people and their Government. We are all here to serve and we must all serve honestly and in the interests of those who gave us our positions of trust.

I will expect all Ministers to work within the letter and spirit of the Code."

We do not need to look far into the body of the code before reaching its guidance on ministerial answers to Parliament. Paragraph 1.iii of chapter 1 says:

"It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister".

Of course, the exercise of that sanction is a matter for the Prime Minister. This episode provides an illuminating illustration of the yawning gulf between his words and his deeds. The Foreign Affairs Committee specifically drew those parliamentary answers to the attention of the Standards and Privileges Committee, and it is a mystery to me why it did not investigate the matter.

My final point relates to the conduct of the hon. Member for Swansea, East. If the report is to believed—or, to be more accurate, if the Foreign Secretary's letter to the Committee, contained in the report, is to be believed—the hon. Member for Swansea, East gave a detailed briefing to the head of the Foreign Office's parliamentary relations department. If that were true, it would constitute a serious breach of trust in relation to the Committee, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman would agree. He told me this morning—and I imagine that he will repeat his account to the House if he catches your eye, Madam Speaker—that the Foreign Secretary's account is untrue.

I shall not embarrass the hon. Member for Swansea, East by calling him an old friend of mine, but I have known him for a long time. I would simply say that the account that he gave me this morning is far more likely to be in character for him than the account given in the letter from the Foreign Secretary. Again, I am surprised that the Standards and Privileges Committee did not investigate the matter. Had it done so it might have got to the truth and the hon. Gentleman would have been spared the embarrassment that he has suffered in the past few days.

The Select Committee system is an essential element in parliamentary scrutiny of Government. The events disclosed and considered in the report indicate a systematic attempt by the present Government to suborn that system. It is a story that gives the lie to the protestations of the Government about their conduct.

The Prime Minister has famously said:

"You know me, I'm a pretty straight kind of guy."

Well, the report reveals that he does not run a straight kind of Government. The sooner the country wakes up to that fact, the better.

4.21 pm

The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and hythe (Mr. Howard) has been extremely fair to me—an unusual case of Llanelli rallying to the defence of Swansea.

The Standards and Privileges Committee has again produced a powerful and thorough report, and its Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), is to be commended on it. So far as it refers to the conduct of my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), I can say only that I much regret losing a diligent and valued colleague from the Committee and I regret also the circumstances of his leaving. He has given a full and honourable apology to the House this afternoon.

So far as the second issue is concerned—the appropriate conduct of Ministers and civil servants on receiving reports—it is clearly right that neither Ministers nor civil servants should make use of such reports and that they should return them immediately. I would have thought that that was common courtesy and should not necessarily be enshrined in a code. However, I welcome the fact that the Government have responded immediately and that the ministerial code is now to be revised.

The House will not be surprised if I concentrate on two parts of the eighth report that refer to me, the footnote on page ix and the last paragraph on page xv, which states:

"On the day before publication the Chair of the FAC gave a full briefing to Andy Henderson, the head of the FCO Parliamentary Relations Department, making clear that the bulk of the Report's criticism would be aimed at senior officials."

Let me say from the start that I totally rebut the idea that I fully briefed that official or, indeed, any Minister or adviser, or that I divulged or intended to divulge details of the report.

The allegation of a full briefing is a serious one. It goes to the heart of the integrity of the Committee and to the authority of its Chairman. Over the two years I have been privileged to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee, I have done my utmost to be Parliament's man, independent of Government and seeking to keep the Executive accountable for what they have done and what they have failed to do. The Committee has received many plaudits for that role.

What are the facts? I wear several hats in the house. Mr. Henderson, the head of the parliamentary relations department, had recently taken up his post. He asked my office to arrange an informal meeting to leave his card, as it were, and to seek my advice on how best to relate to the Foreign Affairs Committee. I also chair the house's Commonwealth Parliamentary Association branch and I lead our delegation to the North Atlantic Assembly. I recall, for example, that the CPA figured largely in our conversation, in which I gave Mr. Henderson names of colleagues whom it would be valuable for him to meet.

The Foreign Affairs Committee report had, by that day, already been presented to the house. It was to be published the following day, so no question of privilege arose, and it was raised in our conversation only in passing. I recall saying to Mr. Henderson that I hoped that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary would not rush to rubbish the report, and that anyone who had followed our proceedings would certainly know that officials, and not Ministers, were mainly in the frame. As Mr. Henderson was the man whose duty it was to try to improve relations between the Foreign Office and the Foreign Affairs Committee, which had been impaired in the course of our inquiry, I advised him that the Committee would never accept that the Government could prevent it from embarking on an inquiry by setting up an official inquiry, such as the Legg inquiry.

At the end of the meeting, I felt that I had done my best to do a good turn by giving Mr. Henderson the names of key parliamentary colleagues for him to meet. I believe that I actually introduced him to one or two of them.

I saw the eighth report of the Standards and Privileges Committee on 29 June, the day it was published. I was astonished and puzzled by the allegation of "detailed briefing", and immediately telephoned Mr. Henderson. I cannot recall the exact details of our conversation, but I do remember that I felt fully vindicated as a result of what he said to me, which was that I had done nothing improper and had said nothing that was not already effectively in the public domain.

Not only did I not fully brief Mr. Henderson, I had also scrupulously avoided seeing my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and my hon. Friend the Minister of State, as a matter of principle. However, on the evening before publication, by chance I met my right hon. Friend briefly in the Division Lobby. I urged him not to rubbish our report, as he had criticised the Committee forcefully in December. I went no further: no more, and no less, was said.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is giving a most lucid explanation of the report's contents, in so far as they affect him. However, will he say why he apprehended that the Foreign Secretary might rubbish the report of the Committee, of which the hon. Gentleman is Chairman?

The answer is simple. The right hon. and learned Gentleman would understand my reasons had he read what my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary told the Committee when he appeared before it in December, in the course of our inquiry, or the various comments that my right hon. Friend made—or which were attributed to him—afterwards.

The report was thorough and, in my judgment, important. My hope was that it would be treated properly by the Department.

As my hon. Friend will appreciate, my memory of the events is not as clear as his, but am I correct in recalling that, over the weekend preceding the report's publication, there were references in the press—which I am sure did not emanate from my hon. Friend—to the effect that the report would be extremely critical of Ministers? Was it not in that context that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made his remarks?

I shall come to the leaks over that weekend in a moment. As I shall explain to the house, I have received a letter of explanation from the official concerned, in which he stated that I had also told him how angry I was that there had been leaks over that weekend.

The hon. Gentleman has made a very serious statement. He has said that the Foreign Secretary's evidence to the Standards and Privileges Committee was materially incorrect. The Foreign Office minute, passed by Mr. Henderson to the Foreign Office officials concerned, of his discussion with the hon. Gentleman is available. It will clearly demonstrate either that a full briefing was given, as the Foreign Secretary suggested, or, as the hon. Gentleman has suggested, that no such briefing was given. In light of that, may I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he request the Foreign Secretary today to place a copy of that minute in the Library of the house?

I would not be unhappy with that, but I can probably go virtually as far, since I will shortly quote a letter from the official concerned which covers that same conversation.

After speaking to Mr. Henderson on 29 June on the telephone, I went immediately to the office of the Clerk of the Foreign Affairs Committee, referred to the report of the Standards and Privileges Committee, and told the Clerk that Mr. Henderson had confirmed my recollection. Since I considered that a Committee matter, I asked the Clerk to write formally to his opposite number, Mr. Henderson, on behalf of the Committee, to ask in effect for further and better particulars before placing the correspondence before the Committee.

I received Mr. Henderson's reply this morning. It is dated Friday 9 July. I shall quote it in full to avoid any misunderstanding and any suggestion that I might have quoted it selectively. After the standard first paragraph, thanking the Clerk for his letter, it continues:

"To answer the points you raised:

'Who initiated the meeting on 8 February?'

The meeting took place at my initiative. It was an introductory courtesy call on the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and in my new role as head of Parliamentary Relations Department. The meeting had been arranged well before we knew that the Foreign Affairs Committee report into Sierra Leone would be released the following day;

'What were the circumstances in which the meeting took place?' The meeting took place over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria of 1 Parliament Street. It lasted a little less than one hour. We discussed a number of issues relating to the FCO's relationship with the Committee and more widely with Parliament in general;

'What did Mr. Anderson say to me about the Report?'

Mr. Anderson told me that the Report would primarily criticise officials rather than Ministers, focusing in particular on a perceived failure to respond to the seriousness of events. He also indicated that the Committee remained concerned about the FCO's reluctance to co-operate with the Committee until the Legg inquiry had completed its work and the decision to deny access to 'C'.

He regretted the press leaks of the report the previous weekend. He hoped that the FCO would react constructively to the serious points made in the Report and counselled against an aggressive or angry response.

'Whether what he said could be construed as a leak of the Sierra Leone Report?'

Mr. Anderson briefed me in general terms but did not go into detail on any of the Report's specific recommendations. It would have been odd if he hadn't mentioned it, given its release the following day."

The reply from Mr. Henderson goes a little further than I recall, but all the matters mentioned were fully in the public domain. There was certainly not a full briefing as alleged in appendix 4. There is a clear difference between the FCO letter in that appendix and Mr. Henderson' s letter, which suggests that he had not been consulted by the drafter of the letter before the report was issued. If he had been, I think that he would certainly have wished to revise it.

Yesterday, The Sunday Times reported that there would be a new row today in the House because details of the report were leaked to the FCO by me. The background is that the reporter—a respected reporter—sought to telephone me at 10.55 am on Saturday, rather belatedly. I did not return to my home until Sunday evening, when I collected the message on the answering machine. I therefore had no opportunity to put my side of the case before that damaging article was published in The Sunday Times yesterday. I now hope that The Sunday Times , as a responsible newspaper, will publish the facts next Sunday and, fairly, put the record straight.

I have no wish to defend any newspaper, but journalists at The Sunday Times will have read the Foreign Secretary's letter, which is printed in appendix 4 on page xv of the Committee's report, in which he clearly says that

"the Chair of the FAC gave a full briefing to Andy Henderson".

That can be construed only as referring to a briefing on this issue, but what the hon. Gentleman has just said flatly contradicts that—so how could the Foreign Secretary have given that evidence to the Committee in that form?

I can only surmise that the person who drafted the letter that went before the Standards and Privileges Committee and which appears in appendix 4 had not consulted Mr. Henderson before he did so. Obviously, the Foreign Secretary would have signed that letter in good faith.

In brief, I had given an hour of my time to help an official. During the meeting, the Sierra Leone report arose in passing. All that I said was general and in the public domain, as has been confirmed by the only other person involved—the official who was present. I fully expressed the Committee's known concerns, which could have been clear to anyone who had followed our proceedings.

My role in safeguarding the independence of Parliament against the Executive has been demonstrated clearly in the past two years by my chairing of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I trust that my explanation will confirm that I did nothing improper. I therefore wholly refute the allegations and inferences made in the report.

4.37 pm

The House is grateful to the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) for clarifying the fact that he did not give a briefing to the Foreign Office official the day before the publication of the report. However, his later remarks sowed seeds of doubt about what different officials believed and what information they had to hand. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has given an undertaking that the minute will be made available.

I am happy to request that the minute be made available, but I have no powers to force anyone to divulge it.

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's clarification. I hope that the Leader of the House will give an undertaking to the House that she will ask her colleagues to ensure that the minute is placed in the Library because it will help to answer all the questions that hon. Members have raised today.

I have the utmost sympathy with my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), who has been placed, primarily by The Sunday Times , in a rather difficult position. He has, of course, reacted strongly to any suggestion that he has been wrongly involved in briefing. Coming to these matters with the benefit of a degree of impartiality and having read the references in the report, I did not interpret them in the way that my hon. Friend, let alone The Sunday Times , did, and it did not occur to me that any allegation was being made against my hon. Friend of the kind that he would clearly want to refute.

It seemed to me—as it does now that I have heard his explanation—that there has been a misunderstanding about the use of the word "full". My hon. Friend has made it clear that he gave an incoming official a full briefing about the work of the Select Committee, in which he touched on the matter of Sierra Leone. If the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) reads the Standards and Privileges Committee's report, he will find that it says that no use was made of the additional information. It does not, therefore, seem to me that the information was very germane to the report. I shall, of course, draw the hon. Gentleman's request to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, but whether he will feel that the matter needs to be pursued in that way or to that degree is another matter.

I do not think that the right hon. Lady's response is adequate. The House needs a promise that the minute will be published. The aim of this debate is to get to the bottom of the issues that the Committee was considering. The right hon. Lady seems to suggest that the newspaper misunderstood the report, but the report is very clear. On page xv, it says:

"the Chair of the FAC gave a full briefing to Andy henderson, the head of the FCO Parliamentary Relations Department"—

Read on.

I shall do so.

"making clear that the bulk of the Report's criticism would be aimed at senior officials. Mr. Henderson minuted that exchange to officials within the FCO."

So, people knew what was going on. The right hon. Lady and her friends should take cognisance of that and be more open to the house.

If this debate continues for the next 10 or 15 minutes, would there not be time for the Leader of the House to ask the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to allow the House to see the minute that was circulated after the meeting? Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the right hon. Lady might want to describe in her winding-up speech the guidelines for Ministers on commenting on Select Committee reports when they cannot have had time to read them in detail? That seems one important issue. The right hon. Lady no doubt already has a briefing which she will read. How much nicer it would be if she also gave the Foreign Office briefing. The point has been made about the intensity of a noun and the strength of an adjective—"full briefing". That could be explained by the Government's disclosure, under open government rules, of a document that cannot be of any risk to anybody.

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention. I hope that the Leader of the House heard his two points and will act on them.

I can help the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Mr. Bottomley). The guidance given to Ministers on how to respond to Select Committee reports is unchanged from that issued in 1990, when the hon. Member for Worthing, West was a member of the Government.

The guidance may not have been changed, but the House is trying to get to the bottom of a serious matter. The right hon. Lady's Government tell the House time and again that they are in favour of open government. I would have thought that, in that spirit, she would ensure that the information is made available to the house.

The report on Sierra Leone was agreed to by the Committee on 3 February and published on 9 February. This briefing took place during that period. The hon. Gentleman will notice that, although paragraph 8 of the report relates to some of the other leaks, it states:

"although improper, they do not raise questions of privilege".

The question of privilege is raised only at the draft stage—not when a report has been agreed.

We seem to be getting to a case of angels on a pinhead. The hon. Lady is making a point similar to that made by the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) when he gave his interpretation of the report. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues on the Committee on a very strong report which does not pull any punches, although I do not necessarily agree with his interpretation of what the report is trying to convey.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No; I want to make some progress.

The right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne said that he and his Committee were not criticising the Foreign Secretary, but they got dangerously close to doing so. As the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and hythe (Mr. Howard) said, it seems rather odd that a senior Minister receiving a leaked report from a Select Committee should not have instinctively understood that something was wrong, and known that he should not have received it and that he should declare doing so immediately.

Receiving a leak of a Select Committee report is almost tantamount to receiving stolen goods. We should be expecting a very high standard of behaviour among Ministers. We should be assured that their instincts—their understanding of our process and our culture—are such that they abide by the highest of standards in reacting to what was clearly a wrong act by an hon. Member, to which he has admitted. The Foreign Secretary and his colleagues on the Labour Benches are only making the issue worse. My advice is that they should stop digging.

As someone who has been in this place for 37 years, may I rather cynically say that the hon. Gentleman ought to understand that one of the less attractive features of the House of Commons is that there is one law that applies to Back Benchers and another law that tends to apply to senior Ministers? I find that attitude profoundly distasteful.

I am very grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention. I think that many people around the House share his concerns.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No. I have given way an awful lot, so I intend to continue.

Other serious questions have been raised in the debate. The Select Committee report asks the Prime Minister to amend the ministerial code. When the Leader of the House intervened on the right hon. Member for North-West hampshire (Sir G. Young), she said that the ministerial code was being reviewed, but that does not mean that it will be changed. It does not mean that the Government have accepted the proposal in the Select Committee report. The Leader of the House did not give us a timetable for the review, or any idea of when the House would have its conclusions. I hope that the status of that review will be clarified.

The report raises wider issues about the way that the Government govern and the way that Ministers and the press operation treat Parliament. Through that, it impinges on how the House protects the Select Committee system. It is a key part of our democracy to ensure that that Select Committee system is independent and has full integrity, so that we can hold the Government of the day to account.

Leaks, such as that which happened from the Foreign Affairs Committee, can damage the Committee system. They damage the Committee in the public's eyes, thereby detracting from the report's authority. They can damage the trust between Committee members and the efficiency of a Committee's workings, and thereby damage Parliament's ability to hold the Executive to account.

Therefore, I submit that the Government should be looking at not just these Committee recommendations, but the need to review and strengthen the Select Committee system—and how we might make members of Select Committees more independent of their party. Select Committee members should be responsible to the House irrespective of party labels. Perhaps we should consider developing career paths within the Committees of the house, so that people can see their way to developing their political careers, not just within their party, but within Parliament.

We should consider making positions on Select Committees more prestigious. The prestige of those senior positions should equal that of a junior Minister, so that people who hold them take the independence of the work that they do very seriously indeed.

The report is about upholding the integrity of the Select Committee system. A stiff penalty has been served on the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), and I believe that all hon. Members will accept his full apology. However, to ensure that the integrity of the Committee system is maintained in future, more than the ministerial code needs to be changed. We need a clearer definition of the responsibilities of civil servants to Select Committees.

I do not know whether there is a code governing the relationships between civil servants and Select Committee members, but some of our exchanges today have shown that there is an urgent need for such a code, to ensure that the civil—

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way at last. Obviously, we need not bother with the Standards and Privileges Committee in future—it will be enough to have the hon. Gentleman investigating. He seems to have a gut instinct for determining what is right without bothering with the evidence. On this occasion, if he looks at the minutes of evidence, he will see the Civil Service and the Foreign Office responding in exactly the way that he asks. That is one of the benefits of the report—a report which, I believe, does correctly attribute blame. I speak as one who spent many hours serving on that Committee, investigating the matter in great detail.

The hon. Gentleman's comments are rather rash. I began my speech by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne and his colleagues—including the hon. Gentleman—for the quality of the report. However, I must say that, after what we have heard today, obviously that appendix is not exactly complete and we need more information to ensure that the valuable work that the Committee did is fully finished.

There is a need for a new code of behaviour for civil servants and Select Committees. There have been other debates about the duties of civil servants and whether they are confined to the Government of the day or whether they extend to the wider public and Members of this place. As we dig down into the details of this affair, it is clear that we need to be sure that civil servants will work for the House without prejudicing their position in working for Ministers. There needs to be a much clearer definition of those responsibilities.

4.50 pm

As the Member who first raised the question of a possible leak of this Foreign Affairs Select Committee document, I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the chance to contribute to the debate. When I raised my concerns on a point of order on 9 February, it did not cross my mind that they would expose something so serious. In a way, I am pleased that they have; in a way, I am sorry. I am pleased because my concerns have exposed an abuse of Parliament by a colleague and by the Government. I am pleased also that the House has been enabled to reassert some crucial rights and privileges at a time when they are being undermined day by day by the Government. I am sorry, however, because of the personal difficulties that this matter has caused a colleague, albeit one from a different party. He is a colleague with whom I have enjoyed working and come to respect.

The report from the Standards and Privileges Committee raises two vital matters. These are the conduct expected of us as Members and the conduct expected of Her Majesty's Government. Like others, I want to say little about the first matter, which is the conduct expected of us all. The report makes it crystal clear that what happened was wrong and worthy of punishment. I fail to see how any of us could disagree with that conclusion. However, there is a redeeming feature in this aspect of this sorry affair. The hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) swiftly admitted his actions. He did not hesitate to agree that they were wrong, he promptly offered the Committee a fulsome apology and he immediately resigned. Once the report that we are debating is behind us, I believe that we should draw a line in the sand regarding the hon. Gentleman's conduct.

However, I do not consider that the report closes the issue of the Government's conduct. In my opinion, and as we have heard the argument developed this afternoon, the report requires us to pursue matters more vigorously. The contrast between the response of the hon. Member for Dundee, West and that of the Foreign Secretary could not be more stark. Nowhere do I see any apology from the Foreign Secretary or from his permanent secretary for keeping, circulating and using a leaked document.

Instead of an apology, the Foreign Secretary contents himself with offering us weasel words in an attempt to justify his behaviour. He claims that the lack of clarity in existing rules entitled him to ignore the words "Confidential—For Committee Use Only", which appear in large letters at the top of each page of the leaked document. That is a pathetic attempt to wriggle out of his proper responsibilities.

The right hon. Gentleman suggests also that a Foreign Secretary can sneak into the private meetings of Select Committees and listen to confidential discussions. That is the most stupid defence of wrong-doing that I have ever heard. If there was no sense of wrong-doing in the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office, why did officials react with alarm and concern when they saw the leaked document? Why were documents destroyed rather than returned? I mention return because the report says that documents should be returned. As late as lunchtime today, not one page of one copy of the leaked document has ever been returned to the Clerk of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

In his evidence the Foreign Secretary claimed that no use was made of the leaked document. However, I raised my original point of order because someone was patently using information that could have come only from a leak, in an attempt to rubbish our Committee and our conclusions before a single official copy had been handed to anyone.

The evidence given to the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges by the Permanent Secretary is not much better. It amazes me that diplomats who provide what the Permanent Secretary described to the Foreign Affairs Committee as a Rolls-Royce service require a memo to be circulated before they realise that receiving leaked documents, circulating them, using them, keeping them and failing to return them is plain wrong. I cannot comprehend why they need a memo to tell them that.

There is one thing about the evidence from the officials that does not surprise me. It does not surprise me to read in the report that they cannot remember when the leaked document arrived, they do not know how many copies were made, and they are not sure why they took weeks to tell the Foreign Secretary. Such a shambles led to the Sierra Leone report itself. The shambles revealed this afternoon led the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend—if I may call him that—the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), to issue a stout and utterly convincing defence of himself against more shambles from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Before he leaves the subject of the evidence from the permanent secretary, has he read the evidence on page 17 of the report in answer to the questions from the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams)? There the permanent secretary seems to be advancing the proposition that Select Committees should not concern themselves with the way in which a Department has handled affairs of state, only with what it might do in the future. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is an extraordinary position for a permanent secretary to adopt?

It may seem extraordinary to some people, but after my experience of the Sierra Leone inquiry, nothing surprises me about the conduct, attitudes and comments of officials in the FCO. In principle, I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but on the specific point, I am amazed that he is amazed.

The eighth report raises another issue that the House needs to address—the role of the Prime Minister in this shabby episode. When he came to office in 1997, the Prime Minister made much of his changes to the ministerial code. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and hythe (Mr. Howard) made exactly this point. After much trumpeting of moral virtue, what a pity that the Prime Minister overlooked the simple matter of leaked documents when he made his changes. What a pity that he waited for the report before making any further changes. The facts were clear and were admitted in February. It is now July, yet the Prime Minister has done nothing.

On numerous occasions, the Prime Minister promised the nation that he would dismiss erring Ministers. Given the clear evidence in the report of wrong-doing by the Foreign Secretary and by officials, when will the Prime Minister sack the Foreign Secretary?

As the report makes clear, the shortcomings revealed by the episode go right to the top. The House must not allow itself to be stopped in its tracks simply by making the hon. Member for Dundee, West a scapegoat. The House must demand this afternoon an unconditional and immediate apology from the Foreign Secretary, and must insist that the Prime Minister belatedly takes action, and does not merely carry out a review.

The report reminds me of three things. First, among any group of 659 human beings, weakness will always rear its ugly head from time to time. We wish that it would not, but we know that it will. Secondly, individual Members of Parliament can still act honourably, even when their conduct falls below the standard that our constituents are entitled to expect of us. Thirdly, the Government's conduct is all too often disgraceful. The report makes it crystal clear that the behaviour within the Foreign Office was not an abberation; it was entirely within the approach to the government of the country adopted by new Labour.

I believe that the Foreign Secretary should be in the dock this afternoon alongside the hon. Member for Dundee, West. Although the hon. Gentleman had the decency to own up instantly, to apologise and to resign, the fact that the Foreign Secretary has still done none of those tells the nation a great deal about the Government.

5 pm