Wilson Doctrine

Mark Field Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Before I start on the substantive argument, which is fairly simple, I will say one thing to the House. Those who are interested in this matter should look not just at the judgment that was handed down by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, but at the transcript of the hearing.

I attended part of the public session. It was an illuminating process and did not necessarily give one much confidence. As the House will know, I have been involved in this subject for many years and am loth to criticise courts, but I was not impressed by the IPT’s understanding of the technology that is available to the agencies to enable them to sift and limit the damage that is done by their intrusion of privacy. To me, that seemed rather important.

Secondly, it is apparent that the ruling means something very specific. It means that the inquiry that was brought by Baroness Jones, George Galloway and the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) is very unlikely to receive an answer because if something is not illegal, they will not be told about it. That is the rule. The hon. Lady will not be told whether something has happened. She will be told only if something illegal has been done. One of the outcomes of this situation is that it will prevent her or any of the complainants getting an answer.

James Eadie, the very skilful lawyer who argued on behalf of the Government, made the point that the Wilson doctrine has no legal basis whatever, is not practical—that is why the tribunal’s lack of understanding was very important—and, therefore, is not binding on the agencies. That is a really serious finding. He spent the best part of two days in incredibly convoluted argument. The only inference that I can draw from the incredible effort he put into getting this outcome is that they had something to hide and that what was happening in secret was a statement that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion or one of the other two complainants had been intercepted.

In the course of the exchanges with the judges, James Eadie was very illuminating on the attitude to this matter. He said, in effect, that if the Prime Minister had come to the House and explained the truth of the matter, post-RIPA, he would have been committing an

“act of political hara-kiri, or something quite close to it.”

That was the attitude of the tribunal to the Wilson doctrine.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I accept what my right hon. Friend has said, but is not one concern that the Wilson doctrine is 50 years old? It was written in a very different world, before the internet. He has drawn various conclusions from what was said, such as that the Government had something to hide. It might simply have been that the Government recognised that the legislative process, which we are updating, was not fit for the purpose of a modern-day Wilson doctrine.

[Mr Davis]

I take my right hon. Friend’s point, but that is why I urged Members to read the transcript. What I said is very apparent from the transcript. He is, of course, right that there has been a huge transformation. Metadata, which I will come back to later, simply did not exist in their current form in Wilson’s day. Many of the things that are now available, including email, did not exist in his day. A whole series of things that we all assumed had been swept up in the Wilson doctrine have not been swept up in the Wilson doctrine. That is why the Home Secretary’s case that it is the same as what was enunciated by Harold Wilson all those years ago is simply not tenable. I will come back to that point, too.

Members will notice that the Press Gallery is nearly empty. Over the past week or so, the newspapers have been very derogatory about this case and the argument that we are putting. They say, “Why should MPs be treated any differently from anybody else?” Those, by the way, are the very same newspapers that were in an uproar of anger about the fact that somebody had checked out the metadata of one of their journalist’s telephones. Perhaps they were right in that, but it is an odd dichotomy.