Orders of the Day — Security (MR. Profumo's Resignation)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 17 June 1963.

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Photo of Sir Ronald Bell Sir Ronald Bell , Buckinghamshire South 12:00, 17 June 1963

The hon. Member is evading the point. The debate tonight is to end in a vote. If any hon. Member thinks that that vote is about the state of the security services in England, he is simply deluding himself. The vote is an attack on the integrity of the Prime Minister and nothing else. By making this an issue of confidence, hon. Members opposite are trying to suggest that the Prime Minister's honour is involved and that he should resign. That is what the debate and the vote are about, and it is on that issue that I shall cast my vote—on the simple, narrow question of whether the Prime Minister and his leading colleagues were dishonourably involved in the deception practised on the House by Mr. Profumo.

I am perfectly satisfied on the evidence that they were not. I am satisfied that their error about this was fully shared by the Opposition themselves, who had been equally deceived, and that everybody knew about this only after Mr. Profumo had confessed, except possibly one or two Members opposite who appear to have had contacts with the sort of people who might know the truth.

I do not wish to say any more about this except—[Interruption.]—I am sure that hon. Gentlemen opposite do not want to hear facts which are disagreeable to them. They have tried to conduct this debate on a wide, smearing, basis and to attack the Government, and I think that it will be a great shame if the public life of this country suffers damage from some of the generalised things that have been said today.

We try to exact a high standard from our men in public life. In political life we have to be a good deal more cruel to personal failure than we could find it right or possible to be in other departments of life. We do that because we want to ensure that those who presume to lead shall have high qualities, and that the public shall believe that they have them, and we shall doubly defeat ourselves if we spread these vague allegations around partly by chasing out of public life men who are not willing to submit their reputations to the repetitive attacks of the kind that we have had in recent years, and partly, in a direct way, by leading people to believe, as I think the hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. C. Pannell) once protested, that the people who come to this House are squalid people, when in fact they are hard-working and responsible people in the main.

For those reasons, whether or not they commend themselves to hon. Gentlemen opposite, I shall have no hesitation in casting my vote tonight in favour of the Government.