Christmas Adjournment

Having been upbraided by the Leader of the House on Thursday for not offering Christmas wishes, may I also take the opportunity, Mr. Speaker, of extending to you and the Deputy Speakers, the Clerks, the Officers of the House and all right hon. and hon. Friends and colleagues best wishes for Christmas and the new year. The Christmas Adjournment debate is always an excellent opportunity to raise all manner of issues, some of which are parochial and of constituency interest, and others that are of great national and international importance. In my brief contribution I shall deal with two matters that tend towards the latter category. The first is a matter that we have not had the opportunity to discuss in a debate because it arose only on Thursday last week—that is, the al-Yamamah arms sale and the discontinuation of the investigation—and the second is the most important issue facing all hon. Members and the country—the ongoing conflict in Iraq. I understand the reason for the timing of the Attorney-General’s statement last Thursday in order to avoid market fluctuation. I am less forgiving of its timing in terms of the recess, and the fact that it offered no opportunity for debate will have astonished many people. It will be widely seen as the last nail in the coffin of the so-called ethical foreign policy. It is an extraordinary decision on the part of the Attorney-General to discontinue an investigation at the point that the investigation had reached, before he had had the opportunity to consider the findings of that investigation. Of course, it is a matter for the Attorney-General alone to make that decision, which makes it all the more alarming that the following day the Prime Minister declared that he took full responsibility for it—a matter to which I shall return. It is also curious that the Attorney-General was able to come to a view that there was unlikely to be a prosecution, when the advice from Mr. Robert Wardle, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, was that the investigation was making good progress, but that it was too early in the process to determine the chances of success. As we know, the Attorney-General couched his decision in terms of national security—a matter of national security that happened to coincide with the Serious Fraud Office obtaining access to certain Swiss bank accounts held by Saudi nationals. He stressed time and again that the decision was not based on commercial considerations. Indeed, he was required to do that because under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development convention, article 5 states that investigation and prosecution of the bribery of a foreign public official"““shall not be influenced by considerations of national economic interest””." That is why the Attorney-General made those points. However, article 5 goes on to state that the investigation and prosecution should not be influenced by"““the potential effect upon the relations with another state or the identity of the natural or legal persons involved””." So, on the face of it, the Attorney-General’s decision seems curious and open to challenge. I shall make three brief points in respect of the decision. First, I am concerned about the role of the Attorney-General. This is the most political of Attorneys-General. He has made a number of decisions that were very near to the fine distinction between legal and political decision-making, but surely his first responsibility is the duty to uphold the law. The rule of law in this instance is subject to the statute that we passed so recently, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001. No other consideration should have been at the forefront of his mind. It may be necessary to return at some stage to the role of the Attorney-General and the requirements placed upon him.