Inquiry finds no wrongdoing by former foreign secretaries in Channel 4 and Telegraph sting,but how rigorous is Westminister regulation?Suppose that the editor of the “Daily campaign” who appointed Sir Humphrey Flannel to be supreme press ombudsman then found himself being investigated for dirty dealing by the selfsame Flannel, who lugubriously declared him not guilty. Hacked Off rockets would be heading for the moon in a moment. But Sir Malcolm Rifkind was on the committee that appointed Kathryn Hudson as parliamentary commissioner for standards a couple of years ago – and Hudson did give Sir Malcolm (along with Jack Straw) a cleanish bill of ethical health in her report to parliament’s standards committee final week. This doesn’t mean that somehow the whole inquiry was a decorous Westminster fix. Of course not. Hudson lays out her assessment of the evidence at length and in detail. But it does mean that rules are rules – and that they vary widely if you’re a TV reporter, or a newspaper editor or an MP (remember that Rifkind and Straw are lawyers to boot).
The basic story – from Channel 4 Dispatches and the Daily Telegraph – claimed that the two former foreign secretaries,approached by a fake Chinese company, were pretty interested to do lucrative lobbying trade. The sting went in: their responses were filmed and broadcast. But were there specific infringements of the parliamentary rulebook? At one point, or Hudson reports Rifkind as acknowledging that “he had made ‘errors of judgment’ and off the cuff’ remarks approximately which he might have been ‘mistaken’ – but while those errors allowed others to draw unflattering inferences,they do not provide evidence that Sir Malcolm had done anything which could be considered a breach of the rules on lobbying”.
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Source: theguardian.com