Читать книгу Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit - Philip Webster, Philip Webster - Страница 13

The Falklands was a brilliant story to cover. But it was its aftermath that got me into trouble with the Commons authorities. It was Sunday, 17 April 1983. I was the Sunday duty man and had a splash of splashes to tell the news desk about. In my hands was a copy of an explosive draft report on the aftermath of the Falklands war.

For six months the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee had been deliberating on the future of the islands in the wake of the war and had come to the conclusion that Margaret Thatcher’s so-called Fortress Falklands policy – retaining enough British forces on the island to deter future aggression from Argentina – was untenable over the long term. Furthermore, the committee (which had a Conservative majority) was proposing that the Government should not turn its back on future talks with Argentina to achieve a negotiated settlement. Reporters were then – as now – often briefed on what was likely to appear in select committee reports. Provided we kept it reasonably vague, without specifically mentioning anything directly from the reports themselves, we could probably get away with publishing without attracting the ire of the Commons authorities (who regarded leaks with dread and threatened punitive action against anyone responsible for them, particularly if they were MPs). This was different. In my hands I had an actual copy of the report given to me by an extremely good source. The protection I guaranteed him then still applies.

A very excited Charles Douglas-Home, editor of The Times from 1982 until his death in 1985, came over to me to discuss the story. We got on well. On the day Harold Evans appointed me to the Lobby in 1981, Charlie, then foreign editor, had offered me a posting in Washington – unaware of the other approach. I chose the Lobby and everyone understood. He was my third Times editor. I told him there were two choices. I could write up the story in a Lobby-style way, with a lot of ‘it is understood’ and ‘it is believed to say’ hiding the fact that I was in possession of the report, or I could write the story as hard as possible, effectively flaunting the fact that I had got hold of this precious document whose publication would create an almighty stir. I reminded Charlie – who was a reporter’s editor and loved the breaking of exclusive news stories – that if we went ahead with the latter choice, both he and I could be called to the Bar of the Commons for breaching parliamentary privilege. His eyes lit up. I had the sense that this was a prospect that did not alarm him in any way. In fact, I suspect he would have enjoyed appearing before MPs to defend his newspaper’s right to publish and be damned.

‘OK, let’s go for full-on publication. We will splash on it, and you and I will take the consequences,’ said Charlie. It was one of the reasons why we all loved him. He had unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, and his tragic early death just a few years later was a massive loss for The Times and journalism. Charlie passed by the news desk and told them: ‘Phil’s doing the splash and it will be a strong one.’

Even though it was early in my Lobby career, I was not in the habit of holding back, and the desk visibly relaxed, knowing that it had a splash for the night. I set about writing it up. I threw in a couple of ‘apparently’s to raise a little doubt in the mind of angry MPs when they read it the next morning, but in all honesty I left no doubt that I had the report in front of me as I wrote.

So under the splash headline ‘Thatcher to be told Fortress Falklands policy is untenable’ – you could get a lot in a three-deck headline in The Times in those days – I wrote that a committee with a majority of Conservative MPs was about to conclude that the Fortress Falklands policy, however necessary in the short term, did not offer a stable future for the islands. I said that although the committee would back the existing policy of keeping a garrison on the islands to defend them against a renewed attack, and of not embarking on any immediate negotiations, it would have to accept that in future talks on a negotiated settlement should not be resisted.

I noted that the committee had visited the Falklands and the United Nations headquarters in New York during its deliberations and I added what I thought was the pretty harmless bit of information that the committee would meet that following Wednesday to consider the draft report.

I suggested that rejection of the long-term efficacy of Fortress Falklands by such a powerful committee, and its willingness to countenance a transfer of sovereignty, was bound to embarrass the Thatcher Government. I said the MPs had concluded that diplomatic, financial, military and economic problems would continue for Britain and the Falklands unless or until a negotiated settlement with Argentina could be achieved.

My story stuck pretty closely to the draft which I still have – and it went on in that vein for many more paragraphs across the front and on page three of the paper. I left the paper for home happy in the knowledge, and not really worrying given the editor’s full backing, that we would cause uproar in the Tory party and in Downing Street that night. I had written the story in such a straight way that it was easy for my colleagues on other papers to follow and they duly did, giving proper attribution to The Times.

Monday morning broke with the story getting massive prominence on the early morning radio and television bulletins. Within the Tory high command there was immediate pressure to discover the source of the leak. There was fury and it was directed not so much at The Times as at the person who – it appeared – had given me the report.

The matter was raised with Speaker George Thomas that afternoon as a prima facie breach of parliamentary privilege. After discussions with the usual channels – the network of whips and business managers from all parties – an emergency debate was set for the Commons that Thursday. Needless to say, the Wednesday meeting of the committee of which I had written did little on the draft. But I was told that MPs spent a lot of the session eyeing each other in the hope that the culprit – the guy who had given it to me – might blush. The report had also been seen by Commons officials. So, in the eyes of the committee chiefs, they could not quite be ruled out, although the overwhelming suspicion among the committee was that it must have been one of them.

I never expected to be the subject of a Commons debate. Thursday arrived and from the Press Gallery – ever so slightly embarrassed to be centre of attention among my reporter friends and the MPs below – I watched as Sir Anthony Kershaw, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, rose gravely to his feet to move that his complaint be referred to the Committee of Privileges. The motion, he said, arose from a report in The Times on 18 April about British policy towards the Falklands. On Thursday last, he said, the draft report was issued to the eleven members of the committee and to six clerks and advisers. Each copy bore the name and initials of the person to whom it was issued. He sounded like a prosecutor opening a case at the Old Bailey. On Monday, said Sir Anthony, an accurate summary of the draft appeared as the lead story on the front page and another page of The Times. The story was clearly based on a close reading of the draft. No one reading both could doubt their ‘consanguinity’, he said, using a word you would be hard put to get into a news story. The story contained more than one unacknowledged but easily recognizable quotation from the draft and followed closely the sequence of paragraphs in the draft. It looked as if Charlie and I were bang to rights. He went on:

Furthermore, Philip Webster, the Times reporter whose name is given in the story, was able to reveal what no other member of the press could have known – that the draft was to be considered by the committee on Wednesday.

He said it had originally been intended to consider it on Monday and a press announcement had been made to that effect. However, because some MPs had wanted to speak in a rival Commons debate that day, it was delayed.

He had enclosed a slip of paper with the draft report telling members the meeting had been postponed to Wednesday. ‘No other announcement was made and Philip Webster could have obtained his information from no other source.’ If I had really been trying to conceal my possession of the report, that would have been a mistake on my part. Sir Anthony went on that it often happened that well-informed journalists, expert in their subject, could and did piece together stories with the help of MPs, the accuracy of which surprised those who thought they were in possession of exclusive information. ‘No, or hardly any, breach of the rules is involved and we turn a blind eye,’ he said. ‘In other instances, if the information improperly obtained is not of great moment to the outside world, again sensibly we take little notice.’ Now Sir Anthony lay my crime before the House:

I submit that this case is different. There has not been an indiscreet conversation in the Lobby, or in one of the bars about a minor matter. A report of a major political controversy, both at home and abroad and inside and outside the House, has been written up from a complete document which the committee has not even considered and which some members had not, in the circumstances, had time to read before the report appeared.

My friends in the pretty well-attended gallery gave me a quiet ‘Hear, hear’ of support as Sir Anthony continued:

I do not think that ignorance of our rules can be pleaded. Philip Webster is an experienced Lobby man, and his source can be presumed to know the rules. In any event on the front page of the draft appeared these words: ‘The circulation of this draft report is strictly limited to members and staff of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The premature disclosure of contents of a draft report has in the past been regarded as a prima facie breach of privilege.’

He added finally:

If the private deliberations of our committee are to be revealed in this way, it will destroy the confidence and trust that have been established between Hon. Members who work together on the committee and make it impossible for the committees to receive evidence, which may be considered confidential from a witness’s point of view or in the area of public affairs, and generally diminish the value of the work of select committees.

I had met Sir Anthony on a few occasions and found him a very pleasant, reasonable man and I could not really argue with anything he had said. Of course, I was the messenger, and the real target, whom he would never find, was my source. MPs generally like publicity but they like it on their terms. This was not on their terms but those of The Times. This was a classic occasion when the job of the reporter conflicted with the role of the politician.

I would by no means have been the first journalist to have been sent to the privileges committee, but that fate was beginning to look inevitable at this stage. As the debate got under way, Jeff Rooker, the independent-minded Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, got up to oppose the motion. He argued that there was no case for hauling before the privileges committee journalists ‘who have carried out their trade, because we never find the source of their information’. He added: ‘One of the members of the committee, or one of the staff, has dishonoured the rules of the House, not the journalist who obtained a copy of the report.’ The Times had been singled out because it put the story on the front page. Its crime was prominence. Others – like my old contact and friend Tam Dalyell, Alex Lyon, Joe Ashton and Chris Price – spoke up on my behalf but Sir Peter Emery, a Conservative committee chairman, said that if it was not referred for investigation, then every draft committee report would be fair game for publication. He asked that the privileges committee see every member of the foreign affairs committee and its staff to find the culprit.

It was a strange, amusing experience. Dennis Skinner, the so-called ‘Beast of Bolsover’ and someone I knew well, was gesticulating up towards me in the gallery as the debate played out and we had a laugh about it afterwards. The front-benches, in the form of John Silkin for Labour and John Biffen for the Government, backed the motion to refer me as would have been expected. Biffen said that if Sir Anthony Kershaw felt the work of his committee was impeded by what had happened and wanted it referred, his request should be sympathetically considered.

There was an interesting contribution from Ian Mikardo, the veteran Labour left-winger, who recalled that when The Economist published a report from a select committee on the wealth tax in 1975, it was referred to the privileges committee. Efforts to find the leaker failed but the committee recommended that the offending journalists (Andrew Knight, the editor, and Mark Schreiber, the reporter) should be barred from the House for six months. On that occasion the Commons had then rejected that punishment. Mikardo wondered whether the journalist in this case – me – was conscious of that precedent and believed he had nothing to fear.

To be honest, I had considered that possibility but felt that in this case the risk was worth it. After an hour or so, the debate ended and MPs voted by 159 to 48 that the issue be referred to the committee of privileges. The procedure of which I had warned Charlie Douglas-Home was well and truly under way.

I can do no better now than to hand this story over to the venerable Ian Aitken, the former (and at the time) political editor of The Guardian. He wrote in a column for The Sunday Standard that sometime between then and the general election (one was due at some point over the following thirteen months but was expected sooner rather than later), a comic little charade was likely to be enacted in a committee room of the Commons where a certain malefactor (by name, Mr Philip Webster) would be wheeled before a distinguished but strictly private assembly of MPs and privy councillors:

He will be there, unaided by legal representation and unprotected by recognized rules of evidence or procedure, to answer the grave job of doing his job rather well.

For Mr Webster, a slightly sinister-looking man who reminds me of the famous Holbein portrait of a pair of shifty Italian ambassadors, is a journalist on the political staff of The Times. Last weekend Mr Webster (whose appearance I hasten to add belies a pleasantly amiable temperament) was clever enough to obtain detailed information of a report drawn up by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs dealing with the Falkland Islands. Wasting no time he wrote the story at length and The Times splashed it at length across its front page on Monday morning.

Bully for Mr Webster, you might conclude … it was a good, competent and detailed piece of reportage revealing that this august select committee, though headed by a Conservative, and counting a majority of Tories among its members, was unhappy with the Government’s Fortress Falklands policy to protect it from a future invasion by Argentina.

The report was in any case going to be published by the committee in a few days, wrote Aitken, but Sir Anthony Kershaw – a splendid example of that desperately endangered species known as The Knights from the Shires – decided that Webster’s publication of the article was a breach of the rules of gentlemanly conduct and probably a prima facie breach of the privileges of the House of Commons. Under the headline ‘The man who breached Parliament’s no-go area’, Aitken wrote:

That is why Mr Webster will shortly have to stand before an assembly which will include such dignitaries as the Attorney General, the Leader of the Commons, the chairman of the Committee of Chairmen, and assorted superannuated back-benchers to answer the heinous crime of getting it right.

Aitken insisted he was not saying that there was never any situation where MPs could berate a journalist for breaking its privileges. ‘But I claim that such circumstances are (or should be) very rare indeed and they certainly do not apply in the case of a reporter doing his job with integrity as well as success.’ He said that what was now going to happen, if the rules were followed to their logical conclusion, was that Mr Webster would be asked to grovel apologetically for doing exactly what the editor of The Times pays him to do; he would also likely be instructed to reveal who it was who gave him the draft report or told him of its content. Aitken went on:

And here I must reveal a paradox. For there exists in the Palace of Westminster a much-maligned group of reporters known as the Parliamentary Lobby Journalists – the Lobby for short. Like me Mr Webster is a member of it. And it is because of our membership that we have access to the private bars, corridors and cafeterias of the building which are the daily hunting ground of political journalists. Much nonsense has been written about this workaday body of hacks. It is sometimes imaginatively invested with strange powers of its own to suppress or distort news, by which Mr Webster and I and the rest of our colleagues pay the price for our rights of access by sitting on genuine news which we know to be of high public interest.

The reality, as in so many other fields of human activity, is rather less dramatic and a whole lot less sinister. We do indeed pay a price for being allowed to get at our informants in their natural habitat. It is the simple common sense one that applies to most journalists – that we do not reveal our sources unless (as sometimes happens with politicians) they actually want to see their names in the paper.

It is on this basis and this basis alone (the rest of the so-called Lobby system is largely pretentious bunk) that we are admitted to the building. It is therefore a rule imposed on us by Parliament.

So what is to happen if the Attorney General or the Leader of the House asks Mr Webster to name the rotter who leaked the stuff to him?

He will be in honour bound – no, more, under absolute contractual obligation – to refuse to answer. And the irony of the position will be that the members of the committee will have to acknowledge in logic that they are themselves the custodians of the rule under which Mr Webster has thought fit to defy them.

He ended: ‘Which should give game, set and match to Philip Webster, my honoured friend and colleague.’

As the reader will judge by the length at which I have quoted Aitken, I liked that piece a lot – not only because a senior journalist from a rival paper had been so nice about me. I forgive him the suggestion that I have sinister looks. But Ian also explained, far better than me, the need for politicians to understand that they must not hound journalists who are merely doing their job.

I was to be denied my moment in court. I was looking forward to facing up to the Attorney General, a man I knew pretty well, and refusing point-blank to name my sources, and I probably would have enjoyed the furore if the committee had decided, as before, that I should be banned from the House for a time. My editor also probably missed the opportunity to shout the case for press freedom as his reporter faced the iniquity of banishment from the Commons premises. But no, Margaret Thatcher intervened. On 9 May she visited Buckingham Palace and asked the Queen for a dissolution of Parliament, about a year earlier than she needed to. The election would be on 9 June and gave her another landslide. But it meant that all the current motions and business lying before Parliament were effectively dead. The motion to refer the Times report and me to the privileges committee went up in smoke with the rest. It could have been revived in the following Parliament but no one expected that to happen because it was generally accepted in everything written about the episode that it would be a waste of time. I would not reveal my sources. He would never be named. We used ‘The Times Diary’ to tell our readers that their political reporter was safe. Under the heading ‘Uncommon luck’, PHS (as ‘The Times Diary’ was known from its headquarters in Printing House Square) said:

The coming of the general election denies my colleague Philip Webster the privilege of being hauled before the House of Commons privileges committee. The motion to refer Webster’s full and accurate account of a select committee report on future policy over the Falklands to the privileges committee dies with the Parliament. If the matter were to be revived in the new Parliament the whole issue of whether to refer or not (carried last time by 159 votes to 48) would have to be debated again. It is highly unlikely that the new House will have the stomach for it, and even some MPs who voted for the reference on April 21 admit now that they are glad to see the matter drop.

And so it proved. But senior MPs still did not learn that our job is to disclose what we find. Three years later, my friend Richard Evans revealed in The Times the findings of an environment committee report that highlighted the dangers of waste from nuclear power stations. Despite the revelation clearly being in the public interest, the privileges committee recommended he be barred from the House for six months. The Commons, thankfully, and sensibly, rejected the idea when it was put to the full House.