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