The MP, the Terror Suspect and the Prison Bug

Civitas, 5 February 2008

Should MPs’ be exempt from police bugging when conversing with terrorist suspects being held in detention and awaiting extradition?
Forget, for a moment, whether any laws or protocols were broken when police recorded the conversations between Labour MP for Tooting Sadiq Khan and his childhood friend and constituent the Islamist terror-suspect Babar Ahmed.
What laws should govern cases of this kind?

Some argue that, unless MPs can enjoy the same degree of confidentiality when speaking to their constituents as solicitors have when speaking with their clients, then the role of MPs as champions of their constituents would be seriously compromised, because the former could no longer enjoy the complete trust of the latter.
Others say that allowing the conversations of MPs to be bugged opens the way to government snooping on opposition MPs in the hope thereby of discovering compromising information that could be used against them.
It is curious how details of the case should only have emerged at the weekend via a leak, just when much of the lustre of MPs had begun to tarnish after the disclosure that some were putting family members on the payroll at public expense in return for apparently receiving very or no little assistance from them.
It is also curious how the case is being spun to portray Khan as the victim of a special police vendetta because of his successful defence of several ethnic minority police officers against police authorities in his capacity as a human rights lawyer.
Doubtless, all will fail to come out in the whitewash of an enquiry Justice Minister Jack Straw has instigated into the matter.
Abstracting from the specific details of the case to confront the matter of principle, although somewhat torn, I am inclined to think that MPs should not enjoy any special parliamentary privileges when they speak with terror suspects, and that they and we should all just have to get used to this uncomfortable fact.
As a former commissioner of the City of London police points out in a letter in today’s Daily Telegraph:
‘If MPs are immune from bugging, them, when a terrorist or other criminal suspects his communications are being monitored, wheat better way could he find, in order to pass on to a third party information harmful to the public interest (suitably coded), than via his unwitting MP?’
As to the specifics of the Khan case, while seemingly a decent enough cove – even, apparently, finding time to take his mother on Hajj during the Christmas recess, I remain puzzled as to how and why he could have had such confidence as he has publicly displayed in the innocence of Ahmed, given what has come into the public domain about the websites Ahmed maintained and other nefarious activities in which he is said to have engaged.
Many prominent Muslims complain the bugging of Khan has further undermined the already shaky confidence of their community in the police, thereby dealing a further blow to social cohesion.
For my own part, the disclosure of how many times Khan visited his friend in prison, both before and after becoming an MP, has served to shake mine in the ability of even some of the most seemingly public-minded and responsible members of that community to exhibit the scrupulous impartiality and fair-mindedness that we would expect to find in all who aspired to public office through pursuing a parliamentary career.