Briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Party Funding, Jonathan Powell/Formula 1 and Powderject.
Party Funding
Jonathan Powell/Formula 1
Asked again about today’s Times report regarding Jonathan Powell, the PMOS said that as he understood it, the Labour Party had denied the central thrust of the story. Asked about the letter from the FIA, the PMOS said he was unable to comment on any party fundraising that had gone on before the 1997 Election or indeed after it.
However, he would point out that this story was five years old and we had tramped over it ad infinitum during that period. The reason for the exemption had been made clear at the time. It could also be argued that the fact that the FIA were now saying it was not something they actually wanted showed that some great favour hadn’t been granted in return for a donation, as had been alleged at the time.
Asked if Downing Street believed that Jonathan Powell should be having official Government contacts with people from whom he had solicited donations, the PMOS said that the question was based on the story which had been denied today by the Labour Party on Mr Powell’s behalf. When he had been head of the Leader’s Office in Opposition, no doubt Mr Powell would have kept an eye on fundraising as one of his responsibilities.
Obviously that had stopped once this Government had come into office and he had become Chief-of-Staff. It would be totally inappropriate for him to be involved in fundraising - and he was not. Of course he would be aware of who was making donations to the Labour Party in the same way that other people were inasmuch as this process was now transparent and open. The PMOS added that he been asked this morning about the Government’s attitude towards transparency and openness. He pointed out again that the only reason we were having this discussion was because it was this Government who made public the names of any donor contributing over £5,000 to the party.
Questioned further about Mr Powell, the PMOS said that anyone who knew him or had met him recognised that he was not only a very talented civil servant but he was also a man of great integrity. It appeared to be part of his job description to be wheeled out into the dying embers of party funding stories to try to keep them going for another day. While he was big enough to take it, he was entitled to correct things when he believed there were inaccuracies, as indeed he had done today.
Put to him that the people on the other side of the transaction were telling a completely different story on the record, the PMOS said that was the case, but equally he believed what Mr Powell had said. Asked if he was insinuating that they were lying, the PMOS said it was not for him to join in in this part of the story. He was not saying that to be unhelpful, but he did not want to start a row that he had talked about party funding when he was a civil servant.
Asked to explain why it was inappropriate for Mr Powell to be involved in fundraising for the Labour Party, the PMOS pointed out that civil servants were not allowed to be involved in raising money for political parties.
Asked if he would accept that Lord Levy’s role as party fundraiser was inappropriate as well given his responsibility as Middle East Special Envoy, the PMOS said that Lord Levy was someone who carried out valuable work for the Prime Minister in the Middle East and had been doing this job for some time. The PMOS added that the questioning indicated journalists were trying to wrap as many different buzz names into these non-stories as they possibly could as they trod water before the Budget.
Powderject
Asked how Ministers had become aware of the sensitivities surrounding Powderject before referring the case to the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health, the PMOS said that although he could cite the sequence of events, he did not know precisely who had known what by what means. As he understood it, the advice from officials had gone to Ministers. Subsequent to that, the officials learned that a donation had been given. As a result, the Permanent Secretary had been asked to look over the papers independently and check that the arguments being made were the right ones to avoid any problems that might arise later on.
Asked if he was saying that the Government would be in even more trouble had the Permanent Secretary not checked the papers, the PMOS said that that was to presuppose that we were in any trouble at all, which we weren’t. Ministers had acted on the advice of officials which they had accepted. It was the officials who had selected the five companies who had been invited to set out what they could provide and when under a slightly different tendering process because of security considerations with the clear understanding that we were looking at a particular form of vaccine. As he understood it, there were two different strains and we had only wanted the one which the MoD currently used.
Asked whether the documents revealed who had taken the decision not to go through the normal tendering process and why, the PMOS pointed out that under Government rules for procurement and tendering, you had to have open advertisements in a certain way and abide by a particular timescale. The Government had wanted to get on with the procurement as quickly as possible. As he had underlined this morning, there was no threat that we knew of. However, post-September 11 it was important to get on with it sooner rather than later for good reasons.
Moreover, a judgement had been taken that since smallpox could only be introduced into this country through terrorist activity rather than through more natural means, i.e. someone bringing the disease innocently into the country, there were issues relating to the dosage and the sort of vaccine we were looking for, which we did not think would be particularly helpful to advertise openly. It could be argued that most of the information was now in the public domain anyway. However, it was obviously preferable for that information to have been made public after a decision had been taken to procure the vaccine rather than before it.
Asked whether the Labour Party customarily circulated a list of party donors around Whitehall and whether that practice had worked in this case by picking up on the Powderject connection, the PMOS said that judging by the papers over the last two or three days, the question of whether it had ‘worked’ was a moot point inasmuch as we were being criticised regardless.
He did not think that the case presaged the circulation of any list of donors or, to the best of his knowledge, any letter asking Departments to be extra vigilant if they were dealing with particular companies, although what had happened in this instance was a perfectly sensible thing to do.
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