Some light shed, but little new in full report

Press, 17 April 1978, Page 1

Some light shed, but little new in full report

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

"One of the things they did not do as a (Labour) Government was talk to each other.”

This statement on the police file, a precis of remarks by the former Minister of Agriculture, Mr C. J. Moyle, may stand as an epitaph for the whole Moyle affair. The importance of publishing the full text of the North report on the affair lies in the chance it gives to assess how Sir Alfred North reached the conclusions he did and also the roles of the different parties. Was there a breach of confidentiality of the police file? Did Mr Moyle give inconsistent accounts of his actions to the police and to Parliament? How did his colleagues remain in ignorance of the details of the affair? Did Sir Alfred North carry out his commission adequately? The answers to some of these questions can be found in the text of the full report, printed on pages 10 and 11 today. However, “The Press” has abridged the report to avoid repetition. Little is added to the summary of the report, published last year after a retired president of the Court of Appeal, Sir Alfred North, investigated several aspects of the Moyle affair.

His findings led directly to Mr Moyle’s resignation from Parliament. In brief, Sir Alfred found that there had been no breach of confidentiality of the police file on Mr Moyle, and that Mr Moyle had given accounts of his actions to the police and to Parliament which contained obvious inconsistencies. His investigation of the leading personalities, of the drama seems to have been thorough, and sheds some interesting light on their relationships with one another. There is not much doubt that the then Minister of Police, Mr M. A. Connelly, let down his Prime Minister, Mr Rowling, by not informing him of the details of the alleged incident on June 17, 1975. When interviewing Mr Connelly, Sir Alfred commented: “As my questioning proceeded, Mr Connelly’s answers became rather tedious as he seemed determined to deny that he had seen papers which could probably be described as a police file.” Sir Alfred absolved the senior police officers concerned of any complaint of a breach of confidentiality,

and was tart about Mr Moyle’s suggestion that one of them, Mr R. J. Walton, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, was involved in a “dirty tricks” campaign to topple the Labour Government. But Sir Alfred seems to have stopped there. There were widespread rumours about Mr Moyle, later found to be substantially true, but he did not pursue the source of these rumours, or whether this source had had access to the police file. Thus, while the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) denied having seen the police file, he agreed that he had been advised privately of the details of the incident by a journalist “within a day or two of the event.”

Sir Alfred exonerated the Prime Minister, but seems not to have pursued this lead once he became convinced that the police had not set out to embarrass either Mr Moyle or the Labour Party. Of the “inconsistencies” in Mr Moyle’s accounts there is clear evidence in the text of the report. Mr Moyle seems to have been in' a state of extreme tension. His replies were

not exactly evasive, but somehow they give the impression of not saying what he wanted to say. Mr Moyle sought to explain why his accounts to the police and to Parliament differed, but he did not convince Sir Alfred, who thus judged Mr Moyle on the inconsistencies and not on the explanation. “I feel obliged to say that I reached the conclusion that Mr Moyle’s belated attempts to clear himself of any suggestion of being involved in a homosexual incident was largely occasioned by his anxiety not to be accused of having lied to his colleagues in Parliament,” Sir Alfred concluded. This “anxiety” of Mr Moyle dominates the report. There are other matters of interest, such as the alleged existence of a proNational “dirty tricks” group before the 1975 General Election, and its composition. But, in fact, the incident on June 17, 1975, which began it all, was a trivial beginning for all the notoriety the Moyle affair subsequently achieved.

Leading article, Page 14