Private investigators could be called to trawl through the emails of politicians and public officials, with chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Crispin Blunt determined to find out how a confidential report on the alleged use of British-made weapons in possible war crimes by Saudi-led forces in Yemen was leaked.
BBC Newsnight and The Guardian were handed extensive documents about the issue, with a forthcoming report, jointly authored by a number of select committees, appearing to have been watered down from its initial suggestion that ‘extremely strong evidence’ had been found of British weapons having been used, to merely ‘allegations.’
The wording must be approved by all the committees. On Newsnight last night, Mr Blunt was asked whether he had deliberately walked out of a meeting of committee members to make the meeting inquorate and impossible for the report to be approved. He appeared to avoid answering the question on several occasions.
Mr Blunt has asked the speaker of the house, John Bercow, to ask all the heads of the Liaison Committee to consider calling in private investigators to find the source of the leak, which he called “a matter of life and death”.
Raising a point of order in the Commons chamber, Mr Blunt said: “Mr Speaker, this amounts to a prima facie case of a deliberate campaign to influence a Select Committee, relying on in-confidence information provided by a member of this House or their staff.”
“Will you confirm, Mr Speaker, that it would not be open to the Privileges Committee, if this is referred to it, to call in the police, as this is not a criminal matter, but that it would be able to call on the services of private investigators?
“They would have the capacity to interrogate the electronic records, including deleted emails, relating to potential sources for this confidential and private consideration by committees of matters, in this instance, of the greatest seriousness, involving life and death issues and the employment of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens.
“Will you encourage the Liaison Committee to consider this as a matter of urgency, and confirm your view of the seriousness of this attempt to undermine the work of Select Committees?”
Mr Bercow said: “This is a very serious matter, indeed. If the committees of this House are to work effectively, we cannot have a situation in which individual members of a committee leak information, in advance, to advance a particular point of view or to retard the progress of another. That is wholly against the spirit of the operation of the Select Committees of this House.”
The Liaison Committee is made up of the heads of all of the House of Commons select committees, and is chaired by Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie.
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