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ON THE RECORD
MENZIES CAMPBELL INTERVIEW
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE: 25.2.96
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JOHN HUMPHRYS: Good Morning to you.
MENZIES CAMPBELL MP: Good morning.
HUMPHRYS: Well you've had - what? Ten days, more
than ten days now to study the report. That's more than the government had
orginally. And the reality is there's nothing terribly new emerged from it is
there?
CAMPBELL: No, I think it's true that the three
hours that Robin Cook and I were given in the bowels of the Department of Trade
and Industry did not actually prove all that much of an obstacle because much
of what we now learn on a more detailed reading had really been flagged up in
advance by leaks from the Report and also my the way that Sir Richard Scott
conducted the oral hearings. You're quite right to say that there isn't
anything new but what there is, when you read the Report in detail, is an
appreciation of just how strong the case is which Sir Richard Scott makes
against the government.
HUMPHRYS: But no more damning evidence against the
prime suspects than had orginally been suspected and then was not borne out by
that report because the report was so diffuse.
CAMPBELL: Well I'm not sure about that. I've
taken the opportunity in the last twenty-four hours to read the Report again
and if you read it in detail, it is quite extraordinary on the number of
occasions on which Sir Richard Scott is critical of the behaviour of Mr
Waldegrave for example. And indeed his criticisms of Sir Nicholas Lyell in
particular with regard to his failure to ensure that the Prosecution properly
understood the extent of Mr Heseltine's reservations about being asked to sign
a Public Interest Immunity Certificate. His criticism of Sir Nicholas Lyell on
that regard is very very strong indeed and of course it's borne out by what Mr
Heseltine said when he gave evidence. I've gone back and looked at Mr
Heseltine's evidence to Sir Richard Scott and in the transcript of evidence
it's pretty clear that Mr Heseltine was very concerned about the failure to
ensure that his reservations were properly put to the Prosecuting Counsel.
HUMPHRYS: Well Mr Heseltine doesn't seem to have
much problem with it.
CAMPBELL: Well that's a matter for Mr Heseltine.
I think he is in, if I may say so, a slightly difficult position sitting there
on the Treasury Bench nodding his head in approval when the record shows in the
evidence which he gave to Sir Richard Scott, that he was pretty upset at the
fact that his reservations, which afterall reflected - some say - a keener
appreciation of the risk of injustice than that exhibited by the Attorney
General. He's obviously-He was obviously anxious that these reservations
were not properly put. If he now wishes simply to sweep that to one side, then
that I think tells you quite a lot about the instinct for survival of the
government rather than its willingness to confront the issues.
HUMPHRYS: And you wouldn't be suggesting that Mr
Heseltine's being duplicitous would you?
CAMPBELL: I certainly wouldn't say anything of the
sort. But I think one's entitled to draw a contrast between his evidence to
Sir Richard Scott at the oral evidence taking sessions and his position now.
HUMPHRYS: You've said some pretty damning things
about the use of PIIs - Public Interest Immunity Interest Certificates. But,
Sir Thomas Bingham, who is the Master of the Rolls, one of the most senior
judges in the nation, has given him pretty much a clean bill of health hasn't
he?
CAMPBELL: Well there's some dispute about that
isn't there because on Friday when this report appeared - I think exclusively
on the BBC - I understand that the Scott Inquiry retorted that there was
something of a misrepresentation of what Sir Thomas Bingham had said? I've
actually read that section of the Report in detail on more than one occasion
and my view is that Sir Richard Scott is right. And, again, if you go back to
the evidence when Sir Nicholas Lyell was giving evidence in the oral hearings,
he conceded that if there was such a thing as what he described as an
exceptional case, or a clear case, then Ministers were not under a duty, were
not compelled to sign these certificates but could decline to do so.
HUMPHRYS: So Sir Thomas Bingham really has got it
wrong is what you're saying because he did seem to be supporting Sir Nicholas
Lyell?
CAMPBELL: I've read, as I say Sir Richard Scott's
analysis of the cases and I've read what the Attorney General said in evidence
and I believe Sir Richard Scott has got it right.
HUMPHRYS: Isn't-In that case, Sir Thomas
Bingham, who is a very eminent judge, as I say, has got it wrong. They can't
both be right can they?
CAMPBELL: Well, I take a different view from Sir
Thomas Bingham. If by accepting the view of Sir Richard Scott I'm seen to be
taking a different view from Sir Thomas Bingham then so be it. But, I believe
Sir Richard Scott's detailed analysis, which is there for all to see, is to be
preferred.
HUMPHRYS: Isn't it enough, from your point of
view, that they have now changed the guidelines? They've changed the rules on
PIIs, we may see some more changes tomorrow. But they have already changed the
rules on PIIs, isn't that enough for you?
CAMPBELL: The central charge which Sir Richard
Scott makes is that there was a failure to discharge the Constitutional
principle of Ministerial accountability to Parliament. That a policy was
changed and that Parliament was not advised of that change of policy. That is
a very very serious charge and of course its buttress that's supported by the
fact that in behaving in that way, Ministers were also acting contrary to
Paragraph Twenty-seven of the Rules of Procedure for Ministers. Now that
simply cannot be pushed to one side. It cannot be explained away as I
understand the government may try and do tomorrow simply by saying it was the
system that was wrong. Ministers must be taken to know what they were doing.
HUMPHRYS: Right, but if the system is going to be
changed and it has now, since the publication, since all of the fuss about the
use of PIIs got underway, it has now been changed. If Ministers decide that
documents should not be disclosed in the public interest, from now on they must
say why and then it is for the Courts to decide. And, that makes sense does it
not and doesn't it meet your reservations?
CAMPBELL: Well, what makes sense is the approach
Sir Richard Scott takes which is that Ministers are not compelled to sign
Public Interest Immunity Certificates. They have to exercise a judgment and if
as Mr Heseltine did - he formed the view that there was nothing in the public
interest that required him to sign a certificate, that the documents could be
released without any damage to the public interest - then in such circumstances
Ministers should not sign them. Sir Richard Scott puts it really: the liberty
of the subject must always take precedence over any question of public
interest.
HUMPHRYS: And that is what is now the situation. I
mean the rules have been changed so that that is the situation from now on. I
mean there's not much more that the government could do about that, is there,
apart from acknowledging what you've just said?
CAMPBELL: Well I think there's a slight
misrepresentation there if I may say so. Because, as has been pointed out,
this is Judge made Law and if we are going to get this matter on a proper
footing, then there's no doubt whatsoever we need to have statutory provisions.
We need to have a Bill through the House of Commons that becomes an Act of
Parliament. And I don't yet understand the Government to have accepted the
unequivocal nature of Sir Richard Scott's recommendations about this matter.
HUMPHRYS: So that if somebody stands up tomorrow
and says we will change the Law to meet your objections, to meet the objections
you've just voiced, you'd say well that's alright then. Might you then vote
for the Government?
CAMPBELL: Of course not. We'd say well that's
the right thing to do. It's taken you rather a long time to do it. In
particular, if that's what you now think, why was this concerted programme to
undermine Sir Richard Scott's Report before it was published? Why do we have
these ludicrous arrangements for Robin Cook and myself to see the Report and
indeed why has it been necessary for Sir Richard Scott to intervene and to
complain about the fact that the Government has been selective in its
quotations from his Report. If that's what the Government is now saying, it
sits very uneasily indeed on the way in which it's conducted itself throughout
this whole matter.
HUMPHRYS: But in some ways it sounds as though
you'd be voting against them out of pique there. I mean you didn't like the
way you were treated when the Report was published. Well, at this stage in the
proceedings, so what?
CAMPBELL: Well I think people who know me know
that pique is not a motive to which I am subject. What is central here is the
fact that the government failed to discharge an important Constitutional
responsibility, that the policy in relation to the sale of arms to Iraq was
changed, that the government - in spite of telling the public and the House of
Commons that it was acting in an evenhanded way - was in fact favouring Iraq
over Iran. That there were in fact circumstances in which Parliament simply
did not know that there had been an important and significant change in
Government policy. That's a central charge. It's a charge to which the
government has no proper defence.
HUMPHRYS: Well - but - the defence has been - You
may not feel it's a proper defence but there is a defence and it is that the
charges that were made by yourself in Opposition, by the Labour Party as well,
were not in the end borne out by Sir Richard Scott. So, therefore, and they've
got all kinds of quotes from the Scott Report, that will prove to their
satisfaction at any rate, that they were exonerated on the charges that were
initially levelled to them by the Opposition Parties.
CAMPBELL: Well that's not borne out by reading the
Report. On the central question of whether Parliament was kept in the dark,
Sir Richard Scott reaches a robust, indeed an unchallengable conclusion. He
dismissed any alternative explanations as not being consistent with reality, or
not being capable of being sustained by reasonable argument. What Sir Richard
Scott has said, in an important paragraph of the Report, is that the Ministers
who signed the Public Interest Immunity Certificates were entitled to rely on
the legal advice given to them by the Attorney General. To that extent
therefore, they are excused, but he then goes on to make it pretty clear that
his criticism of the Attorney General is in no sense diverted or weakened by
the fact that he's reached a conclusion about those other Ministers.
HUMPHRYS: And what he said at that famous news
conference on the day the Report was published is there was no cover-up, there
was no conspiracy.
CAMPBELL: Yes but read-You must read the whole
thing in its context. He went on immediately to qualify that and indeed it's
the way in which the government sought to quote him out of context that
provoked his intervention in the debate last week. I mean I think it's
significant - in a way it's almost more significant - that the author of the
report feels compelled to intervene in the debate because of the way the
government is behaving. That's almost more significant than the precise terms
of his intervention.
HUMPHRYS: It could be his own fault? It could be
his own fault.
CAMPBELL: It's certainly a reflection of the fact
that he does not believe that the government has been dealing fairly with his
report-
HUMPHRYS: Alright.
CAMPBELL: -and that's borne out, if I may say so,
not just by what Sir Richard Scott says but by the analysis of newspaper
reporters, of commentators and of politicians.
HUMPHRYS: If the government wins the vote tomorrow
- is that it? Is that the end of it?
CAMPBELL: No because however a brave face the
government may put upon it, you're left with the fact that the Attorney
General, who's someone who has public responsibilities outside those of his
responsibilities to the government, is someone about whom an eminent judge has
been extremely critical, both as to his legal advice and as to the exercise of
his overall responsibility for the prosecution of cases. And, you've also got
Sir William-Mr Waldegrave, who's been the subject of trenchant criticism about
his behaviour. I'm afraid to say these two Ministers are shop soiled. They
may hang on in the government but it's worth pointing out that the only reason
why they will hang on in the government is because the government is so weak
that it dare not get rid of them. That is bound to be a significant issue
between now and indeed almost certainly during the next General Election.
HUMPHRYS: Menzies Campbell, thank you very much.
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