Speeches by Powell.

“Those are the trade-offs, and we have to balance them all the time. As I say to him regularly, if we want the House to start sitting at 6 am so that someone can come here and say something before they appear on the “Today” programme, let’s have a conversation about that. We are trying to get our messages out to the pub…”

“I am just saying that, as a trajectory of improvement, this is not going backwards but upwards. We have made 192 oral statements to the House in 170 sitting days. That is more than one a day. We have also tabled over 800 written ministerial statements. In the last Session, the Government made 72 oral statements in a ye…”

“No, but the letter from the Speaker came as a result of that.”

“It is not my code to rewrite. Again, I do not think that taking a binary view of these things is necessarily helpful. I certainly do not feel that there has been a breach of the Ministerial Code, but that is a matter for the Prime Minister to adjudicate, not me. Do I feel that, on all occasions, we are as forthcoming a…”

“We can come on to the SDR; I am sure we will. There are several things to unpack here, so let us unpack a few of them. Can we do better? Yes, we can. Are we doing better than the previous Government? Absolutely we are. It is really important to make that point here.”

“The Lib Dem spokesperson accepted the briefing and had the briefing. The Defence Committee Chair had the briefing. The Speaker declined the briefing. As I say, the establishment of a reading room for industry leaders and media and so on was the normal practice for SDRs up to that point.”

“He was offered a briefing, which he declined. Markus Campbell-Savours: Anyone else from the official Opposition?”

“We were actually in recess.”

“They are a matter for the Speaker, and it is not a judgment we share. Q53        Markus Campbell-Savours: You mentioned that there were a number of people invited to the reading rooms. I was in the Chamber on the day. I remember what I thought was quite convincing anger from the offic…”

“That is a judgment for the Speaker.”

“When Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of Government policy should be made in the first instance to Parliament. There are quite a few subjective words in that, I should be clear. You also have to strike the balance between—”

“Absolutely, but I think it is really important to set the context, because the letter from the Speaker came to this Committee as a result of the SDR. The two UQs that you mentioned, which were on the day of the SDR and which delayed the Secretary of State from making his announcement, were about the SDR. I do not think…”

“As I say, not by the Minister or anybody like that.”

“Maybe there has been a slight misunderstanding. I was not saying that that was a reason not to make a statement; just that it is a reason not to make a statement first, necessarily. If a Minister made an announcement on a Monday morning, for example, I would expect them to come to the House on the Monday afternoon, at …”

“It was not too lax, but it was too wide, in my humble opinion. In endeavouring to let people know, there were too many people—”

“No, but that is why I say it: because it is used as a proof point that somehow Ministers like John Healey are breaking the Ministerial Code. That is where I do, quite genuinely, push back.”

“Absolutely. Actually, I think that the Leader of the House is both those things: the Leader of the House is both the representative of the House sitting in Cabinet, but they are also the Cabinet’s representative to the House, especially in regard to House and Government business. If you asked any one of my Cabinet coll…”

“I think it was authorised, but it was under embargo—a verbal briefing—so he had not actually read the report. He said in the article that he had read it, which he had not, because he had not been in the reading room. He broke the embargo, which was obviously very serious. The Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey…”

“Obviously there was a notable breach of the embargo, which was not by somebody who had been invited into the reading room. I think it was raised on the Floor of the House at the time by Iain Duncan Smith and others that Tom Sharpe, a freelance columnist for The Telegraph, wrote a piece that went up online about two hou…”

“Some might say so.”