Committee of Privileges
Oral evidence: Matter referred on 29 November 2022: conduct of John Nicolson MP, HC 940
Tuesday 12 September 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 October 2023.
Members present: Ms Harriet Harman (Chair); Andy Carter; Alberto Costa; Allan Dorans; Yvonne Fovargue; Sir Bernard Jenkin; Sir Charles Walker.
Questions 1-39
Witness
I: John Nicolson MP.
Witnesses: John Nicolson.
Q1 Chair: Mr Nicolson, thank you for coming. You are accompanied by Dr Sam Fowles, who can advise Mr Nicolson at any point. Mr Nicolson, you have offered us an opening statement to start the session, and then we will ask you some questions. The questions and answers will them form part of our report.
John Nicolson: I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to you and the Committee today. It's been almost a year since I was referred to the Privileges Committee, but I understand you've been dealing with another case. I'm grateful, too, that I'll be able to outline the circumstances of my referral here today without restriction.
I want, if I may, to begin with some background. I am my party's Front-Bench culture and media spokesperson, and I sit on the Culture and Media Committee. One of our roles, as you know, is to cross-examine the Secretary of State. When the former MP Nadine Dorries was briefly Secretary of State, she appeared before us. At a hearing in May of last year, she told us that, as a Back-Bench MP, she had some years previously taken time out of Parliament to star in a Channel 4 reality show “Tower Block of Commons”. She had lived with a family on a council housing estate. It had not been a happy experience for her or for the family; they didn't get on. This much had been in the public domain, but Ms Dorries told the Committee something new. She claimed the family she lived with had confessed to her that they weren't really residents of the estate, but actors pretending to be ordinary members of the public.
Channel 4 responded by commissioning an independent investigation. Every member of the production crew and all the residents who had appeared on camera were interviewed. In a detailed report, they concluded that Nadine Dorries’ claim was entirely false. None of the participants were actors and none had told Ms Dorries that they were actors, as she claimed at the DCMS Committee appearance.
The Committee chair offered Ms Dorries several chances to retract her claim, but she refused. As a result, we published a unanimously agreed cross-party report. It was excoriating about Ms Dorries and her behaviour. In blunt terms, we concluded that she had deliberately misled the Committee.
After some discussions with the then Committee Chair, I sent a copy of the report to the Lords Appointments Commission and to the Speaker. We assumed the seriousness of Ms Dorries’ behaviour might well result in her being sent to this Committee.
As a former political journalist, I always try to engage with the public as much as possible, both in print and on video, about my work. I tweet clips of my interviews from the Select Committee after every public session. After Ms Dorries’ evidence session, I did what I normally do and posted clips of her evidence. I later posted a video clip summarising our Committee report, and then I posted a further video clip reporting the fact that I'd sent a copy of the report to the relevant parliamentary authorities.
Now, there has been some suggestion that the Committee was divided on whether to recommend that Ms Dorries be sent to Privileges. We were not. I don't recall any discussion at all about it. As recently as 9 am this morning, I've confirmed this with other Committee members at the private meeting of the Committee itself. We assumed that such was the severity of the charge in our report that this would be the outcome and that Ms Dorries would have to appear before this Committee.
Ms Dorries, of course, was not pleased when she discovered that I'd sent the Lords Appointments Commission and the Speaker the report, she complained to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards that I was bullying her, a claim which was dismissed earlier this year. Shortly after I wrote to the Speaker, he responded with a very short letter saying that he would not allow the time for a privileges debate on Nadine Dorries’ behaviour. I made this known, as I do with Committee-related material, in a video, which I released to social media via Twitter and Facebook. The video was widely watched, and the Speaker received a great deal of criticism from the public over his decision.
I should point out that I did not criticise the Speaker for his decision, nor did I tag him. I was told a few days later that the Speaker was displeased with me because of the public backlash he was getting. My Whips thought I could perhaps lower tensions with his office by asking a question of him in the Chamber, in which I said that I deplored the unpleasantness directed at him on social media over his Nadine Dorries decision.
I did that, but it didn't make things better. The Speaker called on David Davis to deliver an intervention. Mr Davis then read out what appeared to be a pre-prepared statement about me. It is worth pointing out that I received no warning from Mr Davis that he intended to speak about me in the Chamber, nor was he reprimanded for that oversight. I point this out not to criticise Mr Davis, but to highlight the latitude commonly given to Members to raise issues that are, in the Member's view, matters of public interest.
I would have been happy to speak to Mr Davis in advance of his speech had he contacted me. This might have prevented him from saying a number of things in the Chamber about me and our Committee deliberations which were inaccurate. When Mr Davis sat down, I was not given the opportunity to respond, but after Mr Davis finished his speech, the Speaker concluded, “Let's leave it there” so I thought the matter was closed.
However, at the start of the following week, I was told that the Speaker had decided to allow time for a debate not about sending Ms Dorries to Privileges for misleading the Committee, but instead time was to be set aside to hold a debate about sending me to Privileges for revealing the Speaker's decision not to send Ms Dorries to Privileges. It wasn't immediately clear what specific rule I had broken, but I was eventually told via my Whips that I had broken a rule of which I was unaware, namely that the contents of a Speaker's letter to an MP must never be made known.
My assumption was that any letter which the Speaker wanted to remain private would be marked private in the usual manner. All of us, I am sure, label our private correspondence private if we want the recipient to treat it as confidential. It is important for Committee members to note that the Speaker's letter to me, which I have with me, had been marked neither private nor confidential.
Once I knew about the Privileges referral debate, I had very little time to prepare—a matter of days. I tried to find out more about the rule which had been cited to establish whether other MPs more experienced than I were aware of it. I asked a number of senior cross-party parliamentarians if they had ever heard of it. None had, including MPs with decades of service. We also searched “Erskine May”, but we could not find the rule anywhere. Indeed, in the intervening months, we found numerous examples of distinguished MPs through the decades quoting from various Speakers’ letters in the Chamber. Members will know that I mean no offence when I cite amongst this group Tony Benn in the 1980s and Committee member Sir Bernard himself in the 1990s.
Moreover, on the issue of privacy, in 1985 Speaker Weatherill specifically said of his private correspondence to a Member that there is, in the Speaker's words, “nothing secret about it.” In the same ruling, the Speaker undertook to publish his rulings in the public interest. That undertaking has, to the best of my knowledge, never been retracted.
When the debate began, I found that once again it was David Davis who was leading the charge. Once again, Mr Davis had not informed my office that he intended to speak about me. Perhaps I can now address a number of claims which were made in the course of this debate, since it was on the basis of some of those claims that I have been sent here to Privileges. It was claimed that I published the Speaker's letter. However, this is untrue. I did not and have not published the letter anywhere. It was claimed that the letter was marked private and confidential. This also was untrue. Committee members have now, I understand, seen a copy of the letter and so know that it was not marked private nor confidential. Had the Speaker marked his letter to me private or confidential, I would not have revealed its contents.
In both my personal life and my life as a journalist, I have always prided myself on maintaining confidentiality when asked to do so, as a matter of honour. It has been said that I had leaked the letter. Indeed, somebody has altered my Wikipedia page to make this claim, but I did not leak it. Nothing I did was underhand—I could not have been more open and up front—nor, as it happens, did I show the letter to anyone. Only my Westminster office manager, who is sitting behind me, who opens my mail saw it.
Going back to the debate, it soon became apparent that Mr Davis had been shown a copy of the letter, despite its apparently confidential nature. How do we know this? We know it because he commented on its contents during the debate. Which begs the obvious question: if the Speaker's letter was confidential, as I had been told, how did Mr Davis get a copy of the letter from the Speaker to me? I certainly did not give it to him, so who did? Apparently acknowledging that he'd been given and had read the Speaker's letter, one of the allegations Mr Davis made in the debate was that I misrepresented the contents of the letter.
This was very difficult for me to disprove on the day of the debate and subsequently. I had been told that I could not reveal the wording of the Speaker's letter to anyone. On the day of the debate, I could not, in my own defence, refer to the Speaker's letter—the letter that Mr Davis appeared to have seen and the contents of which he was citing. This seems to me to be self-evidently unfair.
I would contend that if I am to be accused of a breach of the rules, those rules must be clearly laid out and consistent and applied to all Members equally. As a journalist, I spend my professional life summarising people's opinions, arguments and documents. I do not believe that I misrepresented the Speaker's very brief letter in my short video summary of it.
Mr Davis also said that in my social media posts I'd withheld from the public the fact that I was a member of the Committee which had authored the Nadine Dorries report. This was self-evidently untrue. I explicitly referred to the Committee at the start of the video as “the Committee on which I sit”.
A final charge was that I criticised the Speaker. Now, again, as a political journalist, I've heard some pretty robust criticisms of Speakers over the years, especially of the last Speaker, voiced by MPs both within the Chamber and outwith. Nadine Dorries herself said of the Speaker in 2010 that he was “biased towards Labour”. Crispin Blunt said in 2019 that the Speaker was biased against Brexit supporters. Jacob Rees-Mogg said the Speaker had acted unconstitutionally in 2019, and in the same year Andrew Bridgen said the Speaker was “not impartial”. These are immensely serious and damaging accusations to levy at the Speaker, but none of these MPs were ever sent to Privileges for voicing them.
Robust criticism of the Chair has always been tolerated. Indeed, this is in line with “Erskine May” and with previous Speakers’ rulings, which I set out in my written submissions to the Committee in points 41 to 47. However, I want to make it clear that I didn't criticise Speaker Hoyle when posting my video. The transcript of my video shows this quite clearly. All I did was report that he had decided not to allow parliamentary time for a debate into Nadine Dorries’ conduct when she misled a Commons Committee. I pointed out that, as a result, she would suffer no consequences for misleading that parliamentary Committee. That, I would contend, was a statement of demonstrable fact.
Furthermore, on the issue of consistency and fairness, what of those who retweeted me? One of those who did was Stephen Flynn, who has since become my party’s Westminster leader. I should make it clear that Mr Flynn has given me express permission to raise this point with you. Originally, the Speaker's Office said that anyone who retweeted me would also find themselves appearing before you here in Privileges. However, since his election as the third party leader, no move has been made to send Mr Flynn to Privileges. Is this because different rules apply to party leaders? Fairness and consistency should surely be the guiding principle in the enforcement of rules, whether real or contested, not parliamentary seniority.
I should say, Ms Harman, that I bear the Speaker no ill will. I have met him on more than a dozen occasions. Our conversations in person have always been friendly and amicable. I've spoken to many parliamentarians cross-party about this issue and these events. All have said the same thing to me, namely that they were unaware of any rule that the Speaker's correspondence to MPs is always confidential, whether marked private or not. And this, I would contend, is because, as I think I've established, no such rule exists.
Moreover, I find little support for the idea that a new precedent be set. Any new rule making all Speaker correspondence secret would be rendered absurd in many situations—take mine. As I understand it, no one questions my right to tell journalists and the public that I had written to the Speaker about Nadine Dorries’ behaviour and our Select Committee report. It is agreed by all parties that I was within my rights to do so. However, the assertion is that were journalists to have asked me subsequently whether the Speaker had replied to my letter—and if so, what his reply was—I should apparently have said, “That’s a secret. I cannot tell you if the Speaker has replied or what he said.” Is this not the very antithesis of open democracy? Do the press and public not have a right to know whether the Speaker has reached a decision on a matter of public interest?
I think the public and journalists have the right to know as many details as possible about the workings of this Parliament and our debates and deliberations, unless there is a very good reason for that information to be withheld from them. In this case, I cannot see why there should have been secrecy. Apart from anything else, the Speaker’s decision would have become self-evident in due course anyway. Given that I had written to ask for parliamentary time to be allocated for a debate on the Select Committee report about Ms Dorries, were that debate not to have taken place, it would soon have become obvious what the Speaker’s ruling had been.
In addition to speaking to many fellow parliamentarians about this case, I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to obtain legal assistance. I deeply appreciate that barrister Sam Fowles, sitting here beside me, has offered to assist me. Dr Fowles is not being paid through the public purse, as was the case with the last case you dealt with. Dr Fowles is working pro bono, because he believes the open democracy and free press issues raised in my case are serious. The written submission before you was co-authored by me and Dr Fowles. This opening statement was written entirely by me. Thank you for your attention.
Chair: Thank you, Mr Nicolson. Can we start with questions from Andy?
Q2 Andy Carter: Thank you very much, Mr Nicolson, for your very clear opening statement. I want to go back to the video that you posted on Twitter on 16 November. Did you consider seeking any advice on whether it was permissible to talk about the correspondence about the complaint of privilege with the Speaker—anybody in the Clerks’ office or anybody who could give you advice? Did you think about asking for permission from the Speaker to release that?
John Nicolson: I didn’t think it was controversial, and I didn’t think it was secret. I also asked a former member of this Committee for advice. They advised me that there were no restrictions on publicising a Speaker’s decision once the Speaker had made that decision. The person concerned is a very senior parliamentarian—nobody who is sitting here—and I took that advice.
Q3 Andy Carter: In that video, you didn’t give Mr Speaker’s decisions for not referring the matter to the Committee of Privileges. The view expressed by the Committee in its report was that he said he did not consider it to reach the threshold. Why was that? You gave a partial explanation. Why didn’t you make it clear?
John Nicolson: I have the letter here. It is two sentences long. As I said in my opening statement, I summarise things all the time. I do not think that “meeting the threshold”, as a phrase, is easily consumable by members of the public. If I was broadcasting, I would not have used that phrase. The Committee did not have a view, collectively, about sending Ms Dorries to the Committee of Privileges. They thought that she would be sent to Privileges. The Chair thought that she should be sent to Privileges. Today, I asked the members of the Committee who were members of the Committee at that time what they thought would happen, and they all said to me that their assumption had been that she would be sent to Privileges because a member of the Committee or another Member of Parliament, like myself, would request that that time be given. I do not think I misrepresented the Speaker by saying that he had decided not to allocate the time.
Q4 Andy Carter: Thank you. One more question, if I may. Why do you think this matter has been referred to the Committee?
John Nicolson: I have thought about that quite a lot. I watched back the debate itself. In the debate, a lot of people were led to believe things that were simply untrue, and I have run through a number of them. I have been contacted by a number of parliamentarians, cross-party, from Cabinet level, Front-Bench level, from all parties, who have said that they regretted that the debate took place. A number of Members have said that, had they understood the issues, they would have voted differently. If the debate were to be held again today, with a bit more notice, and if I had been given the opportunity in the Chamber, as you have given me, to rebut some of the points, I wonder whether a different decision would have been reached.
Q5 Sir Charles Walker: Just quickly, you contest that no rule was broken because no rule exists, but there is a bit of your evidence that does not support that. You say, “I was eventually told, via my Whips, that I had broken a rule of which I was unaware.” If the rule did not exist, how were your Whips in possession of information that you had broken a rule?
John Nicolson: The Whips took on face value the Speaker’s Office assertion that this was a long-standing rule. The Whips did not know that the information that they had been given was incorrect. Remember it was all incredibly hurried. The Whips told me that they had been told by the Speaker’s Office that this was a long-established rule, and they simply accepted that on face value.
I think my Whips, on the basis of the information that we have been able to provide them, now recognise that the information they were given was wrong. When they told me that that rule existed, they told me that in good faith, and they now recognise that that was wrong.
Q6 Sir Charles Walker: So if you were to revise this—I am not suggesting you do; we are dealing with it now—you would say that you had broken a rule that both “they and I” were unaware of.
John Nicolson: I think that’s fair. I just didn’t want to put words in their mouth, but since you ask me the question.
Q7 Alberto Costa: Good morning, Mr Nicolson, and thank you for your extremely helpful opening statement. You have more or less answered this question, but I want to put it for the record. Do you consider that you fairly represented the Speaker’s letter to you—the letter that you have already referred to?
John Nicolson: Yes, I do think that I fairly represented it. You have all seen a copy of it. Were I to have given that to my editor at “Newsnight” when I was a “Newsnight” reporter and said, “This is what the Speaker sent me, and this is how I represented it,” I think my editor would have been satisfied with that.
Alberto Costa: Thank you.
Q8 Sir Bernard Jenkin: Could I just chip in on that point? I think the “Newsnight” editor is not necessarily the best arbiter of what is innuendo. Clearly, you didn’t use the words “does not meet the threshold”, so you didn’t impartially report the contents of the letter. There was an implication in it that there was something wrong. You may have felt there was something wrong, but that was an implied criticism of the Speaker. You do accept that, by implication and by innuendo, you were impugning the integrity of the Speaker.
John Nicolson: Again, I don’t think there was innuendo there. I think the fact that some of those who spoke in the debate had to somewhat jazz up the contents of the Speaker’s letter and imply that it was much longer and that there was a great deal more detail in it than there actually was kind of demonstrates that they didn’t necessarily feel that there was a great deal of strength in that—
Q9 Sir Bernard Jenkin: So why did you feel that the Speaker did not refer the matter?
John Nicolson: I don’t know. I can’t speak for the Speaker, but it was certainly the view of my Committee Chair and all the other members of the Committee at the time that Ms Dorries’ behaviour in deliberately misleading us and inventing a story about the people she had lived with, and inventing a story about what they had said to her, was so egregious that it met the threshold.
Q10 Sir Bernard Jenkin: Well, then why didn’t the Committee refer it?
John Nicolson: I can honestly say that we spent about a second or two discussing that. You have to imagine what it was like. We had interviewed Nadine—
Q11 Sir Bernard Jenkin: But what discussions did you have with the members of the Committee?
John Nicolson: May I just answer that? We had interviewed Nadine Dorries at great length. We talked several times about giving her opportunities to retract what she had said. We were very immersed in the subject. I suppose we felt that it was so blindingly obvious that what she had done was egregious and was a deception of Parliament that all of us just assumed that this would end up in Privileges. It just required a trigger.
Looking back, clearly, it would have been better if somebody had said, “Why don’t we refer it to Privileges ourselves?” Looking back, I wish that I had said that myself. I probably would not be here if that was the case. For some reason we didn’t, but I was very keen to check that with my fellow Committee members this morning, which is why I went to their private meeting at 9 o’clock to get their assurance that this is how they saw it, so I am in no way misquoting them.
Q12 Chair: Can I just intervene so that we can get the facts clear between us? On 18 October, the DCMS Committee agreed a special report where this was addressed explicitly. The report says, “Had Ms Dorries remained Secretary of State, driving a policy of selling the channel, we may have sought a referral to the Privileges Committee”—that implies that there was a consideration—“but, as her claims have not inhibited the work of the Committee and she no longer has a position of power over the future of Channel 4, we are, instead, publishing this Report”.
So what that special report says is, “We decided whether we would ask for this to be a matter of privilege. We considered whether this should be a matter of privilege and decided, for two reasons—that she is no longer in the job and because we’ve not been inhibited—that we are not going to.” It is an active decision rather than something where there was an assumption that it might happen. It seems to cast a bit of a different perspective on it.
John Nicolson: But Ms Harman, the end of that sentence is, “to enable…Members, to draw their own conclusions.” We expected that Members of the House would be given the opportunity to debate this.
Q13 Chair: Oh, I see. So it is for Members to draw their own conclusions about whether or not there should be a referral. I see what you mean.
John Nicolson: Yes. That is very much what we thought. In fact, the Committee Chair and I—
Q14 Chair: So, “We’re not doing it; we’re publishing it, and then the House can decide to refer.”
John Nicolson: Exactly.
Q15 Chair: I see what you mean. I thought the implication was, “We’re not making it a Privileges issue because they can draw their own conclusions about what she’s done.”
John Nicolson: No. We thought—again, I clarified this with them this morning—“Members will draw their own conclusions”. We thought, “This is so overwhelming, the evidence is so strong, that a debate will be had on this.” This is why the Committee Chair at the time was keen that, as a Committee member, I should send this to the Speaker.
Chair: Thank you.
Q16 Sir Bernard Jenkin: May I chip in again briefly? You can see from that exchange with the Chair that that might have been the conclusion of the Speaker—that the Committee had decided not to refer the matter—and therefore he was deferring to what he understood the Committee’s judgment to be. That is a perfectly reasonable decision for the Speaker to have made.
John Nicolson: As far as I know, the Speaker did not contact the Committee Chair to ask for clarification. Nor did he ask me for further clarification. We thought that the report spoke for itself because it was so strongly worded.
Q17 Sir Bernard Jenkin: The point I am making is that you can see how he could have interpreted that bit of the Committee’s report in exactly the way the Chairman just suggested to you, and that would be a reasonable interpretation, because it is ambiguous, isn’t it?
John Nicolson: All of us will, I suppose, draw different interpretations. Certainly the Committee members felt that it would end up going to Privileges. I don’t think any of us thought that it would not.
Q18 Sir Bernard Jenkin: And when the Committee itself said it didn’t impede the functioning of the House—
John Nicolson: The behaviour was so bad—to deceive a Select Committee in that way, to traduce members of the public and to stand by her position despite being given two or maybe three opportunities to retract. If that doesn’t meet the threshold by which one is sent to Privileges, I don’t know what does. Where does it leave public confidence if you can behave like this and yet end up with no repercussions? I think that is what all of us thought. I think that all of us thought that our report was so strong it would end up going to Privileges.
Q19 Andy Carter: Just on that point, if you believe it was so bad, why didn’t you vote against the report? Why didn’t you append your own view to—
John Nicolson: Because I supported the report.
Q20 Andy Carter: But if you felt it should have gone to Privileges—
John Nicolson: I thought it would go to Privileges.
Q21 Andy Carter: But why didn’t you make that point in the report—that you felt that it should have gone? Understandably, when the Speaker received the report, the interpretation, which I think the Chair has just given, was that, actually, the Committee were not suggesting that it needed to go to Privileges. If you felt so strongly—if it was such an egregious breach—why didn’t you vote against it and say that, actually, it should have gone to Privileges?
John Nicolson: I think that the same question could be put to any member of the Committee who felt that it should go to Privileges, which was all of the members of the Committee. I have been on the Committee since 2015. It is very collegiate. There has never been a split vote on it. I certainly didn’t think that this met the threshold whereby I would have to separate myself from my colleagues—apart from anything else, because we all agreed that this would happen. I know a great deal was made about this in the debate, as if we had all had a stooshie about this in our private meeting. We didn’t.
Q22 Sir Charles Walker: Look, I have great sympathy for all parties in this. It is very difficult; it is actually quite obtuse. But when we spoke a few moments ago, you said that you didn’t want to put words into the mouths of your Whips Office, and looking at your tweet, I do think that the Speaker could be of the view that you put words into his mouth. I will just read two of the last sentences of your tweet: “He says that he’s considered my letter, but he’s decided to take no further action and not to refer Nadine Dorries to the Privileges Committee. In other words, she’ll suffer no consequences for what she’s done.”
The Speaker, reading that, could feel that, actually, you are putting him in the frame regarding your disappointment that she will “suffer no consequences”, when, in reality, she had suffered consequences. She had been the subject, as you rightly say, of an excoriating report. That is a political consequence that damages people’s reputations. You may also have had some success in writing to the Lords Appointments Commission around resignation honours.
John Nicolson: I am told that I did.
Q23 Sir Charles Walker: Do you see what I mean? I have great sympathy for all parties in this, but I can see, in a way, I am afraid—it is that sentence: “In other words, she’ll suffer no consequences for what she’s done.” You are placing your disappointment on to the shoulders of the Speaker and the ruling that he made. Can you see that, possibly?
John Nicolson: I am doing my absolute best to see all parties’ positions in this. Ms Dorries is not easily shamed. I think the idea that Ms Dorries was terribly hurt by the Committee report is fanciful. She was offered many opportunities to retract her claim and didn’t do so. In fact, her response to this was not to be apologetic or to withdraw slightly, but to write to the Parliamentary Commissioner to say that I was bullying her. She said that I had bullied her in the Select Committee in my questioning, and I had bullied her across the Floor of the House. That is what she said.
Honestly, here I am, almost a year on, and I wish I had never heard the two words “Nadine” and “Dorries”. This has occupied a lot of space in my life over the last year. She has suffered no consequences at all for this. I think all of my fellow Committee members thought that to have lied in this way she would have paid a political price, and I do not think she has paid any political price at all for it. Self-evidently, I am here and Nadine Dorries isn’t.
Q24 Sir Charles Walker: Look, I am genuinely sorry that this has caused you so much concern. All I am saying, gently, is that perhaps, upon review, and given that you have had a difficult 12 months, those two sentences, when read together, seemed to place your disappointment directly on the shoulders of the Speaker and brought him into play to some extent, and just perhaps—maybe—if you were to redo that, you might use a different choice of words.
John Nicolson: I think if I was to redo my time, I would probably encourage another member of the Committee to send the report to the Speaker so that I didn’t get involved with this poisoned chalice. I think it is a pity that the Chamber itself did not get to debate the issues concerned. I think that would have been helpful. I think it would have been good for public confidence in the process.
There was a lot of engagement in my initial tweets. The cross-examination of Nadine Dorries got hundreds of thousands of views. I find that people talk about folk being cynical about politics. It is often true, but not always. People like to see politicians engaged, they like politicians to be answerable, and they enjoy the Select Committee work. I think the report is a good piece of work. Again, it is so difficult, and I do not want to put words in my fellow Committee members’ mouths, but I wonder whether, if they had their time to do again, they wouldn’t have said, “We recommend that this be sent to Privileges.” I think they expected an outcome that did not then come about.
Chair: Thank you. Allan Dorans is next.
John Nicolson: Ms Harman, my counsel has asked whether he can have a quick word with me. Is that okay?
Chair: Yes, of course.
[Mr Nicolson took advice]
John Nicolson: I wonder if I can develop that point a little bit. I noticed this as a political journalist, and subsequently as a Member of Parliament. I think you are suggesting, and a couple of Members have suggested, that there was implied criticism of the Speaker. I suppose all of us would agree that one is allowed to disagree with the Speaker if one disagrees with the Speaker. As far as I can understand from reading the precedents and “Erskine May”, in order for that to even approach the level of contempt, it has to be pretty severe.
Some of the criticisms of the Speaker—particularly of the last Speaker—that I have observed, in journalism and then in politics, were absolutely scathing, and none of the MPs suffered consequences for very brutal criticisms of the Speaker. Even if one was to accept that this sentence contains some very gently worded implied criticism of the Speaker’s decision, it does not come close to some of the things that Mr Rees-Mogg and others said about the Speaker in the Chamber and outwith the Chamber, none of which suffered any repercussions of any kind, so there does not seem to be consistency. If gentle criticism of the Speaker is intolerable, what about very robust, direct and brutal criticism of the Speaker?
Chair: That is an issue that you referred to very clearly in your opening statement. Can we proceed with Allan’s question?
Q25 Allan Dorans: Good morning, Mr Nicolson.
John Nicolson: Good morning, Mr Dorans.
Allan Dorans: You partially answered this question in response to Sir Charles, but I’m going to ask again. Do you consider that by making a public statement and commenting “in other words, she’ll suffer no consequences for what she’s done”, you implied or allowed others to infer that the Speaker had favoured or protected Ms Dorries rather than acted on the evidence?
John Nicolson: I think that’s for others to decide. The Speaker obviously makes myriad decisions every year. I think a lot of people, including my Committee members, were disappointed by the decision, and I think they wished the decision had been something different. But we are allowed to disagree with the Speaker when we disagree with the Speaker. It does not have to be an unkind disagreement, just to disagree.
Q26 Allan Dorans: Okay. Thank you for that. Do you understand why the Speaker took issue with the way in which this was promoted?
John Nicolson: The Speaker, I think, found himself being roundly criticised by members of the public for the decision that he had made, and the Speaker, I feel, blamed me for some of the criticism that he was getting and was cross about that and felt that if I had not revealed his decision, he would not have been subjected to the criticism that he was subjected to. But as part of the process of open and honest communication with members of the public, I had already told the public about Ms Dorries and me and our cross-examinations. I had told them about the report and tweeted a link to the report.
It was part of an ongoing conversation with the public, and then I told the public that I was sending a copy of the report to the parliamentary authorities. It was inevitable, at that point, that journalists would turn around to me and say, “Did the Speaker reply? What did he say?” At which point, if I am to understand the Speaker’s Office’s original communications to my Whips, I should have said, “I cannot tell you—it is a secret,” which I think serves none of us well as parliamentarians in communicating with members of the public.
Allan Dorans: Thank you.
Q27 Andy Carter: I hear what you say about the logic of the things that you said previously and the strangeness of not being able to say whether the Speaker has decided to grant privilege or a contempt. You have said there is no rule against disclosing the Speaker’s rulings on matters of privilege—that it is not practice. I think that is what you said: “There is no rule, but it is not practice.” There are, though, some rules that the House agreed to in the 1977 report from the Committee of Privileges, which says that applications should not be raised in the House or, by analogy, anywhere else too, because it draws the Speaker into a debate. If you had inquired at the Journal Office, the Clerks probably would have said to you that there is a 1995 letter from Speaker Boothroyd on the record, in which she declined privilege and criticised a Member for releasing the details to a newspaper. Would that not have informed the route that you took, had you been aware of those things?
John Nicolson: Yes, that was raised in the debate. This is of course a very different thing. There is a big difference between leaking to a newspaper the Speaker’s correspondence and not being open about that, and what I did. I didn’t publish it. I didn’t leak it. I simply revealed that the letter had been written. So it was very different from that. Presumably, if the Clerks had been advising me about Speaker Boothroyd, they would also have advised me that Speaker Weatherill had said that his correspondence was not secret, which he said in the 1980s, so it’s more recent than Speaker Boothroyd.
Q28 Andy Carter: In fairness, the letter from Speaker Boothroyd does not talk about leaking; it just talks about making the information public.
John Nicolson: Well, if you give something to journalists, you are leaking.
Q29 Andy Carter: But of course we didn’t have social media then and there wasn’t the ability to—
John Nicolson: Yeah. I don’t know the exact circumstances of that, but one of the examples that was quoted in the debate proved, on further examination, not to be correct. Information had been leaked to The Sunday Times. The Speaker had not been consulted about this. It was a sensitive case. The Speaker said that he was not pleased that it had been leaked to The Sunday Times. But the Speaker—again, Speaker Weatherill in this case—took no punitive action against the person who admitted that he had done the leaking, and the Speaker subsequently published that in Hansard.
Chair: Thank you—[Interruption.]
John Nicolson: My barrister isn’t used to being rendered mute in the courts and finds it rather frustrating. He makes this request: if you feel this is pertinent, it would be very helpful for us to see a copy of that letter that Ms Boothroyd talked about, because I haven’t seen it.
I should say as well that as a journalist I have dozens of close friends in journalism and, had I wanted to be underhand or sneaky about this in any way, I could have done what some have done.
Q30 Chair: I don’t think that is the accusation.
John Nicolson: No, but it is what somebody would do if they were being sneaky.
Q31 Sir Bernard Jenkin: When it became clear that the Speaker was very upset about the pile-on that you had created against him and he spoke to the Whips Office—your own Whips Office—about it and asked them to ask you to take down the video, why did you not do so?
John Nicolson: I don’t think I created a pile-on. I don’t think one can be held responsible for communicating with the public and for how the public then respond.
Q32 Sir Bernard Jenkin: So who was responsible for creating the pile-on?
John Nicolson: The people who piled on are responsible for their own actions.
Q33 Sir Bernard Jenkin: Your video provoked it. At least accept that.
John Nicolson: I think it was the least provocative of videos. Sir Bernard, you sit in the House of Commons. You hear some of the things that parliamentarians say every day. They are provocative. If every parliamentarian who says something critical of another parliamentarian—in the Chamber, outwith the Chamber or on social media—is to be accused of creating a pile-on, we will be walking on glass all the time. I had no intention of creating a pile-on.
The other point, of course, is that if one wishes to create distress for another politician, one attacks them, and that is something I make a practice of never doing. I never attack politicians or, indeed, anybody else, I don’t think, because I don’t wish to create pile-ons, because I think they ill serve public debate. I believe in courteous communications, and I try to make my communications with my colleagues—I know some of you personally. I try to behave with courtesy and don’t get involved in aggressive slanging matches.
There were various suggestions coming from the Speaker’s Office. Again, I am cautious about talking about some of this, because this was the Speaker’s Office having private conversations with the Whips Office that were then filtered through the Whips Office to me. The Whips Office was in a difficult position, because it was taking at face value some of the things that it had been told—for instance, that this rule existed. We now know that it doesn’t exist, but it was told explicitly that this rule existed.
The Whips Office was in a difficult position. It was trying to calm the situation, but it was not entirely clear what the rules were. To be blunt, the Whips did not know what the rules were. A number of parliamentarians were trying to assist me at that stage, going off to see the Table Office and trying to ask where this rule was.
Sir Bernard Jenkin: You have made that point.
Chair: Thank you. Can we move on to the next question from Allan?
Allan Dorans: Thank you. I was going to ask a question about why the Committee that Mr Nicolson sits on did not make more of an issue of the fact that he should go to Privileges, but I think it has already been answered.
Chair: I think you have addressed that point. Thank you very much for your opening statement and for answering the questions. I apologise for the length of time it has taken.
John Nicolson: Might I just say something very quickly in conclusion, which is that—
Chair: Can I just ask for you to postpone your conclusion until after I have asked a further question?
John Nicolson: Okay. Sorry, I thought you were concluding.
Q34 Chair: I think the Committee might be minded, and prefer, to try to see what we can do to conclude this matter here, rather than it travelling back to the House by way of a request to you to apologise to the Speaker. I want to just put that thought into your mind to see what you think about that because it is possible for you to say to this Committee that you were not aware of the rules surrounding confidentiality and that you did not intend to criticise the Speaker or inflame any animation against him. That could constitute an acknowledgment and an apology, and it could form the basis of us resolving the matter here today. Obviously, we have to agree as a Committee, but you are here now, so I just wonder whether you want to think about that and consult with Dr Fowles and see what you think.
Alberto Costa: If that course of action was adopted, I would certainly like to say to Mr Nicolson that this episode might provide useful learning to this Committee and to the House and that, separate from any response to points the Chairman has made, we might bring out other thoughts about the wider issues that you have raised into the report.
Chair: You have done a lot about illuminating the context and what people do and do not know. At this point, you do not need to think about that; you just need to think about you and your situation in this. You can leave all the other reflection on the context to us. The question is whether you can help to resolve this matter.
Sir Charles Walker: May I suggest that Mr Nicolson might like a few minutes to talk that through with his counsel quietly?
[Mr Nicolson took advice]
John Nicolson: Thank you very much. My barrister and I are as at one, I am glad to say. I am very keen to resolve this. It’s very unpleasant. I give as good as I get at Select Committees. I think I can be a tough interviewer. I don’t like personal aggro. I don’t fall out with people in my life, and I don’t like personal animus, so I have found this quite distressing from beginning to end. I want not to be disingenuous. I think there are two things at play here. Let me say that I entirely agree with what you said. I did not intend to criticise the Speaker, and I did not intend to antagonise him. I don’t bear any ill will towards Sir Lindsay; I don’t want to have an unpleasant relationship with him. I have chatted to him in Westminster Abbey and all sorts of different places. I don’t have any grievance with him, so I didn’t intend to criticise him. I didn’t wish for there to be any pile-on against him. I don’t wish to have any antagonism towards him, and I am happy to say so absolutely explicitly.
A separate issue, I think, is the issue about communications. I think that it is in the interests of parliamentary democracy and communications with our constituents that as much of Parliament is available for the public to understand as possible. I think it is good for decisions made in Parliament to be, in plain English, communicated to constituents and members of the public. If the Committee is deliberating on recommendations, my personal preference would be to err on the side of being open and transparent in all our decisions, from the Speaker down to us as individual MPs. Obviously, a very small and simple thing is: if we write to one another and we want something to be private, then just write “private” on it, because this situation would never have arisen if the letter, which I have here, had been marked “private” on the top. I would never have breathed a word.
Q35 Chair: But in that you are reflecting on the wider context.
John Nicolson: Yes.
Q36 Chair: Perhaps I could encourage you to leave the wider context and the state of the system to us, and deal with your own situation of where we are now with the issue of confidentiality and the issue of criticism of the Speaker. It is really about you, and how you are going to move forward in your own situation.
John Nicolson: As I say, I am very happy to say that I did not intend to criticise the Speaker, I did not intend to create an inflamed situation in which the Speaker was put under pressure, I did not wish to offend the Speaker and I did not wish to upset the Speaker. I regret that he was upset and offended; he clearly was upset, and that was certainly the last thing that I intended to do.
Q37 Chair: In relation to the issue about confidentiality, can you say that you were not aware that there was an issue around confidentiality and that you regret not being aware of the issue around confidentiality?
John Nicolson: Yes, I can certainly say that I did not know that the Speaker intended his letter to be confidential. I can say with absolute certainty that had I known the Speaker intended his letter to be confidential, I would certainly have honoured that. I would never have dreamt of communicating anything at all about the Speaker’s letter had I believed the Speaker’s letter to be confidential and had I thought his intention was to keep it confidential.
Q38 Andy Carter: Mr Nicolson, I have just heard what you said there, and it was very helpful that you said it, but I have to say that you have not apologised; I have heard you say the word “regret” but you have not apologised. Are you willing to do so now?
John Nicolson: In the privileges debate, I did say, “I am sorry that I have upset the Speaker.” I have no interest in upsetting anybody in my life. I do not go around trying to upset people, so of course I am sorry that I upset the Speaker. It was not my intention to upset the Speaker and I hope you will accept my assurances that my intention in all this was, as a parliamentarian, to enhance the work that we do as parliamentarians—the communication that we have with our constituents—and to address what I thought was a serious issue.
Q39 Chair: Basically, Andy has just put it to you that you have not apologised to the Speaker for prompting the criticism that he faced, and asked whether you are willing to do so now. I am taking the answer to that to be yes.
John Nicolson: Yes.
Chair: With that, we thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us and thank your lawyer for assisting you pro bono. Thank you for your written evidence and your opening statement. Once again, we apologise for how long it has taken before the Committee found itself in a position to be able to address this issue.
John Nicolson: I do understand the reasons.
Chair: If that concludes your evidence, we will end this evidence session.