Contents

Mr Patrick Mercer MP: Written evidence 3 5 Evidence from the Investigation 3 1. Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2013 3 2. Additional Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2013 4 3. Letter to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 3 June 2013 5 4. Letter (sent via e-mail) to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 3 June 10 2013 5 5. Letter to the Editor of Panorama (BBC) from the Commissioner, 12 June 2013 6 6. Letter to the Editor of The Daily Telegraph from the Commissioner, 13 June 2013 7 7. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 13 June 2013 7 8. Appendices to letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 13 June 15 2013 8 9. Article by The Daily Telegraph Political Correspondent, 13 June 2013 13 10. Letter to the BBC Litigation Department from the Commissioner, 25 June 2013 15 11. Letter to the Commissioner from the Political Editor of The Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2013 15 20 12. Letter to the Political Editor of The Daily Telegraph from the Commissioner, 27 June 2013 15 13. E-mail to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick Mercer MP,11 July 2013 15 14. Cover letter to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 11 July 2013 16 15. Letter to the Commissioner from BBC Litigation Department, 16 July 2013 18 25 16. Letter to BBC Litigation Department from the Commissioner, 18 July 2013 20 Supporting and Background Evidence 21 17. Early Day Motion drafted by Mr Daniel Mann and given to Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 20 March 2013 21 18. Contract signed by Mr Mercer, 20 March 2013 22 30 19. Early Day Motion 1249, tabled 26 March 2013 23 20. Question to be raised in Parliament, drafted by Mr Daniel Mann, 18 April 2013 23 21. Bank Statement of Alistair Andrews Communications, 9 May 2013 24 22. E-mail Exchange between Mr Patrick Mercer MP and Mr Daniel Mann on 13 May 2013 25 35 23. Written Parliamentary Questions, Hansard, 16 May 2013 29 24. E-mail Exchange between Mr Patrick Mercer MP and Mr Daniel Mann on 17 May 2013 29 25. Written Parliamentary Question, Hansard, 20 May 2013 33 26. Bank Statement of Alistair Andrews Communications, 7 June 2013 34 40 27. Extract from Register of Members’ Financial Interests for Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 10 June 2013 35 28. Extract from Register of Members’ Financial Interests for Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 24 June 2013 36 29. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 16 July 2013 38 1

30. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner’s office, 22 July 2013 39 31. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 12 September 2013 39 32. Letter to Mr Paul Marsden from the Commissioner, 25 September 2013 39 33. Transcript of Interview with Mr Paul Marsden, 12 November 2013 40 5 34. Letter to Mr Paul Marsden from the Commissioner, 20 November 2013 51 35. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 20 November 2013 51 36. E-mail to the Commissioner from Mr Paul Marsden MP, 20 November 2013 52 37. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 25 November 2013 52 38. Letter to Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 4 December 2013 52 10 39. Transcript of interview with Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 10 December 2013 52 40. E-mail to the Commissioner’s office from the office of Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 20 December 2013 65 41. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 11 February 2014 65 42. Transcript of interview with Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 25 February 2014 66 15 43. Letter to the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests from the Commissioner, 3 March 2014 73 44. Letter to the Commissioner from the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests, 10 March 2014 74 45. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 19 March 2014 77 20 46. E-mail to the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards from the Office of Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 26 March 2014 77

2

Mr Patrick Mercer MP: Written evidence

Evidence from the Investigation

1. Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2013

5 Patrick Mercer MP resigns over lobbying scandal

Patrick Mercer has dramatically resigned from the Conservative Party after being confronted by The Telegraph.

Patrick Mercer's resignation initially sparked speculation that he was preparing a challenge to David Cameron’s leadership. Photo: REUTERS

10 By Claire Newell, and Holly Watt

11:50AM BST 31 May 2013

The Telegraph and the BBC's Panorama have been investigating the former shadow minister over a major lobbying scandal and is poised to publish a series of revelations about Mr Mercer tomorrow.

He was yesterday asked questions over his activities and was expected to be suspended from the Parliamentary 15 Conservative party this evening.

However, the Conservative MP for Newark is thought to have resigned the whip and is poised to make a statement.

The scandal, details of which will be exposed by The Telegraph and Panorama, involved Mr Mercer lobbying on behalf of Fiji.

20 Parliamentary records show that he asked a question about the regime's suspension from the Commonwealth and put down an Early Day Motion - a device used by MPs to draw attention to certain causes.

Mr Mercer’s resignation initially sparked speculation that he was preparing a challenge to David Cameron’s leadership. The MP has repeatedly criticised the Prime Minister and called for him to be replaced.

He was sacked from the Tory frontbench in March 2007 after he suggested in an interview that being called a 25 “black bastard” was a normal part of life in the armed forces. He added that he had met a lot of “idle and useless” ethnic minority soldiers.

In a statement, Mr Mercer said: "Panorama are planning to broadcast a programme alleging that I have broken Parliamentary rules.

"I am taking legal advice about these allegations - and I have referred myself to the Parliamentary 30 Commissioner for Standards."

"In the meantime, to save my party embarrassment, I have resigned the Conservative Whip and have so informed Sir George Young. I have also decided not to stand at the next general election."

A Conservative Party spokesman said: "The Prime Minister is aware. He thinks Patrick Mercer has done the right thing in referring himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and resigning the whip.

35 "It's important that the due processes take their course."

31 May 2013

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2. Additional Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2013

Exposed: deal that sank cash for questions MP Mercer

A senior Conservative MP has been exposed for abusing his position by tabling parliamentary questions and 5 motions — and offering lobbyists a security pass for the House of Commons — after being paid thousands of pounds.

By Claire Newell, Holly Watt, Daniel Foggo and Ben Bryant

9:06PM BST 31 May 2013

An undercover investigation conducted by The Telegraph and the BBC’s Panorama programme discloses that 10 Patrick Mercer, a former shadow minister, tabled five questions to government ministers and put down a parliamentary motion after being paid £4,000 as part of a contract he believed would earn him £24,000 a year.

The parliamentary questions were all drafted by undercover reporters purporting to be lobbyists for businesses with interests in Fiji.

The Conservative MP also established an all-party parliamentary group in support of the cause being 15 promoted by the lobbyists, which he boasted he had persuaded around 20 other politicians to back publicly.

Mr Mercer, who signed a contract for £2,000 a month also agreed to provide a parliamentary pass for a “representative” of the fictional Fijian client.

“I do not charge a great deal of money for these things,” Mr Mercer said during a meeting to arrange his “consultancy” fee. “I would normally come out at £500 per half day. So £1,000 a day.”

20 Mr Mercer, who was once sacked from the front bench after making remarks about ethnic minority soldiers, was also filmed making a racist remark in front of an undercover reporter.

Mr Mercer resigned from the Conservative Party and referred himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards after being told that he was to be exposed by the joint Telegraph and BBC investigation.

Parliamentary rules ban MPs from undertaking “paid advocacy” on behalf of paying clients.

25 Mr Mercer may also now be investigated by the police over potential offences of bribery and misconduct in a public office.

Alistair Graham, the former Commissioner for Standards, said that Mr Mercer’s actions were “totally unacceptable”. “It brings us back to 'cash for questions’ in the Nineties and is deeply depressing. It’s parliamentary prostitution – whatever the client wants, the client appears to get,” he said.

30 The scandal also highlights David Cameron’s failure to bring in promised laws to allow disgraced MPs to be expelled from Parliament and to regulate political lobbying.

In 2010 Mr Cameron stated that lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen”, yet a proposal of a register of lobbyists has been absent from the Queen’s Speech for two years running.

Mr Mercer signed a contract with the bogus lobbying firm and has been paid £4,000 for his services, which he 35 has yet to declare publicly. After receiving his first payment, Mr Mercer was recorded saying: “I will put a handful of parliamentary [questions], PQs about it [the issue raised by the lobbyists]”.

Earlier this year, The Telegraph and Panorama set up a bogus lobbying company to investigate what Parliamentarians working as consultants were prepared to do for their clients.

Specific MPs and peers were identified as allegedly using their position in Parliament to benefit paying clients.

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Undercover journalists purported to be lobbyists representing a group of businesses trying to end Fiji’s suspension from the Commonwealth on democracy and human rights grounds.

Fiji has been ruled by a military dictatorship since 2006 and its suspension has cost its sugar industry millions of pounds in EU subsidies.

5 In March, Mr Mercer signed a contract with the lobbying company to work as a consultant and agreed to be paid £2,000 a month. On March 20, an undercover reporter provided Mr Mercer with the wording of the proposed parliamentary motion.

On March 26, Mr Mercer submitted an early day motion with almost identical wording. He did not declare his financial interest. Four other MPs have since signed the motion. There is no suggestion the other MPs 10 knew Mr Mercer was being paid by the client or that they behaved improperly.

In April, the reporter told Mr Mercer he was “brilliantly earning your money, which … will go through today”. Mr Mercer responded by giving a thumbs up sign.

He said it was proving easy to recruit MPs. He said: “I mean who doesn’t want a trip to Fiji?” The undercover reporter also asked the MP if he could submit a question to ministers on behalf of the client. After examining 15 the draft, Mr Mercer suggested putting in a “handful”.

He had five questions tabled. Again he did not declare his financial interest.

Mr Mercer has apparently failed to register his relationship with the firm, despite signing a contract in March and receiving £4,000. The Conservative MP has declined to answer a series of questions relating to his conduct.

20 But he is understood to be privately claiming he believes the re-entry of Fiji to the Commonwealth to be a worthwhile cause and said during one meeting that he had an interest in the sugar industry through his constituency.

In a statement, Mr Mercer said: “I am taking legal advice about these allegations – and I have referred myself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

25 "In the meantime, to save my party embarrassment, I have resigned the Conservative whip and have so informed Sir George Young. I have also decided not to stand at the next general election.”

A spokesman for the Conservative Party said: “The Prime Minister thinks Patrick Mercer has done the right thing in referring himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and resigning the whip. It’s important that the due processes take their course.”

30 A Panorama special will air on Thursday at 9pm.

31 May 2013

3. Letter to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 3 June 2013

In view of recent allegations, I am self referring and place myself in your hands with immediate effect. 35 3 June 2013

4. Letter (sent via e-mail) to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 3 June 2013

Thank you for arranging for a copy of your letter of 3 June to be forwarded to me.

I attach a copy of a note which sets out the procedure I follow for my inquiries. You will see from this that any 40 complaint made to me about a Member’s conduct is expected to make clear in what respect the Member may 5

have breached the Code of Conduct and its associated rules. Any such allegations should be supported by sufficient evidence to justify the initiation of an inquiry. I would usually expect any self-referral by a Member to provide the same information.

However, in view of the material which is already in the public domain, I have decided to open an 5 investigation into your conduct. I would be grateful if you could confirm that the “recent allegations” to which you refer relate to the following:

• the registration of payments you had received from a firm of lobbyists;

• the declaration of those payments when tabling parliamentary questions and an Early Day motion;

10 • parliamentary questions and an Early Day Motion which you tabled, and an All Party Group which you took steps to establish.

If there is anything that you would like to add to this, or if you have further information for me at this stage, please let me know.

I will write to you formally next week to set out the allegations I am investigating, the relevant rules of the 15 House, and to ask you to provide evidence in connection with these allegations.

If you have any questions about the process, please do contact me at the House.

3 June 2013

5. Letter to the Editor of Panorama (BBC) from the 20 Commissioner, 12 June 2013

I am writing to seek your assistance with an inquiry I am conducting into statements made by Mr Patrick Mercer MP during meetings and telephone conversations with a journalist preparing an episode of Panorama, some of which were broadcast on Thursday 6 June.

It would be very helpful if you could let me have the full and unedited footage which formed the basis of the 25 programme, including unbroadcast footage, together with any transcripts of the conversations. It would also be helpful to have any correspondence you or your reporters have had with Mr Mercer or his representatives, both in the course of and after the making of the programme.

This material would be confidential to my inquiry, but I would expect to show it to Mr Mercer if I consider it necessary in the conduct of my inquiry. Any such material is likely to be published once my inquiries are 30 concluded. Depending on the outcome of my inquiry, it will be published either on my own webpages or as part of an appendix to a report by the Committee on Standards.

Since I am seeking your help as a witness in this inquiry, I enclose a note which sets out the procedure I follow. My inquiries are subject to parliamentary privilege and I would, therefore, ask that you do not disclose this letter, or your response, except insofar as it is necessary for you to do so in order to respond to my 35 request.

I would be very grateful for your help on this matter. If you could let me have any such material within the next two weeks, that would be most helpful. If this is not possible, it would be helpful to have an estimate of the length of time it will take to produce the material.

12 June 2013

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6. Letter to the Editor of The Daily Telegraph from the Commissioner, 13 June 2013

I am writing to seek your assistance with an inquiry I am conducting into statements made by Mr Patrick Mercer MP during meetings and telephone conversations with a journalist preparing articles for the Daily 5 Telegraph. Some of these were published in the Daily Telegraph on Friday 31 May and Saturday 1 June, and they also formed the basis of an episode of Panorama.

It would be very helpful if you could let me have the full and unedited footage which formed the basis of the articles in the Daily Telegraph, including unbroadcast and unpublished footage, together with any transcripts of the conversations. It would also be helpful to have any correspondence you or your reporters have had with 10 Mr Mercer or his representatives, both in the course of and after the preparation of the articles.

This material would be confidential to my inquiry, but I would expect to show it to Mr Mercer if I consider it necessary in the conduct of my inquiry. Any such material is likely to be published once my inquiries are concluded. Depending on the outcome of my inquiry, it will be published either on my own webpages or as part of an appendix to a report by the Committee on Standards.

15 Since I am seeking your help as a witness in this inquiry, I enclose a note which sets out the procedure I follow. My inquiries are subject to parliamentary privilege and I would, therefore, ask that you do not disclose this letter, or your response, except insofar as it is necessary for you to do so in order to respond to my request.

I would be very grateful for your help on this matter. If you could let me have any such material within the 20 next two weeks, that would be most helpful. If this is not possible, it would be helpful to have an estimate of the length of time it will take to produce the material.

13 June 2013

7. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 13 June 2013

25 Further to my e-mail of 3 June, I am writing formally to set out the matters I am investigating, together with the relevant rules of the House, and to ask you to provide evidence.

In essence, the matters I am investigating are as follows:

30 That, contrary to the rules of the House, you:

• Failed to register monies you received for the provision of consultancy services;

• Failed to deposit an agreement for the provision of services;

• Failed to declare a relevant interest when tabling five parliamentary questions, when tabling an Early Day Motion, when making approaches to other Members, and at a meeting of a 35 prospective All-Party Parliamentary Group;

• Tabled parliamentary questions and an early day motion, and took steps to establish an All-Party Parliamentary Group, at the request of those paying you and/or their clients.

I will also be considering whether your conduct was such as to cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole, or of its Members generally.

40 I will be writing to the editor of Panorama and to the editor of the Daily Telegraph to invite them to let me have records of your conversations with Daniel Foggo and others. If they do so, I may have some further questions. I will show you any material I receive which is relevant to my inquiry, so that you have an opportunity to comment on it.

7

In the meantime, I enclose four appendices which relate to specific areas of the rules of the House. You will see that each appendix contains a summary of the relevant rules and a set of questions. In addition to these questions, I would be grateful if you could provide the following:

1. Any notes or records you may have of meetings or conversations with anyone purporting to 5 work for, or be a client of, Alistair Andrews Communications;

2. Copies of any correspondence you had with Alistair Andrews Communications and anyone purporting to work for, or be a client of, that company;

3. An account of any communications you or your legal advisers have had with any journalists, editors or programme makers involved since you discovered that you had been the subject of a 10 journalistic investigation.

I enclose a hard copy of the procedural note which sets out the procedure which I follow. In due course I will publish on my parliamentary web pages that I am conducting this inquiry and the general category in which it comes. I will not be commenting further on its progress.

It would be very helpful if you could let me have a response to this letter within the next three weeks, ie by 4 15 July 2013, or earlier if that is convenient. If there is any difficulty about this, or you would like a further word about the process, please contact me at the House.

I would be most grateful for your help on this matter.

13 June 2013

8. Appendices to letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from 20 the Commissioner, 13 June 2013

Appendix A: Registration of interests

Paragraph 13 of the Code of Conduct approved by the House of 12 March 2012 provides for the following rule for the registration of interests:

“Members shall fulfil conscientiously the requirements of the House in respect of the registration of 25 interests in the Register of Members' Financial Interests…”

The rules on the registration of Members’ financial interests are set out in the Guide to the Rules relating to the conduct of Members. The duties of Members in respect of registration include the following in paragraph 13:

“Members of Parliament are required to complete a registration form and submit it to the Commissioner 30 within one month of their election to the House (whether at a general election or a by-election). After the initial publication of the Register (or, in the case of Members returned at by-elections, after their initial registration) it is the responsibility of Members to notify changes in their registrable interests within four weeks of each change occurring.”

The Register requires the registration of remunerated employment in Category 2 (Remunerated employment, 35 office, profession, etc). Paragraph 24 of the Guide provides as follows:

“All employment outside the House and any sources of remuneration which do not fall clearly within any other Category should be registered here. Members must register under this category the precise amount of each individual payment made, the nature of the work carried on in return for that payment, the number of hours worked during the period to which that payment relates and (except where disclosure of the information would 40 be contrary to any legal or established professional duty of privacy or confidentiality) the name and address of the person, organisation or company making that payment.”

A Resolution of 30 April 2009, amended on 7 February 2011, provides that such payments must be registered where their value exceeds one tenth of one per cent of the current Parliamentary salary (currently £66) or 8

where the cumulative value of payments from a single source exceeds 1 per cent of the Parliamentary salary (currently £660) in a calendar year.

I attach a copy of your current entry in the Register, as at 10 June 2013.

I would be grateful for your comments on this aspect of my inquiry in the light of this summary of the 5 relevant rules. In respect of the payment you registered from Alistair Andrews Communications on 28 May, it would be helpful to know the following:

1. the date on which you received the payment;

2. the details of the work carried out in return for that payment;

3. the details you were given of the client(s) of Alistair Andrews Communications.

10 Please could you also tell me whether you have received any other payments from Alistair Andrews Communications or from any source purporting to be a client of that company. If so, I would be grateful if you could provide the following details:

4. the amount paid;

5. the date on which you received payment;

15 6. the nature of the work carried out in return for that payment;

7. the number of hours worked during the period to which the payment related;

8. the name and address you were given for the person or organisation making the payment, and of any client of Alistair Andrews Communications.

I would also be grateful if you could confirm that you told the reporter that you usually hold three consultancy 20 roles, but that at present you had only one other such position. You will see from the attached register entry that you have not registered any payments for consultancy since 6 July 2012. Please could you let me know:

1. whether you have received any payments for consultancy since 6 July 2012, and if so the details of these;

2. if you have received such payments, whether you considered at any time registering an interest 25 in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and, if so, why you did not do so;

3. if you have not received any recent payments for consultancy, why you spoke as you did.

Any other points you may wish to make on this issue, together with any relevant documentary evidence, would be most welcome.

Appendix B: Agreements for the provision of services

30 The rules relating to agreements for the provision of services are set out in paragraphs 66 to 71 of the Guide. For ease of reference, these paragraphs are attached to this note.

Having considered these rules, I would be grateful if you could let me know the following:

1. whether you signed an agreement with Alistair Andrews Communications or with any person or organisation purporting to be its client. If not, I would be grateful if you could explain the 35 footage in which you appear to say that you will do so;

2. whether the footage in which you appear to ask that all references to Fiji be struck out of a draft agreement is accurate, and if so why you asked for this to be done;

3. whether you took any steps to ensure that any agreement you signed contained the necessary 9

undertakings that you would not be asked to breach the ban on lobbying for reward and consideration, as required by the rules;

4. if you did sign such an agreement, why you did not deposit it with my office.

I would also be grateful if you could send me a copy of any agreement you signed with Alistair Andrews 5 Communications, or with any person or organisation purporting to be a client of that company.

Appendix C: Declaration of interests

Paragraph 13 of the Code of Conduct approved by the House of 12 March 2012 provides for the following rule for the declaration of interests:

“[…] [Members]shall always be open and frank in drawing attention to any relevant interest in any 10 proceeding of the House or its Committees, and in any communications with Ministers, Members, public officials or public office holders.”

The rules relating to the declaration of Members’ interests are set out in chapter 2 of the Guide to the Rules relating to the conduct of Members. The Resolution of 22 May 1974 provides as follows:

“In any debate or proceeding of the House or its Committees or transactions or communications which a 15 Member may have with other Members or with Ministers or servants of the Crown, he shall disclose any relevant pecuniary interest or benefit of whatever nature, whether direct or indirect, that he may have had, may have or may be expecting to have.”

Paragraph 73 of the Guide to the Rules includes the following:

“The rule relating to declaration of interest is broader in scope than the rules relating to the registration of 20 interests in three important respects. As well as current interests, Members are required to declare both relevant past interests and relevant interests which they may be expecting to have. In practice only interests held in the recent past, i.e. those current within the previous twelve months, need normally be considered for declaration...”

Paragraph 74 provides the following definition of a relevant interest:

25 “The basic test of relevance should be the same for declaration as it is for registration of an interest; namely, that a financial interest should be declared if it might reasonably be thought by others to influence the speech, representation or communication in question. A declaration should be brief but should make specific reference to the nature of the Member’s interest.”

Paragraph 78, which deals with declaration in respect of written notices, includes the following:

30 “Under the Resolution of 19 July 1995, Members are required to declare relevant interests on the Order Paper (or Notice Paper) when tabling any written notice initiating a parliamentary proceeding, ie:

a) Questions (for oral or written answer, including Urgent Questions)...

b) Early Day Motions, Amendments to them, or any names added in support of such Motions or Amendments;”

35 I attach five parliamentary questions and one early day motion which you tabled on the subject of Fiji.

I would be grateful for your comments on this aspect of the complaint in the light of this summary of the relevant rules. In particular, it would be helpful to know:

1. in respect of the five questions and the EDM which you tabled, whether you considered that you had a relevant financial interest or interests arising from any payment or benefit you had 40 received, or expected to received, sufficient to require you to declare an interest;

2. in respect of any approach you made to other Members, including Ministers, on the subject of 10

Fiji, including approaches relating to the possible establishment of an All Party Group, whether you at any time declared an interest and if not, why you did not do so;

3. when arranging any meeting of a group seeking to apply for inclusion on the Register of All Party Groups as an All Party Parliamentary Group on Fiji, and at any such meeting, whether you 5 declared an interest, and if not, why you did not do so.

Appendix D: Paid advocacy and related allegations

The Code of Conduct provides the following rules:

“10. Members shall base their conduct on a consideration of the public interest, avoid conflict between personal interest and the public interest and resolve any conflict between the two, at once, and in favour 10 of the public interest.

11. No Member shall act as a paid advocate in any proceeding of the House.

12. The acceptance by a Member of a bribe to influence his or her conduct as a Member, including any fee, compensation or reward in connection with the promotion of, or opposition to, any Bill, Motion, or other matter submitted, or intended to be submitted to the House, or to any Committee of the House, is 15 contrary to the law of Parliament.”

The rules in relation to lobbying for reward or consideration are set out in Chapter 3 of the Guide. You will wish to read this chapter in full.

Paragraph 90 provides that:

“[The Resolution of the House relating to lobbying for reward or consideration] prohibits paid advocacy. 20 It is wholly incompatible with the rule that any Member should take payment for speaking in the House. Nor may a Member, for payment, vote, ask a Parliamentary Question, table a Motion, introduce a Bill or table or move an Amendment to a Motion or Bill or urge colleagues or Ministers to do so.”

Paragraph 92 provides as follows:

“The Resolution in its current form extends and reinforces an earlier Resolution of the House in 1947 that 25 a Member may not enter into any contractual arrangement which fetters the Member's complete independence in Parliament by any undertaking to press some particular point of view on behalf of an outside interest. Nor, by virtue of the same Resolution, may an outside body (or person) use any contractual arrangement with a Member of Parliament as an instrument by which it controls, or seeks to control, his or her conduct in Parliament, or to punish that Member for any parliamentary action.”

30 I would be grateful if you could respond to the following questions in the light of these rules.

5. Please could you describe for me the circumstances of your tabling the five parliamentary questions attached to Appendix C? In particular I would be grateful if you could tell me:

a) whether any of the questions were drafted by Daniel Foggo, as suggested by the programme;

35 b) the background to your tabling the questions, including, to the best of your knowledge, who drafted the questions, and what role you played in the drafting process;

c) why you tabled the questions.

6. Please could you describe for me the circumstances of your tabling the early day motion attached to Appendix C? In particular I would be grateful if you could tell me:

11

a) the background to your tabling the motion, including whether the motion was drafted by Daniel Foggo, as suggested by the programme, and what role you played in the drafting process;

b) whether you did indeed say “we’ll start getting that signed up” and, if so, what you meant by 5 this;

c) why you tabled the motion.

I attach to this note an account from the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests of the contact you had with my office regarding a prospective All-Party Parliamentary Group. I would be grateful if you could confirm that this account is accurate and respond to the following questions:

10 7. Please could you give me a full account of the actions you took to establish the Group, except where these are already set out in the attached note. In particular, please could you provide:

a) your account of all approaches you made to Members of either House of Parliament in relation to the formation of an APPG, together with copies of any correspondence or notes of conversations;

15 b) the date of any meetings of the prospective group and an account of the meetings. I would be grateful if you could provide any record you have of these meetings, such as minutes or other written notes;

c) Your reasons for seeking to establish the Group.

Finally, I note from the broadcast footage that you appeared to suggest that you would be prepared to initiate 20 a Westminster Hall debate and to approach Ministers on behalf of the clients of Alistair Andrews Communications. I would be grateful if you could confirm that this footage is accurate. If it is, if you could tell me:

8. whether you tabled any application for a Westminster Hall debate on the subject of Fiji;

9. whether you made any approach to any Minister or servant of the Crown on the subject of Fiji. 25 13 June 2013

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9. Article by The Daily Telegraph Political Correspondent, 13 June 2013

13

13 June 2013

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10. Letter to the BBC Litigation Department from the Commissioner, 25 June 2013

Thank you for your letter of 25 June. I am most grateful for your confirmation that the BBC is willing to assist me in my inquiry into the conduct of Mr Patrick Mercer MP.

5 You have asked whether I would expect to publish the unbroadcast footage, or to show it to Mr Mercer, given that you will be providing transcripts of the material. You will understand that I cannot at this stage give any commitments about the material I will publish at the end of my inquiry. However, I think that it is very unlikely that I would wish to publish the unbroadcast footage.

As you will have seen from the procedural note I enclosed with my letter, it is my practice to share relevant 10 material I receive with the Member who is under inquiry. It is therefore likely that I will wish to show some or all of the footage to Mr Mercer.

For completeness, I should explain that I would expect any relevant evidence I receive to be published at the end of my inquiry, either on my own web pages or with any report published by the Committee on Standards. It seems likely that this will include some or all of the transcripts of the recordings. 15 25 June 2013

11. Letter to the Commissioner from the Political Editor of The Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2013

Thank you for your letter. The BBC own much of the material you requested, so it is probably best if you liaise with them directly. I understand that they are happy to provide you with the information you requested.

20 Please find attached our correspondence with Mr Mercer in advance of the articles appearing in the Telegraph.

Let me know if you require any further assistance.

[Enclosures not included in the evidence]

25 June 2013

25 12. Letter to the Political Editor of The Daily Telegraph from the Commissioner, 27 June 2013

Thank you for your letter of 25 June, with which you enclosed your correspondence with Mr Mercer and his legal advisers. I was very grateful for this response. I note that much of the material I requested is owned by the BBC, and I have already been in touch with them separately.

30 I will in due course send to Mr Mercer a copy of the material you have provided, in order to give him a chance to comment on it. It is possible that I may then need to write to you again on this matter.

When my inquiry is finished, my letter to you and some or all of the material you have supplied may be published, either on my Parliamentary webpages or with my memorandum and a report from the Committee on Standards. We would let you know about this shortly before publication.

35 Thank you again for your help.

27 June 2013

13. E-mail to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick Mercer MP,11 July 2013

Please find attached my cover letter and submission. Would you please be able to confirm receipt?

15

I look forward to hearing from you.

[Enclosure – Submission to PCS dated 10 July 2013 – included in the evidence as a stand-alone item]

11 July 2013

14. Cover letter to the Commissioner from Mr Patrick 5 Mercer MP, 11 July 2013

16

11 July 2013

17

15. Letter to the Commissioner from BBC Litigation Department, 16 July 2013

18

19

16 July 2013

[The transcripts of meetings and telephone calls between Mr Mercer and Mr Mann enclosed with this letter have been compiled as a stand-alone evidence item]

5 16. Letter to BBC Litigation Department from the Commissioner, 18 July 2013

Thank you for your letter of 16 July and for the material which you enclosed. I am very grateful to you and your colleagues for the assistance you have provided to my inquiry.

20

Your letter asks me for some assurances, which I am happy to give. I will indeed make clear to Mr Mercer, as I do to any witness who gives evidence to one of my inquiries, that evidence given to me during an investigation is confidential unless and until it is published by me or by the Committee on Standards. Any interference with my inquiries, which could include the unauthorised disclosure of material I had accepted as evidence, would 5 be a very serious matter that could amount to a contempt of the House of Commons. I will ask Mr Mercer to return the material to me at the conclusion of my inquiry.

You also ask about the publication of personal information. I am always ready to consider requests for the deletion of confidential and personal information which is not relevant to the resolution of my inquiry. You will appreciate that I cannot say at this stage what material will be relevant and I cannot, therefore, give any 10 commitments about the material I will publish at the end of my inquiry. However, I consider it very unlikely that I would need to publish telephone numbers, bank account details or e-mail addresses, or other personal information of that kind.

In respect of the unbroadcast footage, my position is still as set out in my letter of 25 June—namely, I cannot at this stage give any commitments, but I think that it is very unlikely that I would wish to publish the 15 unbroadcast footage.

I hope that this letter clarifies the position. Thank you again for your assistance.

18 July 2013

Supporting and Background Evidence

17. Early Day Motion drafted by Mr Daniel Mann and 20 given to Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 20 March 2013

That this House recognises that the government of Fiji is making all reasonable efforts to restore democracy and feels that in the light of the ongoing hardship being endured by its businesses there is no justification for Fiji’s continued suspension from the Commonwealth and therefore urges this Government to arrange a ministerial visit in order to help prepare for and assist its readmission. 25 20 March 2013

21

18. Contract signed by Mr Mercer, 20 March 2013

22

19. Early Day Motion 1249, tabled 26 March 2013

FIJI AND THE COMMONWEALTH

Main content

5 • Session: 2012-13

• Date tabled: 26.03.2013

• Primary sponsor: Mercer, Patrick

• Sponsors:

• Meale, Alan

10 • Crausby, David

• Hancock, Mike

• Dobbin, Jim

Total number of signatures: 5

Crausby, David Dobbin, Jim Hancock, Mike Meale, Alan

Mercer, Patrick

15 That this House recognises that the government of Fiji is making all reasonable efforts to restore democracy; believes that in the light of ongoing hardship being endured by its businesses, there is no justification for Fiji's continued suspension from the Commonwealth; and, therefore, urges the Government to arrange a ministerial visit in order to help prepare for and assist its readmission.

26 March 2013

20 20. Question to be raised in Parliament, drafted by Mr Daniel Mann, 18 April 2013

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they support an end to Fiji’s suspension from the Commonwealth which is proving detrimental to the interests of its business community?

18 April 2013 25

23

21. Bank Statement of Alistair Andrews Communications, 9 May 2013

5 9 May 2013

24

22. E-mail Exchange between Mr Patrick Mercer MP and Mr Daniel Mann on 13 May 2013

5

25

26

27

13 May 2014

28

23. Written Parliamentary Questions, Hansard, 16 May 2013

16 May 2013 : Column 396W

Fiji

5 Patrick Mercer: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (1) what discussions his Department has had with the Government of Fiji about that country's human rights record; [154106]

(2) what discussions his Department has had with the Government of Fiji about the status of Fiji within the Commonwealth; [154107]

(3) what discussions his Department has had with the Government of Fiji about the effects on Fiji of its 10 suspension from the Commonwealth; [155600]

(4) what his policy is on the readmission of Fiji to the Commonwealth; and if he will make a statement. [155617]

Mr Swire: We regularly raise our concerns about the human rights situation in Fiji with the Fijian authorities, including Ministers, the civil service, Police Commissioners and election bodies. In view of the seriousness of 15 the human rights situation, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has included Fiji as a 'country of concern' in its Annual Report on Human Rights for both 2011 and 2012.

Further, in consultation with the British high commission in Suva, the local EU delegation has issued a number of statements on the human rights situation in Fiji, including: concern around the political parties' registration decree; investigations into allegations of torture; and the importance of freedom of expression and 20 assembly. We have also encouraged the local EU delegation to raise these issues with the Fijian Foreign Minister which it did most recently earlier this month. We are encouraging the EU to pursue a dialogue on criteria for EU election observers. In view of the lack of democratic progress, EU development assistance to Fiji remains suspended.

Fiji remains suspended from the Commonwealth until it returns to democracy. Our view is that should 25 democracy in Fiji be restored through free and fair elections, we stand ready to consider further assistance and look forward to the day Fiji is re-instated as a full member of the Commonwealth family. I used my visit to the region last month to make public statements on these points. I have spoken along similar lines to the Fijian high commissioner in London.

I have encouraged the Commonwealth Secretary-General to continue his organisation's outreach to Fiji to 30 discuss assistance that Fiji would need to enable a return to democracy. The British high commission in Suva met a Commonwealth Secretariat needs-assessment mission that recently visited Fiji.

In relation to all of these issues, we continue to work closely with our partners in the region, including Australia and New Zealand.

16 May 2013 35

24. E-mail Exchange between Mr Patrick Mercer MP and Mr Daniel Mann on 17 May 2013

29

30

31

17 May 2013

32

25. Written Parliamentary Question, Hansard, 20 May 2013

20 May 2013 : Column 510W

Fiji

5 Patrick Mercer: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what assessment he has made of the UK's investment in public transport in Fiji; and if he will make a statement. [155619]

Mr Swire: The Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) has acted as guarantor to loans made by a German bank to the Government-owned aviation company Air Pacific. This was to enable Air Pacific to purchase a Rolls-Royce engine. We are not aware of any other UK investment in public transport in Fiji. 10 20 May 2013

33

26. Bank Statement of Alistair Andrews Communications, 7 June 2013

5 7 June 2013 34

27. Extract from Register of Members’ Financial Interests for Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 10 June 2013

MERCER, Patrick (Newark)

5 2. Remunerated employment, office, profession etc

Fees for articles in:

Yorkshire Post (Up to £5,000). Address: Yorkshire Post Newspapers Ltd, PO Box 168, Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 1RF.

June 2012, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 6 July 2012)

10 September 2012, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1.5 hrs. (Registered 12 October 2012)

January 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 11 February 2013)

February 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 8 March 2013)

April 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 17 May 2013)

Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. Address: MGN Limited, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 15 5AP. (Up to £5,000)

June 2012, £100 for commentary. Hours: 30 mins. (Registered 6 July 2012)

July 2012, £300 for commentary in Sunday Mirror. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

August 2012, £350 for commentary. Hours: 1.5 hrs. (Registered 1 October 2012)

February 2013, £350 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 8 March 2013)

20 Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Address: Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street,

May 2012, received £250 for commentary in Mail on Sunday. Hours: 4 hrs.(Registered 8 June 2012)

September 2012, received £350 for commentary in Mail on Sunday. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 12 October 2012)

Payments from The People, Floor 21, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP, for articles:

25 October 2012, payment of £150 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 13 November 2012)

Daily Express and Sunday Express, The Northern & Shell Building, 10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN.

November 2012, £150 paid for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 3 December 2012)

January 2013, £300 paid for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 11 February 2013)

30 April 2013, £300 paid for commentary (Daily Express). Hours: 2.5 hrs. (Registered 17 May 2013)

April 2013, £150 paid for commentary (Sunday Express). Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 17 May 2013)

The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG

November 2012, £150 paid for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 3 December 2012)

March 2013, £175 paid for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 5 April 2013) 35

May 2013, £200 paid for book review. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 5 June 2013)

Payment of £200 from Daily Star Sunday, for commentary. Address: The Star on Sunday, The Northern & Shell Building, 10 Lower Thames Street, London, EC3R 6EN. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 6 July 2012)

Daybreak TV (formerly GMTV) The London Television Centre, Upper Ground, London SE1 9TT,

5 March 2013, £150 for interview. Hours: 15 mins. (Registered 5 April 2013)

Payments from Martin Randall, Martin Randall Travel Ltd, Voysey House, Barley Mow Passage, London W4 4GF:

October 2012, payment of £1,200 for lecturing. Hours: 6 days. (Registered 13 November 2012)

Payments from Global Energy Private Limited, 1 Queen Anne’s Gate, 2nd floor, Westminster, London SW1H 10 9BT:

May 2012, payment of £2,500 for consultancy. Hours: 1.5 days. (Registered 8 June 2012)

June 2012, payment of £2,500 for consultancy. Hours: 1.5 days. (Registered 6 July 2012)

May 2012, payment of £3,560 from A P Watt Literary Agents, 20 John Street, London WC1N 2DR, for writing book produced in paperback. Hours: 2 days. (Registered 8 June 2012)

15 May 2012, payment of £304.60 from Higham Hall, Cockermouth CA13 9SH, for lectures. Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 8 June 2012)

July 2012, payment of £500 for interview from BBC Belfast Sunday Morning Live, Ulster Broadcasting House, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast BT2 8HQ. Hours: 24 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

July 2012, payment of £110 as e-book royalties from Endeavour Press, Tattlebury House, Cranbrook 20 Road, Goudhurst, Cranbrook, Kent TN17 1BT. Hours: 48 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

February 2013, payment of £1,500 from Parker Travel, Capetown, South Africa for lecturing. Hours: 3 days. (Registered 8 March 2013)

Payment of £2,000 from Alistair Andrews Communications, 16 Old Queen Street, London SW1, for consultancy. Hours: 2 days. (Registered 28 May 2013)

25 Payment of £2,000 from Tourist Company South, Simferopol, Ukraine, for lecturing for tour. Hours: 5 days. (Registered 5 June 2013)

7. Overseas benefits and gifts

See my entry in Category 2.

10 June 2013 30

28. Extract from Register of Members’ Financial Interests for Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 24 June 2013

MERCER, Patrick (Newark)

2. Remunerated employment, office, profession etc

35 Fees for articles in:

36

Yorkshire Post (Up to £5,000). Address: Yorkshire Post Newspapers Ltd, PO Box 168, Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 1RF.

June 2012, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 6 July 2012)

September 2012, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1.5 hrs. (Registered 12 October 2012)

5 January 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 11 February 2013)

February 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 8 March 2013)

April 2013, £150 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 17 May 2013)

Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. Address: MGN Limited, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP. (Up to £5,000)

10 June 2012, £100 for commentary. Hours: 30 mins. (Registered 6 July 2012)

July 2012, £300 for commentary in Sunday Mirror. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

August 2012, £350 for commentary. Hours: 1.5 hrs. (Registered 1 October 2012)

February 2013, £350 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 8 March 2013)

Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Address: Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street,

15 May 2012, received £250 for commentary in Mail on Sunday. Hours: 4 hrs.(Registered 8 June 2012)

September 2012, received £350 for commentary in Mail on Sunday. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 12 October 2012)

Payments from The People, Floor 21, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP, for articles:

October 2012, payment of £150 for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 13 November 2012)

20 Daily Express and Sunday Express, The Northern & Shell Building, 10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN.

November 2012, £150 paid for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 3 December 2012)

January 2013, £300 paid for commentary. Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 11 February 2013)

April 2013, £300 paid for commentary (Daily Express). Hours: 2.5 hrs. (Registered 17 May 2013)

25 April 2013, £150 paid for commentary (Sunday Express). Hours: 1 hr. (Registered 17 May 2013)

The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG

November 2012, £150 paid for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 3 December 2012)

March 2013, £175 paid for commentary. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 5 April 2013)

May 2013, £200 paid for book review. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 5 June 2013)

30 Payment of £200 from Daily Star Sunday, for commentary. Address: The Star on Sunday, The Northern & Shell Building, 10 Lower Thames Street, London, EC3R 6EN. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 6 July 2012)

Daybreak TV (formerly GMTV) The London Television Centre, Upper Ground, London SE1 9TT,

March 2013, £150 for interview. Hours: 15 mins. (Registered 5 April 2013)

37

Payments from Martin Randall, Martin Randall Travel Ltd, Voysey House, Barley Mow Passage, London W4 4GF:

October 2012, payment of £1,200 for lecturing. Hours: 6 days. (Registered 13 November 2012)

Payments from Global Energy Private Limited, 1 Queen Anne’s Gate, 2nd floor, Westminster, London SW1H 5 9BT:

May 2012, payment of £2,500 for consultancy. Hours: 1.5 days. (Registered 8 June 2012)

June 2012, payment of £2,500 for consultancy. Hours: 1.5 days. (Registered 6 July 2012)

May 2012, payment of £3,560 from A P Watt Literary Agents, 20 John Street, London WC1N 2DR, for writing book produced in paperback. Hours: 2 days. (Registered 8 June 2012)

10 May 2012, payment of £304.60 from Higham Hall, Cockermouth CA13 9SH, for lectures. Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 8 June 2012)

July 2012, payment of £500 for interview from BBC Belfast Sunday Morning Live, Ulster Broadcasting House, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast BT2 8HQ. Hours: 24 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

July 2012, payment of £110 as e-book royalties from Endeavour Press, Tattlebury House, Cranbrook Road, 15 Goudhurst, Cranbrook, Kent TN17 1BT. Hours: 48 hrs. (Registered 1 August 2012)

February 2013, payment of £1,500 from Parker Travel, Capetown, South Africa for lecturing. Hours: 3 days. (Registered 8 March 2013)

Payments from Alistair Andrews Communications, 16 Old Queen Street, London SW1, for consultancy:

£2,000 received. Hours: 2 days. (Registered 28 May 2013)

20 £2,000 received. Hours: 2 days. (Registered 11 June 2013)

Payment of £2,000 from Tourist Company South, Simferopol, Ukraine, for lecturing for tour. Hours: 5 days. (Registered 5 June 2013)

Payment of £1,442 for book royalties received from Endeavour London Ltd, 21-31 Woodfield Road, London W9 2BA. Hours: 60 hrs. (Registered 11 June 2013)

25 7. Overseas benefits and gifts

See my entry in Category 2.

24 June 2013

29. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 16 July 2013

30 Thank you for your e-mail of 11 July and for the evidence you provided with it. I was most grateful for this response. It was also very useful to have an indication of your availability over the coming months.

I understand from the BBC that they will soon be providing the material I have requested. I will of course share this evidence with you, together with any other relevant evidence I receive in the course of my inquiry. Once I have had a chance to consider the BBC’s material, I expect that I will need to write to you again with 35 some further questions.

In the meantime, if you would like a further word about this process, please do contact me.

16 July 2013

38

30. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner’s office, 22 July 2013

Further to our telephone conversation today, I enclose the material we have received from the BBC.

5 The Commissioner has asked me to send you this material so that you may have an opportunity to consider it and to comment on it if you wish to do so at this stage. When the Commissioner has herself had a chance to consider the material, she will write to you again.

The Commissioner has asked me to explain that evidence given to her during an investigation is confidential unless and until it is published by her or by the Committee on Standards. Any interference with the 10 Commissioner’s inquiries, which could include the unauthorised disclosure of material she had accepted as evidence, would be a very serious matter that could amount to a contempt of the House of Commons. She therefore asks that you do not disclose this material more widely and that you do not make any copies of it. The Commissioner will ask you to return the material to her at the conclusion of her inquiry.

There is no need for you to respond to this letter unless you would like to do so, but if you have any queries 15 please do contact us.

22 July 2013

31. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 12 September 2013

When we met on 25 June I asked you about your availability during the summer recess and you helpfully 20 informed me that you would be available during the week commencing 23 September.

I thought that you might find it useful to know at this stage that I will not be in a position to discuss your evidence with you during that week. As you know, the evidence you have submitted amounts to nearly 170 pages and in addition to this I am checking the reliability of the transcripts given to us by the BBC against the recordings. These consist of the five meetings and a number of phone calls and I am at the same time 25 analyzing the information they contain. When this work is complete I will send you an amended version of the transcripts so that we can agree the accuracy for future reference.

From the work I have undertaken so far, it seems likely that I will need to contact a number of witnesses. In particular, it would be helpful if you could give me the contact details for Paul Marsden at this stage.

12 September 2013

30 32. Letter to Mr Paul Marsden from the Commissioner, 25 September 2013

Thank you for the evidence you have provided in relation to my inquiry concerning Mr Patrick Mercer. I would find it helpful to have the opportunity to talk to you about it and wondered whether there were days when you were likely to be in London during October? If this is not possible, we may be able to arrange a 35 telephone conversation.

I shall be away from the office for the next few days but would be pleased if you would contact my pa,[], who manages my diary for me.

Thank you for your help with this matter.

25 September 2013

39

33. Transcript of Interview with Mr Paul Marsden, 12 November 2013

Present:

5 Kathryn Hudson, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (KH); Paul Marsden, witness (P); Complaints Manager, Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (JP).

KH— I just wanted to start by asking you a little about yourself and your background, and how you came to 10 know Patrick Mercer and become involved in this.

P— I was a Member of Parliament between 1997 and 2005, and retired in 2005. I didn’t stand again for various reasons—health reasons among others. I went back into business, and I have held a series of different positions from 2005, whether interim executive roles, consultancy roles and so on. I knew Patrick, I think it was in 2001, after he had been elected. We got chatting somehow, I can’t remember how, in the Members 15 Lobby, and he said that he had been thinking about standing in Shrewsbury, but obviously he went to Newark instead. Then, after 9/11, we were talking because I had a difference of opinion with the Government over the war in Afghanistan. We would pass and just say hello, and on occasions stop and talk. After I left, I don’t think I spoke to him properly for three or four years, and then I happened to be coming down, I think it was about 2009, and just gave his office a ring. I just said that I happened to be passing through. I’m not sure who 20 it was that I was actually meeting, but I think it was over a passport application. It was Graham from Nottingham—I can’t remember his surname now, but he is a Member of Parliament—

JP— Graham Allen?

P— Yes, that’s it.

KH— Well done.

25 P— Yes, he was going to sign my passport application, so I happened to stop in and spoke to Patrick. After then, we would keep in touch. Sometimes we would go a few months and we wouldn’t speak; other times, we would speak a couple a times a month, or two or three times or whatever it would be. Obviously, we would talk about all sorts of things. We could end up talking about the price the beef, whether the Prime Minister had forgotten his children, any subject under the sun—sometimes it was business and sometimes he would 30 ask after me, and I would be in different positions, so, there usually would be a new tale to tell as to whether I was the director of policy for an animal charity, or whether I was working on a certain project. And so that’s how it’s been. We have just been very, very friendly. Hopefully, he trusts me, and I have not been engaged in political consultancy—I can do it, but my roles have been a lot more diverse in business consultancy generally over the past three and a half years. I can just keep talking and talking, so if you have got specific questions, by 35 all means fire away, otherwise I will give you my life story.

KH— From what you are saying, you have not previously worked alongside him on any project.

P— No, I have never shared any committees with him. I am trying to think: nothing at all, none. If you looked at the two of us you’d say that we would normally be on the opposite side of the fence, because obviously he is more to the right, and I tend to be more to the centre left.

40 KH— Okay. But then suddenly, around November of last year, the question of Fiji came up. Do you remember how that came up and how you both got involved in working together?

P— Sure. I have brought with me one or two things to show you. The way I work, partly because the short- term memory is not brilliant, is that I make notes on everything, or as much as I possibly can, to do with business. I keep records of just about everything going. There is a lot more, but I thought that I’d bring the 45 past whatever—this goes back—

KH— This is just a sample. 40

P— This goes back to about 2008. It is just purely my nature that I will then note things down. They are partly diaries, and I have to say that they are incredibly personal and private, and I whilst I appreciate that you have carte blanche as to what on earth you wish to put in your report, I hope that if I leave further evidence, some of it you will treat sensitively, because it is my deepest thoughts, literally. Nobody sees them.

5 KH— And if there were anything that was personal to you, we would consider whether it was redacted from the report. I actually don’t think that we’re going to get there, from the information that I have so far.

P— Right. Okay. I can’t remember before then, but we would have spoken certainly in the October, because I had started working for a wealthy Georgian business man, and I was working off Park Lane. So, I was in London every week, so certainly in the October I spoke to Patrick. That’s right, we were talking about 10 Georgia, because it was coming up for the parliamentary elections, so that was one of the issues that we spoke about then. Then I think I had finished by about the end of October, so I was then more or less back up in the north-west. Any contact would then be typically by telephone, so I would tend to make more than notes, because if you are sat next to someone obviously you tend to remember or there is a purpose to a meeting or something like that, but if it is over the telephone, I forget. I keep two sets of records. One is a cross between a 15 diary and just actions, and the other one is all sorts of things that I will note down to do with business usually. The folder is more to do with my consultancy business, and then the small moleskin diaries are actions as well as the personal notes. In the November we spoke, because Patrick would typically say on the telephone, something like, “I’m thinking of doing a project on X.” I would just simply digest and if there was something pertinent to say, I’d say it. It is in my nature to look for opportunities, so I will then typically go and do some 20 research. In the November, I remember it was a case of we were talking about Australasia—I know we spoke about the US election and I know that we were talking about that region as well, to do with Australia, possibly East Timor. I think East Timor came up because I had done some work on a tender for some work there and Patrick had been in East Timor. When Fiji popped up, because I think he broached the subject first, and he mentioned about Fiji, I can’t remember whether it was that conversation or another, but we were talking 25 about the world cup finals. He wasn’t interested in rugby, but I was talking about how Wales had beaten Fiji and he was talking about Fijian soldiers, because he had a lot to do with Fijian soldiers. So that is how I remember it. I know that was one of the reasons then why I made a note in one of the diaries—forgive me, I did actually—

KH— It might be a part of your evidence section.

30 P— I don’t have the original sheets from the folder, because those were just passed to Edward in Patrick’s office.

KH— Right. Yes.

P— He has all the originals of any of the notes. I obviously retained the diaries. Hence the reason that I know that I must have made—

35 KH— I have the copy of that here.

P— That’s right. Subsequently, after Edward had been asking me questions, there were other notes that I then found and this might throw you out slightly in terms of what of you were planning to ask—

KH— Don’t worry.

P— There was another note, but I haven’t got a date. It could have been 30th January or after 30th January that 40 I made another note about APPG. I’ve got, “remind PME”—Patrick—“20 names, sponsorship, latest on Commonwealth”.

KH— That would fit with the question that I was going to ask you, which is that it looks to me from the evidence that I have as though you reminded Patrick on 17th February about Fiji.

P— Right. Yes.

45 KH— I wondered why it had come back to you. I wondered what you took from the first meeting that meant that you were ready to bring that back in a couple of months’ time. 41

P— I think that what I did find was that there was another entry that I made, which at the time I didn’t find, but it was some point—yes, it would have been the 17th, because the 17th is that diary entry, and it is before the 18th. On there, I have noted down, “Action no.6, APPG draft sponsor letters.” We were talking at that stage about Serbia, and I know that Serbia has already got an APPG, so it couldn’t have been to do with Serbia, and 5 so it’s got to be to do with Fiji. Because when later on I came to then produce some sponsors’ letters I found I had already drafted the template and done some of the research, and frankly I had forgotten about it, so I suspect—and this is where I can’t be sure—that the conversation was prompted partly because I’d started to look into researching for financing the APPG that Patrick and I had started to talk about in some shape or form.

10 KH— So you’d got there even in your first discussion in November, that you were thinking about an APPG.

P— I think it was December when we started to talk about the APPG.

KH— Right, so there was something in between.

P— Yes. Because I think that second conversation that I can recall, that’s when I’d already checked and there was no APPG, so I’d know for certain, because I’d looked it up on the register, that there wasn’t an APPG, so 15 when we did speak about it in the middle of December, Patrick had said—or I may have said it first of all to him, “By the way, I know we’ve mentioned it before, we’ve talked about Australasia, there isn’t an APPG,” and Patrick then definitely said, “Well, that’s something I’d be interested in.” Maybe in November he’d said something about wanting to join the APPG.

KH— Yes, I have a note of that.

20 P— Okay, that could be one of the reasons as well. We have expansive conversations, so frankly, at that stage—there’s other things I’ve talked to you about: we’ve spoken about Iraq, we spoke about Qatar, I drafted a report—

KH— So Fiji was one of a number of things.

P— All sorts of things.

25 KH— It looks to me like you spent a tremendous amount of time doing work on some of this. Was that in the hope that some consultancy would develop out of it?

P— To be honest, yes. I gave pro bono work for the specialist security APPG back in 2012, because I was interested in the subject, I do consultancy for the security industry, and I was paid a nominal £500, I think, to pay for some expenses. But yes, obviously, to be honest, if that assists my ability then to talk to other business 30 men, and frankly I can explain that yes, I was involved with that inquiry, then it helps.

KH— Yes, of course. Okay, thank you, so that gets us to the stage where you’ve reminded Patrick, you’ve undertaken some work about the development of an APPG, and then suddenly Daniel Mann comes into the picture, and there is perhaps an element of surprise from you and Patrick that Daniel Mann would be talking about Fiji. Have you had any more thoughts about that?

35 P— Well, if somebody said, whatever it would be now, five years ago, there was industrial-scale hacking, nobody would believe you. I remember raising in the Commons in 2003, that potentially my phone had been hacked, and obviously no one took it seriously, because they all think we are into conspiracy theories. It’s a heck of a coincidence, let’s put it that way, but there is absolutely no evidence that the phones were hacked. But quite clearly they are used to covert surveillance, given what then transpired. It could be a complete 40 coincidence. In the same vein, if they had suddenly come forward and said, “We are going to propose an APPG on Qatar,” and I did a paper for Patrick on 26 February, for instance, so if they had come forward and said “How about an APPG on Qatar”—

KH— You’d have had something for that as well.

42

P— Well, exactly. You could say, if this was the only thing we ever spoke about, that this was too much of a coincidence; but on the other hand, we must have mentioned 25 different countries in the previous—back to about December 2011, so probably a year and a half.

KH— And all of them with a view to possibly getting involved with doing some work there, or—?

5 P— No, not at all. Some of it was purely a case of, some of the subjects I had a certain amount of knowledge and expertise on. For instance, with Qatar it was to do with the security industry and possibly training, and it was a case of Patrick had a view on it, and if anything, I might have been going back to him and saying, “Look, I’ve got this project, maybe you can help me.” It never got that far, but it was not a case of everything we were speaking about was purely to try and get business. Some of these things were purely to do with the APPG on 10 specialist security. Sometimes it was ad hoc research that I just did as a favour for Patrick. With Fiji it was more of a specific project that we’d been looking at, because I am very passionate when it comes to helping countries in poverty, and from the December initial statistics and look at this, it was obvious that there was a huge amount of poverty in Fiji, and it struck me straight away that we could do some good. And because there was no APPG, that could be one vehicle. But by the February I’d also then put forward to Patrick the 15 possibility of a foundation.

KH— Yes, that came in quite early.

P— Yes, and in the same way, the reason why I mention that is because I’d outlined one for an Iraqi one. There is a British-Iraqi foundation. That was because I’d met with an Iraqi business man back in whatever it was, I think November or something 2011—

20 KH— So this work was done in 2011, and was there for you to pick out and update.

P— To be honest, yes. So it was a case of, we were in a fluid situation, and we hadn’t hardened up thinking. The way we were approaching this was, emphatically, that I would not and he would not break the rules. And I don’t care what anyone else says, there is absolutely no way in any of our conversations were we going to breach the parliamentary rules or do anything that would even give the appearance of breaking the rules. It is 25 so frustrating, because clearly Patrick was entrapped, clearly they had an agenda, clearly they’d worked out a narrative of what they want from their programme. I appreciate journalists have got their job to do and all the rest of it, but the way that they then cut and edited it down, it made it seem like it was absolutely they were buying influence within Parliament, and it emphatically was not, because I would have nothing to do with it, and if Patrick had said to me, “Look, Paul, actually I’m going to be getting paid here and there might be some 30 money in it for you, and you need to do as you’re told,” or “We’re going to give them whatever they want,” straight away I would have said, “I am having nothing to do with this.” All the way through the documentation, chapter and verse, I made it clear what the rules were, and the first time it came up, Patrick was the one who raised it with me and said, “We’ve got to stick to the parliamentary protocols”—I think that was the phrase he used, so that is why—the reason why he didn’t register it on time—it’s as frustrating for me 35 as anybody—

KH— Did you know that Patrick was being paid?

P— Yes, at some stage. I mean, it must have been—it wasn’t up front straight away, and I can’t remember the first time he said he was going to get paid, but he definitely spoke about a contract at some point in March. So, yes.

40 KH— Because the foundation pages, adjusted for Fiji rather than Iraq, actually talk about a consultant who will work on the project, and also consultancy fees for Patrick. So how did that fit together?

P— The concern I had was that APPGs are either notoriously weak and useless, frankly—and I can say that as an ex-Member—so that they don’t do anything, so I get frustrated because I want to get things done, I want to change things, and I think Patrick’s is a similar kind of mindset. On the one side they can be very strict: you 45 can’t advocate, and it’s cross-party, and you’ve got to be very careful what you do. On the other hand, they are also very weak, because you don’t have to register gifts or material benefits up until £1,500. There’s umpteen ways that, without dropping anyone in it, certain APPGs can get payments to individuals or through to their groups in multiples of £1,500 or £1,499, and they never register it. Now, that’s just ridiculous. No company 43

operates like that. I work in the security industry and we have anti-corruption protocols for anything over £25, and even then if they don’t declare something up to £24, you know, we would be asking, “Well, why haven’t you declared this gift?” or something. So the reason—one of the reasons for the foundation was to say, “We need to make sure that if there is going to be money coming in here that could be to do with Fiji—specific to 5 Fiji—put it into something like either a charitable organisation, unincorporated or incorporated, or a company.” And we never got as far as deciding how we would do it.

KH—No.

P—But the principle of something called a foundation means that it would have to be transparent. It would be accountable, because every dime would have be countable through whatever you register with Companies 10 House, or register with the Charity Commission, or simply by the press of producing accounts. So what was going through my mind was then I could protect Patrick, because there was—By the April I had sent to Patrick a note saying, “There is something suspicious about this.” You know, I had done a little bit of background research and, you know, there could be reasons why there weren’t being transparent, because of business—they were concerned about revealing the names of the business people. Okay. But the fact that none 15 of these individuals appeared on social media, the fact that there was just no footprint on the internet at all, meant that there had to be a reason why they were being opaque. But there might be a way of explaining it; I just didn’t know. But I thought, “Well, at least then the foundation would be able to soak up any of this, if they try to influence in the wrong way, as long as we had control over it.” Now, in all of these topsy-turvy conversations—I mean, I wasn’t privy to any of them, so I had no idea what was going, other than what 20 occasionally Patrick would feed to me.

KH—So you didn’t actually meet Daniel Mann?

P—No.

KH—And you didn’t speak to him on the phone?

P—No.

25 KH—So it all came via Patrick.

P—That’s right. All I had was three brief e-mails, where Daniel Mann asked me to come up with a programme and a budget for running an inquiry. I am happy to do so. But, obviously, getting the snippets meant that Patrick was off doing all sorts of his usual parliamentary duties. This was just one small element of what he was normally doing, so obviously it is difficult. You know, in the cold light of day, you say, “Well, 30 hang on a minute. Maybe you should have thought more about this.” Or, “Who was this individual?” At the time, obviously, I assume he is taking it in good faith that this is a genuine, bona fide representative. And so, you know, as I say, I was getting bits second hand. But that is why I thought, “Well, if we have something called a foundation, any money coming in, that goes into the foundation, as long as we have got control over it.” When Daniel Mann started talking about trying to control the foundation and control the APPG and 35 talking about parliamentary passes, that is when I was absolutely adamant to Patrick, to say, “I do not believe, Patrick, that you can possibly be giving out parliamentary passes to anybody.” If it is a case of, we’re in a foundation, we don’t need a parliamentary pass anyway. And if I was the secretariat, then obviously—or chief exec, or whatever you call it—then, you know, you can trust me. I will account for everything we get, and if there’s something wrong, I will make absolutely sure that we will return any donations or we won’t accept 40 those donations. They can only come from genuine sources. Whereas with the APPG it was a case of, Patrick had already spoken about it. It was something that he emphatically was clear that he wanted to do. So that would just be the usual APPG that would do all of its traditional activities. It would be a voice in Parliament, and it would obviously be able to raise these issues. It would inform Members, it would educate Members and so on. But if there were any risks to be taken, it would be the foundation.

45 KH—Right. And the foundation would sit beside it?

P—In front of it.

KH—With you as the chief exec, whatever.

44

P—If that’s what they wanted. But, you know, I didn’t know if they would even be interested with me being involved or not. But that is because we thought they were genuine.

KH—Yes. And the plan that you set out from for a foundation actually required quite a lot of money up front, didn’t it? Was it £125,000 the first year?

5 P—It wouldn’t be up front, but it would be—If they were going to be able to fund something, it would be, I would have expected, on a monthly basis.

KH—Yes.

P—That was the gold standard. As I had said to Patrick, “Look, if there’s—”If they don’t fund it at all, then I had already in the—whatever it was, the February—started to draft letters to BT, British Sugar—

10 KH—I’ve seen that, yes.

P—All sorts of organisations. That was—that must have been at least 10 days, two weeks, before Daniel Mann even showed up. So I had those letters there.

KH—So those letters were done before Daniel Mann was on the scene?

P—That’s right. That’s how I know, you see. Because it must have been on 17 February, and I’ve got the 15 note—APPG draft sponsor letters.

KH—On 17 February?

P—That’s right. So that’s why—then later on in April or the beginning of May, when I then checked with Patrick and said, “Look, we don’t know where this is going. You’ve got some concerns. I’ve got suspicions. We’re not happy. But nevertheless this is something we’re going to do.” Hence the reason then I could just dig 20 out those letters and just send them through to him and say, “Look, why don’t you fire off these letters”—and he said, “Yeah, please do”—“in order to gain sponsorship?” And we would have been asking for £5,000 or £10,000 off individual—

KH—So did those letters actually go out in the end?

P—I don’t know. I don’t suppose so, no. But I don’t know.

25 KH—So you almost have two parallel tracks. There is the desire to set up a foundation and an APPG for Fiji. There is Daniel Mann’s work, which looks as though it is going to tally, but then doesn’t quite because he has got some different ideas.

P—Sure, yes.

KH—And at one point, I think, a discussion of, “Well, don’t make it Fiji then. What about doing East Timor, 30 or something like that, instead?” How did that come about if there was a commitment to Fiji?

P—Because at that stage, when the suspicions were starting to come to a head, that’s when I threw it back into the conversation with Patrick. And I said something about, “Well look, we started off with Australasia. Maybe we look at the foundation, or we look at a way of doing this which incorporates Fiji but looks at other areas, because obviously it is such a small country. With all due respect, it is a very specialist field, and if you are 35 trying to get sponsorship, if you only talk about one very small country, it does make certain special pleading to persuade, to get people to support or financially assist, or whatever. If it was a wider regional area, then vaguely, I was thinking, we might get more interest. That doesn’t exclude Fiji by any means, but it just means that we have got a little bit more latitude as to how we could do this.”

KH—Yes.

40 P—It’s one of those things. It was a fluid situation. I mean, we were exploring different ways of being able to get this thing off the ground, you know, but—How it would have ended up, I genuinely don’t know.

45

KH—No. And in the mean time you had suspicions about Daniel Mann.

P—Yes.

KH—You had done some checks on him, or tried to track him down.

P—I mean, the thing was, usually these days everybody leaves a small trace on the internet.

5 KH—Yes, somewhere.

P—Somewhere. Even if they’d never had any social media accounts, even if they hardly do anything online, there will still be the odd mention. You know, the telephone number may pop, an e-mail address may pop up, their name may pop up. It didn’t. And I remember saying to Patrick, “Do you think the Christian name is correct, but do you think maybe the surname is not?” Because it’s hard that if you invent a complete name— 10 you know, you call somebody Tom and their name’s Bob, and they won’t turn round when you—You know, they’re going to get caught out. So I thought he’s probably still called Daniel, but maybe the surname is not right. Or is it just that he’s very, very low radar? Some consultants are. In which case, fair enough. Okay. Maybe he just didn’t pop up. But all of his associates as well, you see, the names mentioned on the website—I can’t remember now off hand, Gemma or somebody. Again, I checked those, and none of those appeared 15 anywhere either. Nothing that seemed to corroborate. So the word I would use was, yes it was suspicious. Which is why I had—I had never thought for a second that he wouldn’t register. Because three or four times in the documentation I said, “You have to register.” He originally said, following parliamentary protocols, and making it clear that he was always going to register. On camera he said he was going to register. There cannot be any way at all that he was trying to be duplicitous and not going to register. He must have, because it was so 20 obvious that—it’s standing there. It’s—you know, it’s on everything that’s written down. And that’s why I don’t believe for one second he was genuinely trying to avoid registering, because at some stage I would have mentioned it again, his wife certainly would have, I presume, mentioned it. You know, it doesn’t make any sense. So that’s why I’m convinced he would have registered it, and, for the sake of a couple of weeks, well, I guess probably you ask umpteen MPs, I bet they’ve all failed to register by a couple of weeks something 25 because they’ve had other things on their minds.

KH— But he didn’t listen to you saying, “This is really suspicious”.

P— Well, he did in the sense that, I remember at the beginning he had said, “Are you a journalist?”

KH— Yes.

P— He asked it twice. And I remember that was because of the previous conversation—I am assuming; I 30 don’t know—I assume it was the previous conversation end of February—the end of February one or two of the last days when we’d been speaking again about Fiji and, that’s right: Patrick had said, “I think I’ve got half- a-dozen names for the APPG”.

So then, blow me, a week later, obviously this guy phones him up. So, you know, I presume he thought the rules were that if you say, “Are you a journalist”, you somehow have to acknowledge whether you are or not. 35 Now, clearly that’s not the case, because they’ll just lie through their teeth, and that’s what happened, and maybe if anything Patrick was just naïve then to believe that this guy was speaking the truth.

So, you know, he obviously, based on what we’d been speaking about, knew that this could be a coincidence but perhaps wasn’t. And, certainly later on in the conversations, I think it was when Daniel Mann was trying to pin him down and clearly saying, “Look, we want this inquiry as we want it,” and I don’t know when he 40 was—at some point in the—April—I had again spoken to Patrick and we were both adamant, on the telephone, absolutely on no circumstances whatsoever would we just simply write any old conclusion that—if this was genuine, we would meet with representatives at Amnesty International; we weren’t just going to trot through the motions. I did want to meet with the Fijian opposition and if we had to have off-the-record chats with them, I’d said, “If we were going to fly over there, I would have quietly tried to get out of meetings or 45 pleaded sick and I would have gone off in one direction if I could have possibly met with opposition members to privately discuss with them.

46

So, that way we would have collected the information independently and if it had come back, and if it had said, “Look, this is”—you know—“they are not fit to return to the Commonwealth,” I would have printed that, you know. And there would have been—under no circumstance would I have put pen to paper unless it was my genuine view. That’s what I did with the APPG on Specialist Security. I wrote that report; if people don’t 5 agree with certain parts of it, that’s fine, but, you know, nobody interfered with it whatsoever. The secretariat didn’t interfere, Patrick didn’t interfere, none of the officers tried to influence me. It was my report, and in exactly the same way that’s what I would have done over Fiji.

KH— And you think Patrick would have supported you in that?

P— Absolutely, 100%. There would have been no doubt about that at all. And that’s—hence the reason then, 10 when, I think he realised perhaps that dear old Daniel Mann either wasn’t what he was claiming to be, or it was a case of he, more likely, was just trying to get control of this report. Patrick clearly was very, very robust on camera to say, “No.” And there was no two ways about it.

So, you know, they wouldn’t have got—you know, now we realise they’re journalists—there is no way they could possibly say that they would have got an inquiry report that would have, somehow, endorsed some 15 military junta that was there torturing trade unionists and that we would have just simply gone on a jolly and turned a blind eye to it. No way.

KH— What they did get, though, was some questions put to the House.

P— Well, what—what you have to remember Commissioner, is this: it’s that there’s one thing what Patrick is saying to them, what maybe they want to hear, because we’re assuming they’re a genuine business client, and 20 what we were privately agreed upon. Now, the fact was was that days before any of those questions that were tabled that either they had helped or they had drafted, I’d already drafted a whole stack of them anyway, because I wanted to go on public record and I’d said to Patrick, “We need to be able to get on the public record about ‘what is the Government’s position over the Commonwealth?’” Now, that was one of the questions, I believe, that they then had a hand in drafting, but we were totally relaxed about that, in the same 25 way with the Early Day Motion—

KH— Can I stop you there?

P— Sorry.

KH— Because there is a suggestion that there was an e-mail that you wrote with parliamentary questions on it.

30 P— Yes.

KH— And we don’t have, in the evidence, a copy of that. And I wonder whether you had got the basic copy of that.

P— Sure. In terms of the original e-mail?

KH— Yes.

35 P— Yes, absolutely. I can forward that on.

KH— Could you send me a copy of that?

P— Absolutely.

KH— Because that was one of the things I wanted to pick up again.

P— Yes, no problem/

40 KH— I am glad you raised it at that point.

P— I cannot remember where we were up to—forgive me. What was the question again? 47

KH— Oh, right. This was the—I was talking to you about the tabling of the questions.

P— Yes.

KH— And we were getting on to, well, who actually wrote those questions—

P— Yes.

5 KH— And you were suggesting you’d already done them in advance, before Daniel Mann ever got round to wanting questions drafted. Is that right, or have I misunderstood that?

P— Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes. I can’t remember, I can’t remember—well, some of the questions would have originated back in the November, because in the notes I’d started to look at Tonga and the Solomon Islands—

KH— Yes.

10 P— And Australia and all sorts. And the thing: if were in a conspiracy, you don’t table parliamentary questions, for crying out loud, because it’s on the public record. So if they were trying to be able to, you know, get something done that we were trying to hide, we would have written private letters to the Ministers and said, “Here’s a stack of questions—can you answer them?” We would have—the last thing you do is put it out so every journalist, every blogger can read it on the internet.

15 So—but again, that’s why I was just completely relaxed that if they were involved in helping to draft questions, or draft an Early Day Motion, that, fundamentally, I was relaxed about, because the Commonwealth ministers were saying that they were encouraging, in the September, that Fiji could come back into the Commonwealth. It only—the policy position only changed at the end of April, and that is when the Commonwealth ministers then started saying, “Hang on a minute—they’ve not complied.” But, at that time, we believed that we were in 20 line with Government policy and the Commonwealth policies.

So, you know, as I say, it happens all the time. A consultancy is supporting an APPG, and you hive work out to them because you are busy, because your staff are overworked. So it was a case of he’d asked me to draft some parliamentary questions. He obviously was holding conversations with Daniel Mann and talking to him about drafting questions and a motion—all the rest of it—but he was in control.

25 Anyone who knows Patrick Mercer knows that this British—former British Colonel in the Army, there is no way you’re going be able to cajole him or persuade him or tell him what to do. That is not how Patrick works. He decides. He gives out his orders, or instructions, and, you know, we have to play catch-up. That’s the way he is. So I do not believe for a second that if they’d put something in front of me and I said, “Hang on a minute, I’m not doing it,” he would say. In the same way that he may have given the impression to them to 30 say, “Look at a parliamentary pass,” but he had said to me, “Definitely, there is no way I’m gonna have this one working for us, Paul, because she doesn’t know anything about”—

KH— This was the secretary they wanted to introduce?

P— Yes. But I can understand if you’ve got a business client across a desk, you’re not gonna immediately throw it back in their face and say, “Not in a million years,” so I can understand he’s gently trying to let her 35 down, and he’s obfuscating, trying to come up with reasons why, that maybe, the pass can’t be, you know, sorted out. But what he was saying to that individual is not necessarily exactly what he was thinking, or certainly what he was saying to me.

KH— Okay, thank you. So, with regard to putting down the parliamentary questions, you’d drafted some. You have that e-mail. It’d be really helpful to see it.

40 P— Yes. No problem.

KH— Daniel Mann may also have drafted some.

P— Yes.

48

KH— We need to look between them at what happened there.

P— Sure.

KH— And you went on then to talk about the woman he wanted as secretary.

P— Yes.

5 KH— And it feels to me as though he’d actually decided he wanted you to take the lead in this foundation.

P— Yes. I mean the thing was, was that if we’d got no money for it, there would have been—it would have been limited as to what I could have done.

KH— Yes.

P— I know that Edward in his office would have been too busy to take on secretariat work: that had been 10 ruled out early on. I think even before December Patrick had mentioned something about, well, yeah, Edward won’t want to do any extra work, so, you know, we can’t—If we’re getting to an APPG where you’re gonna have to find some other way of getting admin support. But yes, that would have been the plan—that, if the APPG did the sort of minimal work, perhaps the foundation was taking the lead, but as long as we had sufficient funding, whether it was from private sources or whether it was actually going to be from some sort 15 of Fijian business interests, fine. But if we just got a cheque coming through the post from some organisation or some individual that we didn’t have a clue who they were, there is no way we would have allowed them to be funding activities unless we had got them to acknowledge that it had to be transparent and accountable. So, my view at the time would have been getting them to agree to some sort of anti-corruption policy or getting them to acknowledge in writing that we had complete control as we saw fit as to how we were going to run 20 things. I mean, obviously they didn’t exist, so it didn’t matter.

KH—No. And in terms of setting up the APPG, were you involved in that? Or was that something that Patrick was doing separately? It might have been rather difficult for him.

P— No, I think that Edward had everything to do with that, so—from his office.

KH— Right. Yes.

25 P— So no, apart from having rounded conversations as to what we were ultimately trying to achieve, no, Edward handled all that.

KH— Okay. Just let me have a quick look down my questions and make sure I have covered most things. You have been very helpful. As far as I am concerned, I have covered all the issues that I needed to. Is there anything that you think I might have missed out or that is useful to put in at this stage?

30 P— No. All I would say is this, is that I know journalists have got a job to do, but all they have done is they have moved from covert hacking to covert surveillance. And it is sickening now—no one can set up an APPG on Fiji for years, because anybody who then, who doesn’t know the story, looks into then thinking they can start one for the right reasons, just like Patrick and I thought we were going to start it for the right reasons, they won’t touch it with a bargepole. That means tens of thousands of kids in Fiji will have no support now. In 35 the same way, Commonwealth Ministers, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—all of them—will be extremely nervous of doing anything associated with Fiji. This journalist has admitted (a) that he lies but (b) that he’s used Fiji, and the consequences are people now are going—and it’s not melodramatic—will die in Fiji, because we would have been a force for good. If we had been able to roadmap back into the Commonwealth, a transformation into democracy, by now the report could have been produced. It could 40 have been out there. It could have been having an impact. It was done for the right reasons and it could have actually changed things. Instead now, obviously the journalist moves on to another target, but unless somebody stands up to these journalists doing covert surveillance, and ultimately—the editing of that programme is outrageous. I have no idea what you are going to put in your report, but frankly, somebody has got to tackle that you—it was blatant that they created a programme that they wanted to prove their lobbying 45 scandal, and the voiceovers, the techniques, the subliminal messaging of having Patrick in his military

49

uniform next to the military junta in their military uniforms—it was an utter disgrace. Patrick’s career is destroyed. You produce your report, and I am happy to co-operate 110% with yourself.

KH— Thank you.

P— Of course, I’ll just end up being tarred with the same brush. The journalists were going to produce and 5 print whatever they want to print, and they now basically rule the roost. Although we have Leveson, although we think we’ve got them back under control, we haven’t, because they’ll just go and tape record the next MP, Minister—whoever—and then print or publish whatever they want. By the time that we can begin to fight back, it is too late, because the damage has been done. So I wish you the very best with your inquiry, but the next set of headlines is already written. It is either going to be a claim that it’s a whitewash, or it will be a claim 10 that it just simply proves everything they’ve been saying, even if it doesn’t. So, very best of luck, Commissioner.

KH— Well, I have to say thank you very much for your co-operation this afternoon, if that is your view on what the outcome might be.

P— Well I’m just tired, so forgive me.

15 KH— But I can understand you feel strongly about that.

P— I do.

KH— Jon, is there anything I’ve missed that you might like to pick up?

JP— No. The only thing I wondered about was, you said about the people with no internet trace, and I just wonder how long that was between your first being introduced to these people and actually doing some check 20 on what internet presence they had? Because it seems there is a bit of lag there.

P— Sure. I don’t know. I’ve got an e-mail that I sent to Patrick, which I think was probably the April, the May, and I can copy that to you, certainly. But in terms of, after the initial suspicions, which would have been the first week of March, obviously then it was a case of, well, Patrick was going to go and meet them. So he went off and met them—met them a couple of times. We thought, “Well, maybe this is genuine.” I don’t think it 25 was probably until the beginning of April, then questions were starting to float around between us where we’re going, “Well, one minute, what exactly is this again, and why exactly are they asking us to do certain things and not listening to other things we’re telling them that we’re going to do?” Again, it was—there were no immediate alarm bells, but I will send you a copy of the e-mail that I sent. I don’t know the date of it, but obviously that will give you some idea then of the time scales.

30 JP— Okay. That’s good.

KH— Thank you. The other thing for me to say, which just picks up on a comment that you made: I don’t normally give the names of people who are witnesses in my inquiries.

P— Oh right. Okay.

KH— And there is no reason at all why I wouldn’t redact your name. I can’t promise that no one could 35 identify you, but I am grateful for your co-operation and I can’t see any reason why your name should be all over the report.

P— Well that would be very kind if I can be kept out of it, because I did send Snapper TV a cease and desist letter when Patrick told me. And I read their letter and it was quite clearly libellous, because it was saying that I could be bought and the conclusions to the report could be bought. And I had no idea what the content of 40 the programme or of the Telegraph was going to be. I sent them a long letter explaining that they would be denigrating my professional reputation, it was libellous and I would take action. Now, they then didn’t mention my name and they redacted my name off the report that they showed in the programme. But at the same time, if my name does come out, well, ho hum. I’ve been through this before.

KH— Right, well, we will do what we can in that respect anyway. 50

P— All right, well, thank you very much. Don’t let me forget: it was the email to do with—forgive me; this is why I’ve got to write things down. Forgive me.

KH— Right. I was asking you for the e-mail with the questions.

P— And the e-mail was to do with—oh, suspicions.

5 JP— When you checked the lack of internet trace.

P— Yes. That’s it. Gotcha. Okay. I shall send both of them through, probably later on today.

KH— That’s fine. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon; I’m very grateful to you.

P— No problem—very best of luck.

KH— And we will send you through the transcript so that you can have a look, and if there is anything in 10 there that you particularly would like removed, then tell us and we may be able to look at that.

P— Probably my strong views at the end, probably, but.

KH— Well, we can consider that if you feel you don’t want it expressed in that way.

P— No, no, no, I don’t mind.

12 November 2013

15 34. Letter to Mr Paul Marsden from the Commissioner, 20 November 2013

Thank you for coming to meet me on 12 November in relation to my inquiry concerning Mr Patrick Mercer. I have now received the transcript of that meeting, and attach a copy to the email version of this letter so that we can agree its accuracy.

20 I will then send to Mr Mercer a copy of the agreed transcript, in order to give him a chance to comment on it.

I would expect any relevant evidence I receive to be published at the end of my inquiry, either on my own web pages or with any report published by the Committee on Standards. It seems likely that this will include some or all of the transcript of our meeting.

I would be grateful if I could have your response, with any comments on the accuracy of the transcript, by 4 25 December. It would also be helpful if you could send me copies of the emails we discussed at our meeting.

Thank you for your help with this matter.

20 November 2013

35. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 20 November 2013

30 I am sorry that it has taken me some time to assess all the evidence I have been sent in relation to my inquiries, but that work is now complete.

I now have the amended versions of the transcripts of the five meetings supplied by the BBC, as alluded to in my letter of 12 September, and I enclose these so that we can agree their accuracy.

It would now be appropriate for us to arrange a meeting to discuss your evidence at your earliest convenience. 35 To that end, can you please contact my PA, who manages my diary for me?

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Thank you also for supplying contact details for Mr Paul Marsden in your letter of 18 September. I have now had the opportunity to meet Mr Marsden and am today sending him the transcript of that meeting so that he and I can agree its accuracy, and I will provide you with a copy once this is done.

I look forward to hearing from you.

5 [The transcripts enclosed with this letter have been compiled as a stand-alone evidence item]

20 November 2013

36. E-mail to the Commissioner from Mr Paul Marsden MP, 20 November 2013

Thank you for your letter dated 20th November and I can confirm that my statement is accurate. I appreciate 10 it is a verbatim transcript so I trust any quotations will reflect the sentiment of what I was saying.

I will forward the requested emails separately.

20 November2013

37. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 25 November 2013

15 Thank you for phoning this morning. This is just to confirm our arrangement to meet in your office on Tuesday 10 December at 4pm. I will be accompanied by my Complaints Manager … You kindly agreed that we could record the interview and I will send you a transcript. If you would like to be accompanied by someone else this would be fine, but I will expect you to respond to my questions personally.

As I mentioned to you, I have now sent Mr Marsden a copy of the transcript of his interview and I will 20 forward a copy to you as soon as he confirms its accuracy.

[Personal information – redacted]

25 November 2013

38. Letter to Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 4 December 2013

25 Mr Marsden has now agreed that the enclosed transcript is an accurate record of the interview that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards conducted with him on 12 November 2013.

I thought you might find it useful to have a copy in advance of our meeting on Tuesday 10 December.

[Enclosure included above as item 32]

4 December 2014

30 39. Transcript of interview with Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 10 December 2013

Present are:

Kathryn Hudson (KH); Patrick Mercer (PM); 35 Complaints Manager (JP); Patrick Mercer’s Parliamentary Assistant (EB).

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KH— If we just introduce ourselves. I am Kathryn Hudson. I am the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

PM— I am Patrick Mercer. I am the Member of Parliament for Newark.

JP— I am … the complaints manager at the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

5 EB— I am ... Patrick Mercer’s parliamentary assistant.

KH— Thank you. We have just spent some time checking all the evidence that we are going to use. We have not recorded that. Now, we are moving on to a more general discussion.

You and I had a brief discussion about what had happened only just after the events of end of May and beginning of June.

10 PM— 26th of June, I want to say.

KH— Yes. I really wanted just to ask you to reflect on what your thoughts are now about what happened then, just to see if anything has changed. Just general reflections on it, to start you off.

PM— Reflections on our discussion, or on the events—which?

KH— On the events.

15 PM— A lot of has happened in the last six months and a lot has changed for me, personally. Forgive me using military analogies, but they are extremely helpful, so the shock of capture, if you like, the fact that I was shown—I watched—a television programme, and thought “Cor. Blimey”, much more so, frankly, than the newspaper articles, which came at me. I was then subject to, I have to say not to a tidal wave, one or two, probably four, resentful constituents, who were saying, “Gosh, you are a disgrace, etc. etc.” A couple of 20 stinging letters—not from friends, but from people I had known earlier in my life—made me feel pretty bereft. Of course, that goes hand in glove with the extreme shock of being overwhelmed with this assault, with my wife and I having to flee to escape press pressure, to my private property being besieged, with—I hesitate to say “outrageous”—claims in the newspapers that this was all a police matter, and that this would very quickly end up with court cases, jail sentences and all the rest of it. Those claims have never been repeated other than 25 in those first few days.

This all combined to make me think, “Gosh. Well, this isn’t quite how I remember it, but of course it must be true, because what the media says is true. Of course it’s true.” I was a journalist myself, and I never lied when I was a journalist. That effect took a little while to wear off, before I suddenly realised that I was being—this was evidence that was produced by professional liars, by people who used a nom de guerre as a perfectly normal 30 way of doing their business. I sat down with a barrister friend, who said, “Of course, this is nonsense. None of this stuff could ever be used in a court of law”— I appreciate that this isn’t a court of law—“This is inadmissible.”

That feeling has strengthened on the basis that—there is no point in my trying to beat against the walls on this, but this is a very serious assault that has taken place on me, with a clear judge, jury and executioner 35 forming up in the hands of the media. I have only found this out through nefarious routes, but the media are terribly disappointed in the effect that it had in terms of very low viewing figures, and the fact that it was not picked up as broadly as they had hoped. Suddenly, I was thinking, “Actually, why is there so much in this that I don’t recognise?” Why, for instance, is the underpinning issue of my intense concern for particularly Fijian and Commonwealth soldiers serving in the British Army—this was going to be the most marvellous vehicle 40 for me to use—why has none of that been reflected? Where I rigorously stand up for my constituency, how is that being contorted to make it look as if I am selling Newark down the stream? Why were none of the statements that I would not be bought, that I was not available as some sort of tradesman for them, not produced?

Again, to use the military analogy, this was an extremely capable and ruthless attack from not a wholly 45 unexpected direction, because I think you will probably ask me whether I expected any of this.

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KH— Yes.

PM— The answer is, “Yes, I did.”

KH— Right. I might come back to that, then.

PM— Of course.

5 I suppose to summarise all of that, I feel now much more on the front foot about this. I am prepared to defend myself, which I don’t think I necessarily was initially. And, after a period of great uncertainty and unhappiness at home, with all my wife’s frailties being played on by exactly these sort of things, and, if I am frank, many of my own frailties, I won’t say that I am feeling bullish about it, but I am prepared to fight these people.

KH— Yes. So, come back to the “Were you expecting it?”

10 PM— Yes, entirely.

KH— Or why do you think it was you?

PM— Well, I don’t know. Again, I have had a whole series of theories. I should explain, Kathryn, I know the media very well; I am an ex-media man, albeit briefly. I have spent more of my time talking to the media here, than I have talking to other politicians. They, in their entirety, have been remarkably discreet about their 15 loyalty to each other in this, but none the less, they have talked, and rumours have come back to me. It goes from everything from, “This was a quite deliberate operation that was mounted against you personally in order to remove you and your awkward views from the political scene”—one extreme—through to “You just got unlucky. They were after someone and you gave them enough with the all-party parliamentary group on specialist security for them to look at, and for them to have”—as they would define it—“their prima facie case 20 in place.” As you know, clearly that would be an illegal activity without that. “In some ways you were self- selecting, there is nothing personal about this.” Between those, are all sorts of interesting conspiracy theories, which I won’t even waste your time discussing. Do I have any particular theory myself? No, I don’t. It’s a reality, and it’s happened, and I will do my best to outdo the court of public opinion.

KH— Given the point you just made about you know the press and you have worked here in the past, why 25 was it that you didn’t listen to warnings that you might be being set up for a sting?

PM— I got several warnings, including one from—sorry, not directly, but in response to my questions, I spoke to the Sunday Times Insight team. They didn’t come to me, but I said, “Look, what do you think of this?”

KH— This was while you were in touch with him?

30 PM— Yeah, Mr Foggo, or Mr Mann, or whatever name he was using.

The overall case of Fiji was not as important to me as the case of Fijian soldiers serving inside the Army. Just wind the clock back a little bit. My last job in the Army was that I was partially in charge of recruiting. The Army in the late 1990s was extremely short of recruits, except in certain regiments. One of my initiatives was to resurrect a scheme that worked very well in the ’50s and ’60s, which was to recruit Commonwealth soldiers. 35 Having put that scheme in place, I then watched it flourish, and then watched all of the various different problems that occurred, which I can describe, but I don’t think that they are germane.

KH— No.

PM— This is a great interest to me. When I was sacked from my—I’ll rephrase that—when I chose to resign from my shadow ministerial job, it was my talking about Fijian and Commonwealth soldiers that had brought 40 this to a head at the time. I wanted to push on with this. I wanted to do this. Paul Marsden and I had talked about this before at about this time last year—

KH— Yes. We will come to that and go through that.

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PM— Yes. This seemed to be a vehicle through which I could do something, some real good, for this particular cause, and if that meant expanding it into a broader spectrum, well and good. I felt, to say that I’m passionate, that’s silly, because one isn’t passionate about anything really—one or two things in one’s life—but I do feel strongly about this. I mean, that’s silly, because one isn’t passionate about anything, really—I mean, 5 one or two things in one’s life, but I don’t feel strongly about this. I wanted to believe that these people were kosher. There was also an element in me that thought, “Well, if I can get to the Fijians”—whoever these mysterious people are that are constantly being dangled; you are about to have lunch with them, you are about to meet them.

KH— Yes. They are coming next week.

10 PM— But, hang on, there is no next week—and then next week and next week. Perhaps my doubts and worries and concerns would have been overcome. But the answer is I am extremely naïve. There were a number of times when I thought, “Right, I’ve got to do something about this. I’ve got to take an action, where I say to this man, ‘I just don’t trust you.’” And I did say that.

KH— And, in fact, you did say that.

15 PM— Not in those words. But when we were up on Skye—gosh, let me think, in March, probably April; I can check the dates—but I resolved, when I came back, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to get this man—” And I’m sorry if I offended him and upset him. I don’t like offending and upsetting people, strangely. “Surely this man has got to be straight, but I’ve got to have it out with him.” Well, I didn’t. And it was too late by the time I came back.

20 KH— Yes. And your colleague, Mr Marsden, was concerned about him, I know. David Davies was concerned about him.

PM— David Davies was extremely concerned about him. He said to me quite straightforwardly, “Be careful. Be careful. There is no trace of these people.” We sat and we looked at the website together, then we checked it out. I even considered going back to the Sunday Times team and saying to them, “Look, could you have a look 25 at these people for me?” I didn’t in the event, because I was overtaken—

KH— Yes.

PM— But please understand that running parallel with all of this were the extremely difficult personal circumstances.

[Redacted personal information]

30 KH— But you didn’t at any time say to Daniel, “Look, go away for a few months. I’m too busy.”

PM— No, I didn’t. If you were to ask my staff, it is almost a mania with me to respond to messages and to react responsibly, because people don’t. People do not answer messages; people do not return telephone calls. In fact—this will come back to something I will mention later on—I cannot find this, but at some stage Foggo/Mann/Smith/Jones, whatever he was calling himself, did say to me, “Gosh, you are awfully good at 35 answering messages.”

KH— It’s quite noticeable from going through the e-mail responses and the phone calls, you do always phone back.

PM— I do. Always. Always. Everyone. And that’s not just these people. It’s probably a failing of mine, that I’m a bit—I’ll be absolutely honest with you, I needed something to concentrate on. My parliamentary career has 40 not been happy, and I was beginning to feel utterly lost. For the remainder of my time in Parliament, this seemed like an extremely good issue. I mean, I can’t ask you to ask Edward, because he’s not giving evidence, but if you were to ask my PA he would tell you I am punctilious about it, to a point that it is almost fetishistic.

KH— Yes. Okay. So what you are saying to me is you were concentrating on the work as a way almost of diverting yourself from some of the problems at home.

55

PM— Please take this as—this is not meant to be disrespectful to—I have found dealing with civilians, after leaving the army, extremely difficult.

KH— That’s interesting.

PM— And I know that this drives me into being more punctilious than punctilious, for the simple reason that 5 I will not ever be—I cannot be unreliable. Being unreliable, late, absent from my place of duty is unforgivable. It drives my wife mad. You know, we can’t be five minutes late. Five minutes late for a meeting is a crime. If the Sunday Times are asking me about a mutiny in the British Army or something, I will respond to the telephone call. I will. I was inundated with telephone calls immediately when the news broke, and every one was answered. Every one was answered. So, yes. And also, this was a good cause, and I wanted to get involved 10 with it. Passionately, I wanted to. No, passionate is the wrong word—it’s not right. But I was keen to do this. I liked this idea.

KH— Right, so go back for me a bit. You had been talking to Paul Marsden about Fiji.

PM— Yes. Well, about several different things.

KH— Yes, it was about several different things, wasn’t it?

15 PM— Yes.

KH— Around December time, to start with, I think.

PM— This time last year, yes.

KH— Yes. And then fortuitously—or was it fortuitous? There is some suggestion between you that it could have been a tapped phone or something—they knew you were interested.

20 PM— I think that’s Paul’s theory, rather than mine. I don’t decry it, but—

KH— It was something you suggested to me.

PM— Yes, but as I say, I think that idea came from Paul, rather than from me. Paul had—I have to say, I don’t know what it was, but he had an issue about some phone tapping with him. But I was phone-tapped by Glenn Mulcaire, and we had police in the office asking me about this, and all the rest of it. It seems a bit far-fetched, 25 doesn’t it?

KH— Right, well—

PM— Doesn’t it? I don’t know.

KH— I don’t know.

PM— But somehow—I prefer to think that this was coincidence.

30 KH— Yes.

PM— But my interest in Fiji, I can’t—They called me “Mr Australasia” somewhere in the TV script—you know, this mocking television script. I am not Mr Australasia at all. But I do have specific interests, and my interest in Fiji lies principally in the soldiers—I didn’t actually soldier with them—for whom I am responsible for delivering into the arms of Her Majesty. They interest me, and they are getting a rough deal.

35 KH— Right. So how did you develop a link with Paul Marsden?

PM— Paul and I—in fact I was surprised in his—that he didn’t bring this up. I went to be—or I put my name forward to be selected for Shrewsbury. That coincided entirely—the series of interviews for that coincided entirely with Newark, the difference being that I don’t come from Shrewsbury, I come from Newark, and I had preferred to represent Newark, so I took that particular series of interviews no further. However—and 40 Paul’s name was on everybody’s lips, obviously, as the opponent. When we came into the House, I sought him 56

out and said, “Ha ha! I jolly well nearly stood against you.” And Paul said, “I am so glad you didn’t, because if it had been someone like you, I’d have lost.” Everything else I’d met was a sort of stupidity of party politics in the few weeks I’d been in the House so far, with the Labour party not speaking to you and your own Whips not speaking to you because you’re a new boy, and all this sort of nonsense. And here’s a bloke, who is an 5 opponent, being polite. So we became friendly. Then, I think it was Iraq—it might have been 9/11, but anyway it was a terrorist, military-related issue; I can’t remember which—but Paul stood up and he made the bravest speech against Tony Blair as one of his own Members of Parliament that I have ever heard. I went out afterwards and I said, “Paul, remember me?” “Yes, of course.” “That is the bravest thing I have ever heard. I don’t agree with you, but you have my total admiration.” And it developed from that. Paul lost his seat, or 10 stood down. And then—I don’t think—Again, I’m a bit surprised from his evidence. I just can’t remember if there were texts or telephone calls.

KH— No, he is fairly vague about how the contact went forward.

PM— I can’t remember if it was quiet or not, but Paul came back into the House at some stage. And again, you might be able to ask Edward about this; he might have a better memory than I do about this. But I got a 15 call from—and I think Edward came in and said, “Someone called Paul Marsden.” “Oh, Paul Marsden. Good heavens, what’s he doing?” He came up and saw me and we made friends from there. The thing about Paul is that Paul’s been in every sort of political party you could shake a stick at. He is ambivalent about—he is as ambivalent about party politics as I am, but the big difference between the two of us is that he is a details man, and I am not. He’s a cracking—again, the military analogy—he is a cracking staff officer, and there were a 20 couple of things that I just wanted his guidance on, and Paul seems to look at a word processor and a brief comes out at the other end. You know, I’ll be there, you know, like this—[two-finger typing gesture]

KH— Yes. He did explain to me that he developed briefs on certain areas, as a consultant.

PM— Yes.

KH— He more or less had them ready and could change the date or the time depending on what he needed.

25 PM— Yes.

KH— And was that what he was doing over the Fiji piece of work?

PM— Well, no. He was working with some Georgians—you may or may not know that I have got quite strong sort of Black Sea and Caspian connections. We talked at length about Georgians, and my other sort of area of interest is also Serbia, because of my service over there. He worked up some documents, which I think 30 were—no, I beg your pardon, it was Iraq. That’s right. Sorry. I beg your pardon. Because he and I had been both passionately—to use that phrase again—had been very heavily involved in the Iraq debates, I was still involved with several Iraqis who felt strongly about the persecution of Christians, etc. etc. etc.—all those of sorts of issues. I was approached by an Iraqi businessman with a view to establishing a foundation of some sort, and I said, “Well, let’s talk about it,” mentioned it to Paul, and Paul said, “Yeah, now, actually, I’ve 35 thought about this in the past.” I think—I think—that that was because of his Georgian connections, but I might be wrong on that. Sure enough, you know, you mention something to Paul and five pages turn up the next day. He was then saying—and I know exactly how it came up, because we got on to the subject of my resigning my shadow ministerial post. I then started talking about the difficulties with Fijian troops, and he said, “Well, you know, this is a country that we ought to look at.” And I said, “Yes, that would be helpful.”

40 KH— Yes. Right.

PM— How the connection is made between Foggo/Mann/Andrews, I just don’t know.

KH— No. So look, we got to a point—certainly this is the way it comes from Mr Marsden—where there was a possibility that you could use the work that Daniel Mann wanted done to forward the work that you also wanted done on Fiji, and, not to put too fine a point on it, to find some work for Paul Marsden to do.

45 PM— Yes, I don’t think there’s—well, I would certainly—

KH— That is certainly the way that Paul Marsden tells the story. 57

PM— Yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t disagree with the latter half of that. I think that the Mann project, if you like, sits in a comfortable parallel. What is not clear from any of the evidence that I have seen so far is the strenuous efforts I made to persuade him of the need for Fijian soldiers to be included in all of this.

KH— No, it comes across more as Fiji in general.

5 PM— Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. But I was perfectly prepared—the Fijian case, with all of its difficult human rights stuff, its remoteness, its coups and counter-coups, military government and the rest of it, all of that sits in parallel to my particular, my narrower interest, which was the military side.

KH— So your hope was that that would somehow get woven in.

PM— Well, no, it wasn’t my hope at all; I was in control of this. This is the all-party parliamentary group on 10 Fiji, and I was jolly well going to make sure that one of the issues that we brought up—one of the biggest issues that we brought up—was the whole gamut of the economic effect, social effect, etc. etc., of Fiji sending such a large proportion of her manpower to serve in the British Army. Paul needs a job.

KH— Yes. Oh yes, I don’t think there is any doubt about that.

PM— Yeah, there’s no doubt about that. Paul needs a job; this struck me as being something that he would be 15 extremely good at. I thought that this was a good and proper cause and it interested me.

KH— Yes. Okay. And the setting up of the group—alongside that you were hoping to set up a foundation, and Paul had done quite a lot of work on that as well.

PM— Yes.

KH— Again, was that you trying to introduce your ideas to Daniel Mann, or was that the way he wanted to 20 go?

PM— Oh no, Daniel Mann had no idea about this.

KH— Right.

PM— Erm, when—I mean, I think it is probably fair to say, erm, that when I seized this with such enthusiasm, and because of my reservations about him and because of the warnings from people like T.C. Davies, I wasn’t 25 wearing my heart on my sleeve about all this at all, but I think he was quite surprised about the enthusiasm with which I seized this.

KH— Yes.

PM— You know, a couple of people have said to me, “Well, the one thing that does come out from the television is that you are really rather efficient—you are quite keen to get on.” Yes, I am—I was. I am not 30 sure—well, I am sure: I would have used the word “foundation” first. I explained it as the fact that I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on human rights.

KH— Yes.

PM— And they have an extremely—they call it a secretariat—they have an extremely effective, paid secretariat, which makes them such a powerful APPG that produces good reports, etc. etc. I explained this to 35 Foggo or Dan—Matthews, or whatever his name is, Andrews—and said, “Look, what we have got to have is a secretariat which can drive this forward.” We even got as far as talking about physically where it was going to be placed.

KH— Yes.

PM— That became a foundation—I don’t know whose term it was, but it was probably Paul’s term.

40 KH— I think that’s Paul’s term. I think that was part of the work he had done.

58

PM— Yes, and we then—and I presented him with this outline, which I know he thought, “Good grief.” He thought, “Crikey, this bloke’s taking this seriously, you know, this is all a lark. We’re just going to smash him to pieces and have a bit of fun at his expense, but actually, you know, this is serious staff work that is being presented here.”

5 KH— Right. Okay, so if we go back a bit to your earlier contact with Mr Mann, on the business of the contract, and the fact that then you took Fiji out of it.

PM— Yes.

KH— Would you like to talk me through what your thinking was around that?

PM— Yeah, sure. There are a series of comments by me saying that the—I can’t quote them, but I will if you 10 want me to—saying, “The work that I do with the all-party parliamentary group and the work associated with it is nothing to do with the consultancy which you are asking me to carry out, which I see being involved in defence, security, policing matters, etc.” When the contract was given to me—it was quite clear that I should have taken the contract away and looked at it more carefully, but it was clear that this was confused. I was not going to include any of the direct Fijian—

15 KH— But Daniel Mann didn’t ever ask you to undertake any security work.

PM— No, he didn’t, but I was expecting him to.

KH— Right, but he doesn’t discuss security work with you even as you set up the contract in the first place.

PM— Erm, well I did make it clear to him that I was expecting to—

KH— You talk about it; he doesn’t.

20 PM— Yes.

KH— I need to go back to it. So I was just wondering how you had got the impression that the work you were doing—that you were going to be paid for doing and which there was a contract for—was going to be security work when what he talks about all the time is the work that he wants done in Fiji, and not only that, it is things like, “Could you get an early-day motion? Can you put some questions?” You know. How did you square 25 that?

PM— I squared that simply by the fact that I was quite clear that I had said to him that everything we did— everything we did—had got to be completely proper.

KH— Yes.

PM— I said to him that we mustn’t meet on the parliamentary estate, we mustn’t discuss remunerated work 30 of any sort as part of this—that I was not for sale. I make that point several times. I said to him that, and in a way, this is probably the thing I should have taken most alarm at, because I said, “Look”—something which your predecessor had no qualms about at all, namely the Guido Fawkes stuff about the all-party parliamentary group for specialist security—do you need me to expand on that?

KH— I do a bit, because I don’t know that in detail.

35 PM— Right. Well.

KH— I know about Guido Fawkes.

PM— Yeah, yeah. Guido Fawkes put on, as is his wont, a wholly scurrilous thing about the fact that I was being paid by the secretary of the all-party parliamentary group for specialist security. That went to the Commissioner—it went to the Commissioner in the shape of a telephone call. And I said, “Look, really, what 40 is it? Have I got this wrong?” To which he, your predecessor, said, “No, you haven’t. It is not an issue—it is not going any further.” And I said to Daniel Mann, Foggo, whatever, “You’ve got to be clear that anything that we do that is improper, or even hints at being improper, or can be contorted or twisted as being improper will be 59

reported as being a major scandal by Guido Fawkes,” and I used some fairly rash language at the time—that was a pun and it wasn’t meant to be—“and we have got to be absolutely right and proper about this.”

The reason I expunged the Fijian stuff from the contract was precisely for that reason, because I did not see myself receiving remuneration for the parliamentary work that I was doing.

5 KH— Despite the fact that he had not actually asked you to do anything else other than the work on Fiji.

PM— No, but I was expecting him to do that. I did say to him that this must lead on to that. I may be contorting or confusing things here, but I got the impression that we would discuss those other activities with the Fijian representatives whom we were going to meet next week, the week after, the week after, the week after.

10 KH— Right. And of course the meeting never took place, so those discussions didn’t happen.

PM— Unless it’s scheduled for next week.

KH— I think they’d have told you. Right. So we are in a position that work you are actually doing is the work connected with Fiji, which you are telling me you were doing because you wanted to do that work on Fiji anyway, and that it was off to one side: that was not what you were expecting the contract to be about.

15 PM— I was not expecting any remuneration. I do say that I will not receive any pennies, I think is the phrase I used for this.

KH— Then how does Daniel Mann become involved in Fiji at all, if the contract was supposed to be about something else entirely, to do with security issues?

PM— No, no, it was—

20 KH— Am I misunderstanding something somewhere?

PM— The thing that I was understanding was that his Fijian clients, these ‘Friends of Fiji’, would in due course ask me to take up work on security, policing and something else—what else? So this is not general purpose Alistair Andrews-type security—you know, for other clients.

KH— But specifically Fiji.

25 PM— Yes.

KH— But at the same time, he was talking to you about setting up the APPG, which I think he says his clients also wanted you to do.

PM— Yes. Well, not at the same time, but interspersed with these other things.

KH— Yes. And to that extent, were you setting up the Fiji APPG because his clients wanted you to?

30 PM— No. I was setting up the APPG on Fiji because I wanted to have an APPG, because I knew how powerful a properly handled APPG could be, as long as it was properly supported.

KH— Right. So—

PM— If I may, the crucial thing about this is the fact that, if it was going to be a foundation or a secretariat, it had got to be supported by funds.

35 KH— And the funds were quite considerable. I think you came up with £100,000 a year, or something like that.

PM— I think Paul came up with that, yes.

KH— Yes. And was the hope that these clients might fund some of that?

60

PM— We were expecting that, yes.

KH— You were hoping that.

PM— We were hoping that. Yes.

KH— For me, these things then start to get muddled together: that your foundation, which is going to support 5 the Fiji APPG, the intention is that the APPG will produce a particular report on re-entry to the Commonwealth—

PM— As a start, yes.

KH— But you are not seeing that the clients were in any way involved in that. Although you are hoping they are going to provide the money for it.

10 PM— Well, what I was hoping was that the clients would be in a position to fund the foundation, which would allow us therefore to produce a report which would clarify the position in terms of Fiji with the Commonwealth, and then move on to other reports, which hopefully we would be in a position to get Fiji going on this so-called road map, if that was the conclusion we reached, and then we could start looking at things such as Fijian troops, the erection of the statue, etc. etc.

15 KH— I see. So that might be further down the line.

PM— Yes, it could be. Yes.

KH— But in the meantime, they were paying you £2,000 a month.

PM— I have to say I was not aware of that. I was not aware of that because I failed to check my bank account.

KH— Right. I am aware that you didn’t register it—or one was late and one was a bit nearer the time—but the 20 contract itself, which you signed, actually has a date on for commencement. I think it was something like the 10th of April.

PM— Right. I’d have to check on that. Fine. I was not aware that they were going to start paying me when they did. And I cannot—you say to me, “Why don’t you check your bank account more frequently?”, well, I’m afraid the answer is I’m afraid I don’t know.

25 KH— You have given me an explanation for that. I am just surprised that, having signed a contract that says you are going to be paid £2,000 a month from then on, you weren’t aware you were going to be getting some money.

PM— No. I can give no better explanation than that.

KH— Right. And you have also said that you did not give a copy of that contract to the Registrar.

30 PM— Yes, which was quite wrong.

KH— So where do we go from there? I think in the end you got £4,000, April and May.

PM— April and May, yes.

KH— And you have also told me in your statement that you thought you would have found those figures at the end of May when you checked the bank statement.

35 PM— Yes, when I reconciled at the end of May.

KH— Yes. Okay, so we have talked about the payments and about the late registration. We have talked about the contract. The tabling of questions: one of the allegations that Daniel Mann has made is that he wrote those questions for you. Is that the case, or were they written by Paul or by yourself—or by whom?

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PM— No, I think they were probably written by a combination of people. For instance, the EDM—I don’t know where the initial wording came from, I think it probably came from Daniel Mann, which is something that I did not baulk at at all, but I took that away and considerably revised that. I mean, he did say there are a couple of tweaks in it but it is a very considerably different document from the one he presented. Similarly, the 5 questions—the handful of questions that he provided—seemed to fit very well with questions that Paul Marsden was providing for me, and that these supported the case that the APPG would be looking at.

KH— But again, would it not appear that by submitting those questions you were doing work for the Fijian clients?

PM— I am afraid I didn’t see it like that. This was my—or my and the other Members’—all-party 10 parliamentary group. The business about the re-entry to the Commonwealth was extremely important, of course it was, but if I am being blunt it wasn’t something that I had thought about in great detail before we started to discuss it, particularly with Paul and myself. Those were questions that I wanted to have answered.

KH— Right. So are you saying you would have submitted them in any case?

PM— Yes, I would. And there were a whole series of questions with which Mr Daniel Mann, Mr Foggo or 15 whatever had absolutely nothing to do, which you know were never actually submitted.

KH— One of the—

PM— Did you see—sorry, did you see those, by the way?

KH— The questions? Yes, I have got them, thank you, they are in the bundle of evidence somewhere.

One of the things Daniel Mann appears to do is to check up on your progress on some of this, and in 20 particular there are some e-mails saying, “Have you submitted the questions?” and you say, “Yes, they’ve gone in,” and then later he says, “I can only see two of them,” and one of them has been sent back because there’s something wrong with it, and he says, “I need to tell my clients about this,” and it looks as though you are reporting back to him on things that have been done for the benefit of his clients. You might at some time want to get those e-mails out and have a look at them.

25 PM— Hm. Yes, no, I am very familiar with what you are saying, and I can quite see that that is how it looks. I can’t answer that adequately, other than to say that these were questions that I wanted to have answered. I am very conscious of the fact that all my questions are visible on the internet etc. Daniel Mann was developing into a nuisance. You know, he was a pest. I wanted to get on with this. There was urgency in forming the APPG and getting on with things. I wanted to have something, frankly, that I could say that I had achieved in 30 this place, before my time ran out. If I am guilty of not paying enough attention to that, and if I am guilty of allowing that impression to be contorted, well, yes, I am probably guilty of that, but those were questions I wanted answered, and if I have someone—look, you know, he’s not the only person that—we put down parliamentary questions on a whole series of different subjects, for constituents, for causes in which I am interested. And people will ring up and say, “Look, I have just looked at the answer.” Often, people will ring 35 up and see an answer before I do, and say, you know, “What about so and so?” and I will say, “I haven’t seen the answer to that one yet. I’m awfully sorry.” We are doing some stuff on the War Graves Commission at the moment, for instance, which I know is being looked at very closely by people who have asked me to do it, and whom I am happy to help—people by whom I am not being remunerated.

KH— Okay, let’s move on from there a bit then. Setting people up with parliamentary passes—which in fact 40 you didn’t do.

PM— Nope. Had no intention of it.

KH— Had no intention of it? It does look as though you are on the point of—

PM— Of course it does.

KH— So tell me about that, if you had no intention of doing it.

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PM— Yes, absolutely, I will tell you about that. Daniel Mann was an extremely pushy, importuning individual. He’s the sort of man in the Army to whom you would say, “Look, clear off, you can’t speak to people like that.” You can’t. And—

KH— Well, you could have told him you weren’t going to work with him any more.

5 PM— Yes, I could. Of course I could. You’re right. But by the same token I don’t wish to be rude to people. I wasn’t thinking about giving a pass to this peculiar woman that turned up out of nowhere. I still don’t really understand that. I had two passes; they were out, and they were both in useful hands, and probably I should have said, “No, no passes.” The person I wanted to run the foundation was Paul, who of course had a pass. And actually I get that wrong in something that I say, because I say that he doesn’t have a pass. But he did 10 have a pass. Of course he did. When I am putting him forward to Foggo/Mann/Etc. I say, “He hasn’t got a pass. He’ll need a pass,” but of course he has. And at some stage I realised that. But I wasn’t having Lynn— Lynn?

KH— Yes.

PM— I wasn’t having this strange woman coming here. And as I say, if I am guilty of not saying, “You’re not 15 having a pass. Get out of my face”—

KH— So we have got to a stage where he is being quite difficult with you but you are not feeling able to say to him, “Look, I don’t want to work with you. Please go away.”

PM— “I’m not giving you a pass.”

KH— “I’m not giving you a pass.” But actually he’s fairly pushy on some of the other things as well.

20 PM— He’s extremely pushy on a series of other things, yes, which is why eventually I confront him, in, I think, meeting three—

KH— Three or four, I think. Yes.

PM— Where I say to him, “Look, you know, if I’ve given you the wrong impression about the”—sorry, I am moving on slightly.

25 KH— No, it’s all right.

PM— “If I’ve given you the wrong impression about the report being somehow a pre-decided affair”—

KH— Oh yes. Mm.

PM— “That’s wrong. We will get the result that we want.” Which of course is contorted into saying that it is what we—Daniel Mann and I—want, not myself and the APPG. And he then produces this mocking stuff on 30 the television about, “Oh, these are the questions he should have been asking before.” He’s probably right—I should have been. But my suspicions were coming to the point where I was going to have to say to him, “Look, this can’t go on. I must meet these individuals. I’ve got to speak to these Fijian individuals before anything else can be done, because this is not going in the direction I want it to go. I am in charge of the APPG, and you won’t get a report—you know, I can quote you—you won’t get the report, you will get the 35 report that the terms of reference lays out clearly. We will interview people like Amnesty”—but they say, “Mr Mercer had no interest in, you know, human rights.” So why was I asking Amnesty International to come and be interviewed by us? “We will decide. I will decide as the head of the APPG. It’s not pre-decided.” I did say to him that I thought that my inclination was extremely benign. And it remains extremely benign, and I would happy to say that to anybody in a similar position, but I couldn’t speak for the rest of the members of the 40 committee.

KH— No. And in fact, in the end, the APPG—

PM— Group, sorry. Because I picked him up on using that phrase.

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KH— Right. The APPG wasn’t finally set up, because I think there was some difficulty with the membership.

PM— There was a technical glitch. Sorry, I can’t quite remember what it was.

KH— Yes, I think it hadn’t got the right numbers. You have to have 20 members divided between certain groups and you hadn’t quite got that distribution right.

5 PM— The balance wasn’t right. Yes.

KH— That’s the only reason why—

PM— Yes, we went through all of that extremely painful process with the specialist security group. We eventually got there, but by golly it was difficult.

KH— Yes, but in the process of getting there you accumulate a number of names of Members about whom 10 you are quite rude to Mr Mann.

PM— Quite realistic.

KH— Why would you choose those people if your opinion of them—your opinion of the members you have selected for the group appears to be quite low. You actually say to him at one point, “Are you sure you want this lot?” and describe one Member as being a bad lot, or a bad boy.

15 PM— The names I’ve accumulated are all people who are going to have an interest in Fiji. I think I know who you are talking about, but I did actually say that that particular man had connections all over—

KH— That particular one you did. But the summary of that group of Members is, “We’ve got a group of Members who actually aren’t particularly good as people”—is the impression that is given.

PM— You would need to show me the words.

20 KH— I can’t quote it. It may be that we would need to go through that in more detail.

PM— Yes, certainly. But certainly that wasn’t—I do say at some stage, I use some insulting language about APPGs, that they are largely not very effective. I wanted this to be effective, and I wanted people who would, first of all, be capable of helping, and who secondly would give me their names because they had an interest in the area we were talking about.

25 KH— Did you have difficulty collecting names?

PM— No. Not at all.

KH— Right. And was that because they all wanted trips to Fiji?

PM— No.

KH— Which is one of the things you talk to him about.

30 PM— It is. I did say to him that one of the nice things about this is that we would go to Fiji. And who wouldn’t want to go to Fiji—except me? It is actually quite instructive that the only person who goes to Fiji is Mr Foggo/Mann/Smith/Jones. Interesting, that. Paid for, I imagine, by the taxpayer.

Anyway, but no, I did say to him, “This would be an attraction.” Funnily enough, when I started talking to people and they said, “Well what would this involve?” and I said “Well, it would involve a trip to Fiji,” a 35 number of people said, “Gawd Strewth, you know, I won’t be able to get that past the wife,” and all this. It wasn’t probably as attractive as I’d at first thought. People came because they were my friends or because they had an interest.

KH— Okay. We might come back to that in more detail and have a look at some of what you said there, because that’s the bit that worries me in terms of whether things that you have said bring the House into 64

disrepute. And certainly criticising other Members to someone you don’t know that well is worrying. But we will leave that one and come back to it with the specific text another time.

Let me just see if I’ve covered most of the things I wanted to with you today. Jon, is there anything you think I might have forgotten at this stage?

5 JP— No. There is just the matter of, you got these payments in April and May, and you said you weren’t expecting to get them, but they paid them anyway. What did you suppose they thought they were paying for?

PM— I honestly thought that the payments would not start arriving until such time as I had done—until certainly I had met the clients, and that I had started doing some security/policing work for them. I said to my wife, “There isn’t money coming in, is there?” to which she said, “No, there isn’t,” and it turned out that there 10 was. Money had been coming in. Now, you can say, “Why aren’t you banking online?” Well, we do.

JP— At what stage is it that you do notice that the money has come in?

PM— Once it’s all blown up. June the—no, right at the end of May, the 27th, 28th, something like that. And I would have been expecting to sit down with a, you know, to reconcile things, within the next couple of days after that.

15 KH— Okay. I think—unless, Jon, there’s anything else you think I have missed today—we’ll leave it there. We need to go away, have a look at the evidence, compile it, and probably then come back to you with some very specific questions.

PM— Sure.

KH— I think one of the areas we probably will return to is the setting up of the APPG, and what was being 20 said around that. Once we’ve got the transcript, we can look at the evidence you have given us today, build that in and then come back with the specifics at a later stage. Thank you for your time.

PM— Thank you for your time.

10 December 2013

40. E-mail to the Commissioner’s office from the office of Mr 25 Patrick Mercer MP, 20 December 2013

Patrick Mercer OBE MP asked me to email you to thank you for your letter of 16th December and to confirm that your record is an accurate transcription of what was said in the meeting on 10th December.

Thank you for checking.

Best wishes and have a lovely Christmas. 30 20 December 2013

41. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 11 February 2014

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this complaint with you in December and for your agreement to the accuracy of the transcript. At the end of our meeting I said that I thought it would be helpful to meet again to 35 focus among other things on some of the issues relating to the setting up of the APPG, together with any other issues which we had not fully addressed. I have now begun to put together the factual part of my memorandum to the Committee on Standards. I was aware when we met that I had not discussed with you the final issue which I set out in my letter of 11 June 2013, namely “whether your conduct was such as to cause significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole, or of its Members 40 generally”. This issue becomes particularly apparent in some of your discussions with Daniel Mann about the setting up of the APPG.

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I thought that it might be possible to deal with this remaining issue through correspondence but would of course be happy to see you if you would prefer to discuss it. The questions I am considering are:

1. During the course of your meetings with Mr Mann, you made a number of derogatory comments about Members. In particular, in conversation with him on 18 April 2013, you said of 5 a list of MPs including David TC Davies, Mark Field, Stewart Jackson, Bill Wiggin, Julian Brazier, Stephen Barclay, Stephen McPartland, David Norris, Jack Lopresti and Ben Wallace, “You’ve got some right bad boys there, you really have”. You then said that Keith Vaz was “a crook of the first order”. Why did you choose to describe fellow Parliamentarians in this way, and in particular why did you do so in talking about them to someone whom you did not know well?

10 2. If this was your opinion of these Members, why did you want to recruit them to the all-party parliamentary group on Fiji? Did you not consider that this representation of them undermined the credibility of the group, together with the reputation and integrity of the House and of the individual Members of the House?

3. You have apologised for the anecdote you told to Mr Mann on 25 April in which you used the 15 phrase, “You don’t look like a soldier to me, you look like a bloody Jew.” While I accept the sincerity of the apology you have already made, could you explain how you came to recount that story in the context of a business meeting, and tell me whether you believe that in doing so you have impacted on the reputation of the House?

I would be very pleased to receive your answers, and any further comments you may have, by 26 February, 20 but please let me know if this causes you any difficulty. As I have said, if you feel it would be helpful to discuss this or anything else in person again, I would be happy to make an appointment to meet you.

11 February 2014

42. Transcript of interview with Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 25 February 2014

25 Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, interview with Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 25.02.14

Attending: Kathryn Hudson, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (KH), Patrick Mercer MP (PM), Complaints Manager, Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (JP)

KH— I wrote to you a couple of weeks ago and set out the questions that I thought we hadn’t covered when we last met, principally about the setting up of the APPG, but also about whether some of the comments that 30 you made in your interviews with Mr Mann actually brought the House into disrepute.

PM— Yep.

KH— I set out three main areas to talk to you about. The first was about those comments about Members who might form part of the APPG. Would you like to talk me through your thinking on that: the reasons why you made certain comments—and I can quote them to you, if you want.

35 PM— Yes, sure.

KH— There was the comment about “You’ve got some right bad boys there, you really have,” and “a crook of the first order”. What made you say those things and what did you think the impact might be?

PM— I don’t think I thought anything at all about the impact. I had—if I say I very carefully selected these people, that’s not fair, because it’s not easy finding the names that you need for an all-party parliamentary 40 group, and as many people as I approached said, “No thank you very much,” or there was a quid pro quo of “I tell you what, I’ll join your APPG if you join mine,” or “I’m sorry I haven’t got time I can’t do anything for you.” I think one is also conscious that there are a lot of people on any APPG who aren’t necessarily going to contribute very much, but who are—I don’t want to be any ruder than I have been—but who are makeweights, if you like, and who will never turn up, but will be there. 66

The comments I’ve made—it sounds like the classic excuse, doesn’t it, about being taken out of context, but when you wrote me the letter I looked very carefully at the tapes, because when we spoke in December, you alluded to this, and please correct me if I’m wrong about this, because the initial letter you sent me in June last year made out a series of charges, which we addressed, and then there was a generic charge at the end, which 5 is broadly bringing the House into disrepute, and as far as I recall I made no riposte to that at the time, because it wasn’t specific enough. Am I right about that?

KH— I think that is correct, yes, and that is why I’m bringing it up now, to talk in more detail.

PM— Of course. Then, when you alluded to it I was genuinely confused. As you know, I think we saw that at the time, there is no doubt that the whole measure of this, the whole plan of this, the whole balance of this, was 10 designed to besmirch whatever I had said. The context is important.

KH— Absolutely.

PM— I think—I have desperately been trying to think of an analogy to all this. My son calls me a “wicked Dad”.

KH— Yes?

15 PM— I don’t think I’m wicked, and I would not take that word to mean wicked.

KH— Hmm.

PM— I am very conscious of the fact that my language, because of my background, is interspersed with all sorts of Irishisms, as you may or may not have gathered. To call someone “a bad boy” is not meant to be an insult at all. If I said you were “a wicked Commissioner”—

20 KH— Ah. So you are suggesting that it might be possible to misinterpret the words that you were using.

PM— I think entirely. And—but I absolutely put my hands up to the fact that here is a man about whom I was deeply suspicious—absolutely deeply suspicious—why am I using language like this? And this will have a bearing on this later on. This sounds awfully glib, and it really isn’t meant to be: I had picked as many people as I could to be effective on this. Some of them—there is no point in naming names, but one of the individuals 25 I really, really wanted, because he had a clear understanding of the whole Fijian military issue—which we didn’t really talk about very much last time—

KH— We didn’t.

PM— And I can expand on that if you wanted me to. Which was my underlying desire to get on with this and establish this APPG, and which was my particular hobby horse in all of this. This particular chap I went to and 30 said, “Look, you know, will you help me on this?” “No, I’m not going to. I’m not going to”—and he was up to his neck in other things at the time. So I didn’t get everybody that I wanted. The people I did get I thought were very effective.

KH— Right. So I am then left with, did you get the people who were the last resort because they were the only people who would say yes?

35 PM— No, not at all.

KH— Right, so it’s not that.

PM— No, not at all. Not at all.

KH— Okay. So you managed to get people who were effective, but it was not easy to do that.

PM— I didn’t think—and I’m awfully sorry, I should know, but I cannot now remember the numbers; is it—

40 KH— It’s twenty altogether.

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PM— Yes, twenty, I thought it was.

KH— From different parties.

PM— Yes, getting that balance is not easy. I have been through this process once before—at least. Yes, once before, this process: very, very hard. And please, I’m really not being pejorative, but a lot of those people that I 5 picked were never going to be hard driving. They weren’t going to be bad boys at all; there weren’t going to be wicked; one or two of them are going to be wicked.

KH— Right, so they would have been making up the numbers for you, because twenty is a very large number to have to—

PM— Yes. And I can’t dissemble on that.

10 KH— Right. Okay. So what you are saying to me is that the expression “right bad boys” is an expression that you would use; doesn’t necessarily mean what it might be interpreted as meaning?

PM— Indeed. And the same with the expression you are going to come on to next. It’s exactly the same.

KH— Keith Vaz—“a crook of the first order”?

PM— Yes. And I have qualified that later on in my statements by saying this is a man who is extremely well 15 connected—

KH— Yes?

PM— and who will be able to work with us very effectively with all sorts of minority groups.

KH— And who is not always ethical?

PM— I don’t think those were the words I used, were they?

20 KH— I’d have to look up the quote exactly— or, doesn’t always behave in an ethical way?

PM— That was not my implication.

KH— Right. I need to look up the exact quotation of that, but there are more comments than just the ones I put down here. It just leaves the overall impression that maybe there’s a large number of Members of the House who aren’t particularly savoury characters. Is that an unfair interpretation?

25 PM— That is not my—that is not what I was trying to suggest. It really wasn’t. I was actually trying to suggest—and please, again, it is hard to put yourself, and indeed myself, back in this particular situation.

KH— I understand that, yes.

PM— Here was a man who—pun—who was extremely cold, there was no warmth of character with this man. I found it impossible to form a relationship of any sort with him. This was a subject that I wanted to get on 30 with hard, for an agenda which, I put my hands up, there was an agenda that I wanted to pursue with Fiji which wasn’t necessarily the one which was—the Fijian APPG would have been an extremely useful vehicle. The cause was right, but there were other things that I wanted to explore, and I will explain those to you if you like, as well.

KH— Do. Go through that, yes.

35 PM— Of course. I think I put this in my original submission to you. I’m sorry, there is a bit of hinterland on this. My last job in the Army came in terms of the Army Recruiting and Training Agency. I was colonel in charge of training and recruiting. The reason I had been sent there was because when the Army could not— or, in my view, would not—recruit, my last appointment had been as a lieutenant-colonel, and I had taken a battalion that was 80% manned and turned it into a battalion that was 120% manned, and had been told that 40 was not possible to achieve. One of my crusades, if you like, on promotion and going into the Army Training 68

and Recruiting Agency, was to make sure that we produced the right number of soldiers for the Army. And one of the things about which I was dubious, but which I helped spearhead, was recruiting Commonwealth soldiers. Now, I don’t know the proportion—I can’t remember the proportion of Commonwealth lads that came forward, but a large number of them were Fijians. And please bear in mind of course that there is a 5 tradition of Fijians serving, very gallantly, but not in the numbers that they are at the moment. Again, I don’t know if it is fair to say that the G1 problems, to which I referred to Mr Mann—

KH— Yes.

PM— who completely misinterpreted that, as you will recall, and then rescinded—all of that stuff. A lot of the G1 problems with the Commonwealth soldiers tended to revolve around Fijians and similar nations.

10 KH— Yes.

PM— This has—in the last ten years, this has left me extremely offended on their behalf, that these are people who are being plucked from their home circumstances, quite often killed and injured serving us here, yes, they carry forward all sorts of difficulties—

KH— Mm.

15 PM— Conditions of service difficulties, if you like. But the questions I have asked in the House, the comments I have made about this, I am passionate about this, and this was an extremely attractive issue for me to pursue. It was.

KH— So the hope was that through setting up the APPG, through working with Mr Mann, you would have an opportunity to pursue that particular area that interested you.

20 PM— Which of course impacted on everything else that was being asked, and it’s why I thought the cause was useful, and it’s one of the reasons why I had talked about an APPG as—long before Mr Mann came on the scene.

KH— Right. But it doesn’t in fact get to the stage with Mr Mann where you are ever able to take that forward.

PM— No. In fact, just the contrary. Again, the thing that has been sort of conveniently airbrushed out of all 25 this is my conversations with him about the establishing of Sergeant Talaiasi Labalaba’s statue—

KH— Yes, which comes up very early on, I think in your first conversation with him?

PM— I thought it was my second, but probably.

KH— Yes, at an early stage.

PM— Do I need to explain all that or not?

30 KH— No, no, I remember what was in there.

PM— Well, that was ignored.

KH— Because that was not where he was going.

PM— Not where he was going at all. There was a hint that the people we were going to meet, the Fijians that we were going to meet, would be extremely interested in this issue. There was a hint. It’s one of the reasons 35 why I let this run so long. I can explain, I can continue to dilate on this, but it is quite wrong, quite wrong, that we take these men from their home circumstances, kill and injure them—sometimes, not all—and then won’t give them British citizenship.

KH— Yes, I understand that, and that is a point you make firmly early on, and is the focus of some of the questions you have asked in the past.

40 PM— Indeed. 69

KH— Nevertheless, it’s not where you manage to get to with Mr Mann—

PM— By no means.

KH— and it is not the focus of these discussions.

PM— No.

5 KH— Okay. So if we move on, then, from the setting up of the APPG and the comments that you made about those Members. And what I am hearing you say is, no it wasn’t intended to be derogatory.

PM— It was not intended. The context is very important. A lot of these people are friends of mine, and are good people, and I have worked effectively with them, and more importantly, seen them working effectively.

KH— Mm.

10 PM— If I have opened myself to misinterpretation, and frankly what isn’t open to misinterpretation, I am extremely sorry.

KH— Yes. Are they aware that you made these comments about them?

PM— I don’t know.

KH— No, right, okay. Well, we’ll have to see. The question is, you’ve made an explanation to me, which 15 comes from knowing you and why you might use those phrases. Of course, people externally who don’t know you are likely to place perhaps a different interpretation on what you’ve said.

PM— I accept that.

KH— That’s probably as far as we can take that one then. And actually, the second question follows on from that, because I was saying, if this was your opinion of those Members, why then would you want to recruit 20 them to the APPG, and what you are saying to me now is, that was not your opinion, it was just a way of talking about them. Is that right?

PM— I can make it no plainer than that, yes.

KH— Yes, okay, right. So if I said to you, making those comments might undermine the integrity of the House and of the individual Members, what would be your response to that?

25 PM— I can understand that interpretation. I can understand the interpretation of everything that has been levelled against me by Mr Mann, or whatever name he chooses to use, and I very much regret it, and of course it was stupid.

KH— Okay.

The other thing I wanted to take up with you—and I really don’t understand how this arose—was the 30 anecdote that you told him on 25 April, when you said, “You don’t look like a soldier to me, you look like a bloody Jew.” How did you come to be telling that story in the first place?

PM— I had—the comments—and again, when this was levelled at me, I was surprised I had even said that.

KH— Mm.

PM— There we are, I obviously did. The comments were made outside, I think it was outside No. 16 Old 35 Queen Street.

KH— Yes, you were actually at the end of an interview.

PM— I had just that minute returned from Israel. I had been on a trip to Israel, and I had been recounting the fact that—

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KH— Ah, that incident had happened on that trip, had it?

PM— No, it hadn’t. It had happened on a previous trip. I’d been twice or three times to Israel—can’t remember. Anyway, over the years I’ve been a small number of times. I had just come back and I was actually saying how much better I had been treated this time than I had been on previous trips. And I can elaborate on 5 that if you like.

KH— By all means again.

PM— Well, this last trip was, I think—yes, it was purely and simply a private trip where I’d been to see a number of Israeli friends. The previous trip where this had happened had been with the Conservative—no, not the Conservative Friends of Israel but the Conservative Middle East Council—when we had gone to visit, 10 myself and another Member, had gone to visit one or two of the West Bank, the Occupied—the so-called, so- called Occupied Territories, where we’d had some very great difficulty with Israeli soldiers, who’d been less than obliging.

KH— Right.

PM— I mean, I can’t really remember, except the fact that we’d finished talking about APPGs, and I think he 15 said to me, er, words to the effect of “Are you all right?” and I said “Well, no, I’m tired, just come back from Israel, we had all this, but it was a lot better this time. Last time x, y and z.”

KH— Yes.

PM— I notice the fact that we also had conversations about the Isle of Skye, for instance.

KH— Yes.

20 PM— That’s not mentioned. That, I think is—I don’t know if the term “redacted” is correct or not, but it just says, you know, this is irrelevant.

KH— But it’s still there in the script, isn’t it?

JP— Yes, although there is a point in the script where it says, “Then there is some talk about the Isle of Skye” and it’s not a full transcript there. That was just the very end.

25 KH— No.

PM— That is my memory of it.

KH— But there is a mention about Skye.

PM— Oh, sure there is.

KH— Because you invite him to go visit you there, don’t you?

30 PM— Yes, I invite him to come out—anyway. If I’d said something rude about Scotsmen, even not deliberately rude about Scotsmen, I have no doubt that that would have been broadcast—you know, as “Patrick Mercer the Scots hater”.

KH— Possibly, yes. I think the important thing for me though is to make sure that you feel that the representation of what happened in the report that I write is fair and balanced, and so one of the things I will 35 say to you when I send you the draft with the evidence is to have a close look, because inevitably, with the amount of paperwork that we have, I will have summarised a lot of it, and if you feel that the case is not presented correctly please tell me and let’s get the balance correct and absolutely feel it’s fair.

PM— Fine. Of course, Kathryn, and thank you.

KH— I will make that clear again in the letter when I send it to you. Because it feels to me as though what you 40 are saying—and I know you feel this about the Panorama programme—is, of course, they selected bits that are 71

going to make an impact for their programme, and that is one of the reasons why we are not using the Panorama programme.

PM— And I respect that, and I am grateful to you. That shows a degree of objectivity that hasn’t been reflected by everybody.

5 KH— And which we need to maintain, yes.

PM— I don’t know. We probably had all sorts of other conversations during our meetings, about— pleasantries or whatever. We did, you know—a case in point, as Jon says, about Skye. It’s a stupid thing to say.

KH— And I understand that you have apologised.

PM— I have apologised fulsomely. I am married to a woman of Jewish extraction. I have lots of friends in the 10 Jewish community, and—yes, I can prostrate myself no further, it’s just a stupid thing to say, and I didn’t even—I accept I said it, and I am conscious that my speech isn’t always as balanced as it should be.

KH— Okay. As far as I am concerned, those are the main things that I needed to cover with you. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about in relation to this that you would like to cover with me now?

PM— No, I don’t think so. Thank you, you have allowed me to explain the business about Fijian soldiers, 15 which I don’t think—we might have touched on it before.

KH— I don’t think we did cover that last time. It’s there in some of the paperwork that we have, yes.

PM— I don’t think there is anything else. I’ll only end up saying something unwise.

KH— Fine, okay.

The position we have reached at the moment—I said this briefly in my letter—is that we have now started to 20 put together all the information and the evidence into a report. We will need to get a transcript of this interview.

PM— Of course.

KH— And we’ll again share it with you to make sure that you’re happy with that, and it will form part of the evidence. Following that, I will then be in a position, I hope, to send you a draft of the factual part of the 25 memorandum.

PM— Factual part of the memorandum—what does that mean, please?

KH— It means that I will send you a report which contains all the evidence that I intend to use.

PM— Right.

KH— And attached to it will be all the individual pieces of evidence, the letters and the transcripts of the 30 meetings with Mr Mann.

PM— Right. So that will be a substantial piece of work.

KH— A substantial piece of work, yes, and I am hoping that we are going to be able to do that within the next two or three weeks now. I won’t absolutely promise just in case something goes wrong.

PM— Right.

35 KH— There is an opportunity then for you to go through that, have a careful look at it, to make sure that you do think it’s balanced and fair, and to correct any factual mistakes. The bit that you won’t get is my analysis of all the information that I’ve accumulated over the weeks. When you return it to me, if I feel there are amendments I can make to the report I will make them. I will let you know what I have amended and what I

72

haven’t. And fairly soon thereafter I will complete the report and will send it to the Committee on Standards. So I am hoping now that it’s not going to be too much longer.

PM— Right. But we are still talking about several weeks, aren’t we?

KH— We are still talking about—what do you think, Jon?—probably three or four weeks.

5 JP— Yes.

PM— Okay.

KH— Depending a bit on how much longer—I need to send you the transcript and you need to check that you are happy with that before I use it, and I need then to finish the report and you need a chance to check it, and I have to give you long enough to have had a proper look at it. So yes, we are still talking about a little 10 while yet, but we are now getting towards the last stages of it, and I hope it won’t be too much longer.

PM— Thank you. And Jon, thank you.

24 February 2014

43. Letter to the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests from the Commissioner, 3 March 2014

15 I would welcome your help on an inquiry concerning Mr Patrick Mercer MP.

In essence, the allegations I am investigating are that Mr Mercer

a) Failed to register monies received for the provision of consultancy services;

b) Failed to deposit an agreement for the provision of services;

c) Failed to declare a relevant interest when tabling five parliamentary questions, when tabling 20 an early-day motion, when making approaches to other Members, and at a meeting of a prospective all-party parliamentary group;

d) Tabled parliamentary questions and an early-day motion, and took steps to establish an all- party parliamentary group, at the request of paying clients

I am also considering whether Mr Mercer’s conduct was such as to cause significant damage to the reputation 25 and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole, or of its Members generally.

I would welcome your advice on this matter. In particular, please could you let me know:

1. Whether, under the rules of the House in relation to agreements for the provision of services, you consider that the contract that Mr Mercer signed with ‘Alistair Andrews Communications’ on 20 March 2013 was such as to require that it should be deposited with this office under the 30 resolution of the House of 6 November 1995; and if so, whether it met the requirements of such contracts;

2. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer about depositing that contract with this office;

3. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer about his entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and in particular about the registration of monies received, including any 35 payments made under that contract;

4. What advice, if any, you have given Mr Mercer on the declaration of his interests in relation to these payments;

5. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer in relation to the establishment of an all-party group, and what information you have concerning the initial stages of the establishment of an 73

all-party parliamentary group on Fiji.

Any other comments you may wish to make would be most welcome.

I enclose a copy of the contract dated 20 March referred to above.

It would be very helpful to have your response to this letter within the next two weeks. Thank you for your 5 assistance.

[The contract enclosed with this letter is reproduced as item 18 above.]

3 March 2014

44. Letter to the Commissioner from the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests, 10 March 2014

10 Thank you for your letter of 3 March 2014.

You asked for my advice in connection with your inquiry into Mr Patrick Mercer MP. I will answer your questions in order.

1. Whether, under the rules of the House in relation to agreements for the provision of services, you consider that the contract that Mr Mercer signed with ‘Alistair Andrews Communications’ on 20 15 March 2013 was such as to require that it should be deposited with this office under the resolution of the House of 6 November 1995; and if so, whether it met the requirements of such contracts;

The relevant paragraphs in the Guide to the Rules are as follows:

66. Under a Resolution of the House of 6 November 1995 the House agreed that Members should deposit certain agreements for the provision of services with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

20 Members should:

• ensure that the agreement does not breach the ban on lobbying for reward or consideration (see paragraphs 89-101 below);

• put any such agreement in written form;

• deposit a full copy of the agreement with the Commissioner. The agreement should indicate the 25 nature of the services to be provided and specify the fees or benefits the Member is to receive in bands of (1) up to £5,000; (2) £5,001 to £10,000 (and thereafter in bands of £5,000);

• make the appropriate entry in the Register; and

• declare the interest when it is appropriate to do so (see paragraphs 72-88).

67. 'Services in the capacity of a Member of Parliament' is usually taken to mean advice on any parliamentary 30 matter or services connected with any parliamentary proceeding or otherwise related to the House. Essentially, when Members are considering whether an agreement is necessary they should ask themselves 'Would I be doing this job in this way if I were not a Member of Parliament', and seek an agreement if the answer is 'No'.

I have not previously seen the agreement attached to your letter. If Mr Mercer had shown it to us in the spring of 2013, I would have advised him that he appeared to be undertaking employment in his capacity as an MP 35 and was therefore required to deposit an agreement with this office, in accordance with the second bullet point of paragraph 66 (above). I would also have advised that Mr Mercer was right to strike out the clause in his contract which relates to Fiji, since it implies that he would be paid to undertake advocacy.

We offer Members a template agreement which includes an undertaking that they will not be asked to undertake paid advocacy, and I would have advised Mr Mercer to either amend his current contract in order 74

to make plain that the services to be provided did not include advocacy, or to complete our template agreement which includes an undertaking that paid advocacy will not be required.

2. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer about depositing that contract with this office;

3. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer about his entry in the Register of Members’ 5 Financial Interests, and in particular about the registration of monies received, including any payments made under that contract;

We have advised Mr Mercer in general terms about the registration of employment and the need to deposit an agreement for the provision of services. Following the last General Election Mr Mercer submitted his initial registration form on 3 June 2010. This was followed by an update on 6 August. My predecessor’s reply of 21 10 August 2010 includes the following advice:

...I should point out that in Category 2 the requirement to register all payments received refers to payments for any type of work, whether or not related to membership of the House. The reference to work done in a parliamentary capacity applies only to the requirement to register a salary band.1

We provided further information as follows to Mr Mercer’s office on 18 April 2012, following their enquiry 15 about a lecture tour and some consultancy work [for an energy company]:

Members should register all payments over £66 within four weeks of receiving the payment. The registration should show the name and address of employer, the amount and the time spent for that payment. So, please let me have the details of all the new entries and I will include them in the Register. ...

If Mr Mercer is providing services in his capacity as an MP in his new consultancy role he should also provide us 20 with an agreement for the provision of services. Please let us know if this is the case and we will give further advice on this.

We have also provided specific advice in May and June 2013 in relation to these payments. Mr Mercer was in the habit of making regular Register entries in respect of his payments for outside employment. It was customary for him to do so by means of an email sent by his office each month, to which was attached a sheet 25 giving details, under four headings, of his outside earnings in the previous month. On 28 May 2013 Mr Mercer’s office emailed with the following “receipt for April 2013” which had not been included with the April payments notified to us on 17 May 2013:

Name and address of payer Amount paid Hours worked Ref

Alistair Andrews Communications £2,000.00 2 days per month Consultancy

16 Old Queens St, London SW1

We replied to Mr Mercer as follows on the same day, 28 May 2013:

...The hours worked are stated as 2 days per month which suggests that it is an ongoing employment, in 30 which case could you let me know the date when the employment started and the nature of the work done. Please could you also let us know every time you receive a payment, with the hours worked for each payment.

I should also remind you that if you provide services in your capacity as an MP to Alistair Andrews Communications you should deposit with the Commissioner’s office an agreement for the provision of 35 services. I can provide you with further information and an outline agreement if required.

Mr Mercer did not reply immediately to this. We reminded him by email on 11 June 2013, in the course of an email exchange about other, unrelated payments, that our request for further information was still

1 This sentence refers to the wording of the registration form. 75

outstanding. Mr Mercer himself telephoned later in the afternoon of 11 June. He said that he had not yet received our reminder email. He offered to send us the contract he had signed. We drew his attention to the need to lodge an agreement for the provision of services, and later forwarded to him the template for such agreements. Mr Mercer’s office emailed later the same day to say that the date when the contract had 5 commenced was 30 March 2013, and that payments had been received on 15 April and 15 May. We acknowledged this information and told Mr Mercer that the details of the second payment would be included in the Register immediately following [ie 24 June].

On 14 June we emailed to Mr Mercer, for his approval, a draft updated Register entry which included the second payment from Alistair Andrews Communications, received on 15 May and notified to us on 11 June. 10 Mr Mercer telephoned to say that he thought he had registered both payments on 28 May. We explained that the attachment to the 28 May email did not say that there were two payments. We later confirmed this by email on 26 June.

There is further information which we would normally have requested at this point from a Member who undertakes consultancy work. Such a Member must record in the Register the names and addresses of any 15 clients to which he or she has provided services, or who have benefited from his/her advice. We would normally have asked Mr Mercer for this information when he provided further details on 11 June, but having seen the media coverage, we did not do so.

4. What advice, if any, you have given Mr Mercer on the declaration of his interests in relation to these payments;

20 We have advised Mr Mercer in general terms on the declaration of interests. Following the 2010 election we provided all Members with Advice Note 8 on this subject. My predecessor advised him as follows by email on 21 August 2010:

I should also remind you of the requirement to declare a relevant interest when appropriate, for example when participating in a debate or signing an EDM. For further information about this please 25 refer to the note2 by the Registrar of Financial Interests issued in the information pack from this office.

We have not advised Mr Mercer about declaring these particular payments.

5. What advice, if any, you have given to Mr Mercer in relation to the establishment of an all-party group, and what information you have concerning the initial stages of the establishment of an all- party parliamentary group on Fiji.

30 I have summarised below our interactions with Mr Mercer about the establishment of an All-Party Group on Fiji.

25 March 2013: Mr Mercer’s office enquired about how to establish a new Associate Parliamentary Group;

2 April 2013: we forwarded a copy of the registration form (which explains much of the procedure) and the Guide to the Rules on All-Party Groups;

35 16 April 2013: Mr Mercer’s office told us that they had “booked the meeting”, which we understood to mean the inaugural meeting to elect the chair and other officers;

16 May 2013: we received a completed registration form signed by Mr Mercer for this Group, which he was to chair. On checking however we found that the names he had listed for the 20 qualifying Members did not provide the required party balance (10 have to be from the Government parties and 10 from Opposition 40 parties). We emailed Mr Mercer to ask him to provide the names of three more Opposition members.

3 June 2013: Mr Mercer’s office emailed to say that Mr Mercer wished “to cancel the registration.”

2 ie Advice Note 8 76

Please let me know if you need anything further.

10 March 2014

45. Letter to Mr Patrick Mercer MP from the Commissioner, 19 March 2014

5 I have now completed a draft of the factual parts of my report and I enclose it together with the evidence on which I have relied. This is in accordance with paragraph 25 of the procedural note. Although there is a large volume of evidence, I think all but two items will be familiar to you. The exceptions are my letters to the BBC and The Telegraph, both were sent in June 2013 and were requests to them for the evidence that they held.

Please would you send me any comments on factual accuracy by mid-day on Monday 31 March 2014. I will 10 consider any amendments of fact which you propose and ideally would seek to be in agreement with you on the factual part of the report if this is at all possible.

I will then conclude my report and send it to the Committee clerk who will send you a full copy which includes my analysis and conclusions shortly before the Committee meeting. There will be an opportunity for you to submit written comments or to address the Committee should you wish to do so before it reaches a 15 conclusion.

19 March 2014

46. E-mail to the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards from the Office of Mr Patrick Mercer MP, 26 March 2014

20 This email is to confirm that Patrick Mercer OBE MP has thoroughly read the letter of 19th March and the enclosed documents and confirms the factual accuracy of the evidence.

26 March 2014

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