That is what I am saying, that he could not apply it to the persons of the Inquiry. But why not? However we limit it, we are still left with the two standards. I am saying that in a free society it is impossible to maintain those two standards. We cannot say, as the right hon. Member for Bromley said, that in a free society we cannot do these things. In a free society we must take the risk that something may go wrong rather than sacrifice the principle of freedom on which our democratic society is founded. We cannot say that, unless we are prepared to apply it to Jack as well as to his master—unless we are prepared to apply it to the civil servant as well as to the Minister. We cannot have it both ways. Either we say that this security business is so serious that we have to whittle down our democratic standards of justice, or we have to say, serious or not, we will not whittle them down. But surely we cannot say that we will whittle them down for some and maintain them for others. That cannot be right.

I say no more about that. But I proceed—I do so with some diffidence, but the truth has to be told—to ask how did Lord Denning apply these high standards to other people than Ministers? How, for instance, did he apply them to Stephen Ward? Please do not snigger. Stephen Ward is dead and there is nothing to snigger about. Five or six times in his Report Lord Denning said that Stephen Ward was a man who procured women for his influential friends. That was the charge of which Stephen Ward was acquitted by an Old Bailey jury, and Lord Den- ning knew it. Is this to apply the high standards of justice, not convicting anyone on suspicion, not convicting anyone unless the proof is made out beyond any real controversy? This was the most injudicial thing possible for anyone to say, much less the Master of the Rolls.

He went out of his way in connection with the other charge, the charge of living on immoral earnings, to remind his readers that on this charge Stephen Ward was convicted. How strange it is, then, that he also convicted Ward of the other charge without ever pointing out that on a full trial in an unsympathetic court before an unyielding jury he was acquitted of that charge altogether. I followed the speech of the hon. Member for Rugby with great care and I hope that he is following mine with equal care and equal sympathy—not equal sympathy perhaps, because it is natural that all of us should have more sympathy for Ministers of the Crown than for Bohemians like Stephen Ward. Certainly we have more sympathy, probably because they need it less. But, sympathy or no sympathy, facts are facts. Stephen Ward was in fact acquitted of the charge and it was very wrong of Lord Denning to convict him of it after he was dead and when no one could speak on his behalf or defend him. That is not judicial. It is no use paying compliments to people on the grounds of the supreme judicial honesty and integrity of a report they have made, when one finds that it is not at all like that.

It was said, the hon. Gentleman repeated it, that in some way this man was a security risk; that he was in contact with this, that and the other; that he was doing all kinds of things. What was alleged against him? That at the time of the Cuban crisis he tried to persuade the British Government to mediate. Maybe he should not have done so. But a great many people wanted the British Government to mediate, a great many people in all parties. I am not at all sure whether the Prime Minister himself—then Foreign Secretary—or the right hon. Member for Bromley—then Prime Minister—could lay their hand on their heart and say that they never took any step at any time to endeavour to mediate between the Soviet Union and the United States in an emergency upon which, after all, the fate of the whole world depended.

I can quite understand the other view. I think that there is a great deal to be said for it. I am saying that it is a pretty poor basis on which to charge a man with espionage—that he wanted his country to mediate between two much more powerful countries who were deadlocked in a struggle on which all our lives might depend. It is nonsense, it is over-stating the matter at least, and failing to apply to Ward the standards of truth applied to other people. And why should not one do that, if one is a judge and appointed to conduct an inquiry because one is a judge?

More could be said. I am not going to say it. I promised not to take too long, and it may be that I have taken too long already. I said that the question I wanted to ask was, what good are these inquiries? What do they establish? The answer is that they establish conclusively everything that was known already. They establish nothing else at all. They soothe public fears and public anxieties with a camouflage of moral rectitude based, if it comes to that, on class distinction; on the condemnation of people who cannot defend themselves; on condemnation of people who cannot answer. It really will not do.

I should like, finally, to say a word about Mr. Profumo. I say it because I think that even the hon. Member for Rugby will acquit me of party partisanship in that case. When the Motion was before this House to pass a Vote of Censure I think that I was the only Member to rise in my place and say, "Do not pursue this too far. Leave the man alone, he has paid his penalty". And, as we now know, a great deal more. What had Mr. Profumo done wrong? He had had an association with a girl—a girl who had seen a lot of evil before she ever met Mr, Profumo. It was pointed out to him discreetly by the security services that this was inadvisable, and when he received the warning, that very day he wrote a letter and broke off the association, and by the time the thing all blew up into the tragedy which it became, he had not seen the girl for two years.

For what is he condemned? He is condemned for adding one denial to a series of admissions in a statement made for him in the middle of the night when he was not even in the room. And remember that it was a great convenience to the Government that Mr. Profumo should deny the association because if he admitted it, the Government were in a jam. And so he made this denial. I am not defending it. Of course not. I am not saying even that the penalties were too heavy. But for Heaven's sake let us remember, when we attach the penalties and lay this moral unction to ourselves that we ourselves are innocent and that he alone is guilty, that this may not be true.