Leak inquiry 'running into the sand'

On Sunday 07 December, Andrew Marr interviewed Dominic Grieve, MP, Shadow Home Secretary

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

The Shadow Home Secretary says the police should call off their investigation into his Conservative colleague, Damian Green.

ANDREW MARR: Now when the Home Office officials launched their mole hunt, I don't suppose they thought it would lead to calls for the resignation of the Commons Speaker, Michael Martin.

But the argument over his fitness for purpose has become one consequence of the Damian Green affair. It's raised questions as well about the ethics of leaking, about police tactics and about the sanctity of Parliament.

All of that is being debated there tomorrow and I'm joined by one of the key figures in that debate, the Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve.

Mr Grieve, welcome. Thank you for coming in.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Thank you.

ANDREW MARR: First of all, do you think that the Speaker's position is threatened and should be threatened?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well I think many people don't wish to threaten the Speaker's position, but they do want to see action taken to ensure that this episode is never repeated. And there have clearly been serious failures by the House authorities. The police should never have come in to Damian's office in the way they did.

The material they were seeking was material that Damian had used in the Chamber to highlight government failings. As such, I believe it's covered by the protections afforded to the words an MP uses in the Commons and could never form part of a prosecution at all. So that the police should have come in, should have gone into his office and trawled through it.

They don't seem to have followed even the safeguards in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in respect of special procedure material and the whole thing appears as a complete disaster and the Commons authorities ought to be in a position to prevent such a thing happening.

ANDREW MARR: Two papers, I think, are calling for the Speaker to go this morning and say that his position is "untenable" - thirty MPs and so on. A lot of people are going to be watching your tone in the debate very closely. You're saying as far as you're concerned, as long as he comes up with some promises about explaining why this won't happen again, he's safe?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well it is actually for the House collectively to take decisions to protect its members. In many ways, the Speaker is only our voice in doing that and of course we tell him what needs... what the parameters are which he has to operate under.

Quite clearly, the House authorities failed to provide Damian Green with that protection. It is now up to us collectively as a House to disregard party and tribal allegiances and make sure that in future all MPs are properly protected and that the Speaker is in a position and understands what has to be done.

ANDREW MARR: And can the Speaker do that? I mean we read today that he wants a third term.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well that's a matter of course for MPs to decide, not for the Speaker to decide. And I don't know, that may be... that may just be a piece of journalistic story. He has in fact now been Speaker for quite a long period of time.

My view is that the first thing we need to do is to sort out what happened, and part of that must be having a proper and credible inquiry into it. Part of the problem - and you may already have seen this - is that it looks to me as if the Executive, the Government have started to hijack this process. They put forward a motion tomorrow for debate, which is completely unsatisfactory...

ANDREW MARR: In what regard?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well it pushes, it pushes the inquiry into the long grass and it's not at all clear that the members who would be appointed to it would have the necessary powers to investigate this matter properly. So the matter's got to be capable of being investigated properly and I'm afraid I simply don't buy this idea that it can't be investigated while the police inquiry continues.

I mean my hunch is that this police inquiry is running into the sand in a very big way. I think it's going nowhere and it's up to the police - and I hope the Director of Public Prosecutions - to bring this to an end quickly because I don't believe there will be any prosecutions arising out of this at all. There have been no criminal offences committed.

ANDREW MARR: When Boris Johnson said just the same thing, he was quickly accused of interfering in an ongoing police inquiry.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well Boris is the Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority. I have to say that the comments which I heard him make seem to me to be the absolute commonsense comments that would have come to any sensible person contemplating this constitutional disaster being perpetrated by the police bursting into the Parliament. I'm certainly not going to criticise him for that. If there are members of the MPA who think that he shouldn't have said anything at all, then doubtless they will raise that with him.

ANDREW MARR: Let me ask you about the mole, Mr Galley. When was he recruited as a Conservative candidate?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: I've no idea when Mr Galley... I believe Mr Galley stood as a local candidate in the North-East of England some time ago.

ANDREW MARR: Do you know when he first made contact with the Conservative front bench?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: No, I don't.

ANDREW MARR: And with whom?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: I don't know with whom he first made contact. I don't know the details of that. What I do know from what I've been told is that he provided about four pieces of information to the Conservative front bench, each one of which strikes me as being clearly covered by being in the public interest because it showed in each time that the Government was concealing very embarrassing facts such as, for instance, there were 5,000 illegal immigrants who'd been given certificates to work in the security industry.

ANDREW MARR: But among the embarrassing facts, the very embarrassing facts, was a list of how many Labour MPs might revolt against a piece of Labour Party policy. It's hard to see how that's in the public interest, embarrassing though it is in party political terms.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: It's hard to see what it was doing in a minister's office, in the Home Office, if that is indeed where it came from. And I think that I mean highlights to me one of the issues.

Leaking is not something which is in an ideal world desirable, but it's happening because there's a breakdown of trust between ministers and civil servants. And part of that breakdown of trust is the perception, which has been going on for years, that ministers are massaging the truth, concealing inconvenient facts, and that's the reason why the leaks come out.

ANDREW MARR: But I mean the charge against this guy is that he was doing it for party political reasons, encouraged by leading members of your party.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: From what I know about this matter, I'm absolutely convinced that he was not encouraged or induced into doing anything of the kind.

ANDREW MARR: And it would have been wrong had he been?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: I would regard it as being unethical to induce somebody into providing information of any kind. I wouldn't do it myself and I don't believe any of my colleagues have done it either. And I know Damian. I've known Damian for many years and I don't believe he would have done any such thing and he's told me he didn't.

ANDREW MARR: And Damian Green came to you about this matter before it blew up, presumably looking for advice. I'm just wondering why he would look for advice if he wasn't worried that something wrong might be occurring?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: I don't think he thought that something wrong might be occurring, but it is quite true that he sought my advice over a particular matter in relation to his dealing with this individual.

ANDREW MARR: Which matter was that? Can I ask you?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: That he had made, that the person concerned had made an application for a job.

ANDREW MARR: Right. So he was worried at that point there might be the appearance of inducement even if there wasn't inducement?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: He wanted to make absolutely... He already knew what he had to do, but he wanted to be absolutely clear that there could be no suggestion that any inducements were being offered at all.

And it's for that very reason that I'm so confident that Damian has done everything properly in this matter, including revealing in Parliament the documents which he obtained because at the end of the day, we cannot do our jobs as MPs if we are not allowed to do that.

I know that Jacqui Smith and indeed Gordon Brown, who's got a record in this, have admitted this, and yet somehow they seem to try to divorce that from the reality of where the documents actually come from. As MPs, we must be able to do this work; and if we're being prevented by the threat of police prosecution and investigation, then it is actually a serious issue because we can't get on with all the other things we need to discuss in this country, the important things, if we're being fettered in our work in this way.

ANDREW MARR: You could fast forward a year or something and find yourself as Home Secretary and you've got somebody working very closely with you day after day after day who turns out to be a Labour Party person who is leaking stuff out of your office to the Labour Party to embarrass you. What would you do?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Well I think the remedy is that the person's employment is going to be terminated. But if they have been behaving in a way that does not attract a criminal sanction, which it would be the case if it doesn't concern national security, and if the information certainly is being passed to a Member of Parliament, I think I have to live with it in a democratic society. I might be very upset about it, I might be very angry about it, but that doesn't justify launching the police out on an inquiry. And there is another aspect to this, I think we can't...

ANDREW MARR: To be clear, it was right to have the inquiry into the mole hunt, right to sack the mole, but where the Home Secretary should have known what was going on was when the police were involved and she should have stopped that happening?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Yes. And I mean I have to say I do have a slight... There's something slightly odd about this. There are some unanswered questions. It must have been pretty obvious at the outset the linkage to Damian because he'd been reported on the back of each of these stories, so it's a bit disingenuous to just launch the police out onto an inquiry and then wash your hands of it.

I mean this is the "Don't Know" Home Secretary and, frankly, she has failed completely to run her department in a way that I would regard as acceptable. She keeps on hiding behind the operational independence of the police.

It's the Government that provided the briefing to the police about what this was all about. There's a clear suggestion the police were told there was a national security angle - there isn't one - and thereafter she failed to monitor what was going on and failed to ask the perfectly basic questions which without interfering with operational independence could have prevented the whole of this fiasco taking place.

ANDREW MARR: Alright. Dominic Grieve, thank you very much. A big day tomorrow. Thank you for coming in.

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

Your comments

Disclaimer: The BBC may edit your comments and cannot guarantee that all emails will be published.

E-mail this to a friend

Printable version