This week, during the
Public Administration Select Committee, and questioning of senior Civil Servant Gus O'Donnell, Labour MP Paul Flynn and myself had a profound disagreement about the role of the British Ambassador to Israel and Matthew Gould.
You can read the transcript below:
Q369 Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believe—it is nothing to do with this case at all—that he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence and so on."
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed—
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn: Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair: I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon: Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn: I quote the Daily Mail: “Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations”—not from me, from the Daily Mail—“that he was close to the country’s secret service, Mossad.” There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair: I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn: Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraq—joining Bush’s war in Iraq—and the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while this was going on. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people who were in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war inb Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another—
Chair: Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q370 Paul Flynn: Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty’s interests?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q371 Paul Flynn: Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I am afraid they were not the subject—what members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
Paul Flynn: But these meetings were held—
Chair: Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair: Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q372 Paul Flynn: No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. Let me raise the next question anyway. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the report—on the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Aviv—that there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis.
The UK ambassador was present. Are you following the line taken by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who says that he can eat with lobbyists or people applying to his Department because, on occasions, he eats privately, and on other occasions he eats ministerially? Are you accepting the idea? It is possibly a source of great national interest—the eating habits of their Secretary of State. It appears that he might well have a number of stomachs, it has been suggested, if he can divide his time this way. It does seem to be a way of getting round the ministerial code, if people can announce that what they are doing is private rather than ministerial.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with him—namely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual’s biases. That is what ambassadors do. Our ambassador in Pakistan will have exactly the same set of wide contacts.
Q373 Paul Flynn: I have good reason, as I said, from constituency matters, to be unhappy about the ambassador. Other criticisms have been made about the ambassador; he is unique in some ways in the role he is performing. There have been suggestions that he is too close to a foreign power.
Robert Halfon: On a point of order, Chair, this is not about the ambassador to Israel. This is supposed to be about the Werritty affair.
Paul Flynn: It is absolutely crucial to this report. If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.
Chair: Order. I think the line of questioning is very involved. I have given you quite a lot of time, Mr Flynn. If you have further inquiries to make of this, they could be pursued in correspondence. May I ask you to ask one final question before we move on?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: One thing I would stress: we are talking about the ambassador and I think he has a right of reply. Mr Chairman, I know there is an interesting question of words regarding Head of the Civil Service versus Head of the Home Civil Service, but this is the Diplomatic Service, not the Civil Service.
Q374 Chair: So he is not in your jurisdiction at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: No.
Q375 Paul Flynn: But you are happy that your report is final; it does not need to go the manager it would have gone to originally, and that is the end of the affair. Is that your view?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: As I said, some issues arose where I wanted to be sure that what the Secretary of State was doing had been discussed with the Foreign Secretary. I felt reassured by what the Foreign Secretary told me.
Q376 Chair: I think what Mr Flynn is asking is that your report and the affair raise other issues, but you are saying that that does not fall within the remit of your report and that, indeed, the conduct of an ambassador does not fall within your remit at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: That is absolutely correct.
Paul Flynn: The charge laid by Lord Turnbull in his evidence with regard to Dr Fox and the ministerial code was his failure to observe collective responsibility, in that case about Sri Lanka. Isn’t the same charge there about our policies to Iran and Israel?
Chair: We have dealt with that, Mr Flynn.
Paul Flynn: We haven’t dealt with it as far as it applies— Chair: Mr Flynn, we are moving on.
Paul Flynn: You may well move on, but I remain very unhappy about the fact that you will not allow me to finish the questioning I wanted to give on a matter of great importance.
Paul Flynn's remarks caused considerable controversy and have received a fair amount of press coverage.
The Jewish Chronicle Newspaper have written the story HERE. Yesterday,
they called to ask me to write a short article about what occurred, which I reproduce below:
I like Paul Flynn. It may surprise JC readers to know that he is one of my favourite Labour MPs. Witty, intelligent and original, we have often collaborated on the Public Administration Select Committee, which examines the machinery of government.
Yet his outburst in front of the most senior civil servants, Sir Gus O'Donnell, really shocked me. During questioning about the Liam Fox/Adam Werritty controversy, Mr Flynn seemed to imply that the British ambassador to Israel was, in collusion with Liam Fox et al, working with Israeli intelligence as part of a Zionist plot.
As the transcript shows, when I tried to interject, Mr Flynn then accused me of being a neo-conservative and part of a clique that wanted to bomb Iran.
Mr Flynn's actions betray an extraordinary mindset on the left, that allows normally highly intelligent and engaging individuals to lose all sense of proportion when the word "Israel" is mentioned.
The same kind of mindset rarely raises the daily atrocities committed in Syria or Iran, preferring to focus on Israel as part of some vast international conspiracy - usually involving American and British Conservative politicians.
What makes this worse is that Mr Flynn is able to do this because the British ambassador to Israel is Jewish. The subtext, of course, is that Jews by nature are not loyal to the country that they serve but are working for foreign powers. This has been the habitual accusation of antisemites throughout the ages.
Whilst I do not believe for one moment that Mr Flynn is antisemitic, the question that people will ask is: "Has he allowed himself to fall into the trap that those who hate Jews often set?"
Readers will note that I, too, as a Jewish MP, am being accused of being part of a "plot" to bomb Iran.
Yet as Sir Gus O'Donnell observed, the fact that the British ambassador has meetings with Israeli intelligence is part of his job, just as the British ambassador to Pakistan meets Pakistani intelligence.
If only the left, with a few notable exceptions, put their money where their mouth is in terms of human rights and freedom, there would not be outrageous attacks on the British ambassador to Israel but real condemnation of President Ahmadinejad and President Assad.
Robert Halfon is MP for Harlow
Since this came to light,
three Labour MPs have condemned Mr Flynn. John Mann, Dennis McShane and Shadow International Development Secretary Ivan Lewis who said:
"Matthew Gould is highly professional diplomat and excellent advocate for UK foreign policy.He is proud to be Jewish. [The] smear is appalling".
You can read more HERE.
by Robert Halfon - www.roberthalfon.blogspot.com
