Security minister tries very hard to say nothing about Jamal al-Harith | John Crace

One of the advantages of being a cabinet minister is that you have juniors to take the flak. So it was no great surprise to find that the home secretary, Amber Rudd, was nowhere in sight – a self-imposed detention had never seemed so attractive – to answer an urgent question about the alleged British suicide bomber, Jamal al-Harith. In her place was the rather downtrodden-looking spooks minister, Ben Wallace.

“We don’t comment on intelligence matters,” he said. “Nor do we comment on whether someone may or may not have been paid compensation. So I’m afraid I’m not able to be any more detailed than this.” Really sorry and all that.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper was not wholly convinced. Could the minister even confirm that Harith had died in a suicide attack? Was he given compensation? Was he subject to monitoring during the period from 2010 up until his departure from the country in 2014? Was he on a watch list?

Wallace twitched uneasily. “The sums of money that have been paid...” he began. At which point he got a large dig in the ribs from Victoria Atkins, his home office apparatchik, who was sitting behind him. “You’re not supposed to have confirmed any money was paid even though everyone knows we did,” she hissed. Wallace hastily corrected himself. “The sums of money reported to have been paid.”

“It was £1m,” someone from the opposition benches interrupted. Wallace didn’t look overly pleased to be kept up to speed by people who had the advantage on him of having read the papers and listened to the news bulletins on the radio.

“The outrageous sum of money that is reported to have been paid,” he corrected himself. By now he was so out of his depth that he chose to cut his losses. Anything he said would be bound to be wrong so it was easier just to say nothing and ignore the other substantive questions Cooper had raised. “I’m sure the whole house has confidence that the lessons that will be needed to be learned, will be learned,” he concluded. Delusional.

The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, was not as reluctant to come to the Commons as her opposite number and wanted to know if the £1m had been paid to stop Harith talking about Britain acquiescing in the torture of its citizens in Guantánamo. Wallace shrugged and placed a zip over his lips. It broke his heart not to be able to tell the house anything but if he did he would have to kill them all and they wouldn’t want that, would they?

Before the session had started, Atkins had been handing out her own versions of government D notices – aka questions the minister actually had an answer to – to the few backbench Tory stooges who had remained in the chamber. It wasn’t long before they came to the good. Wasn’t everything the fault of David Blunkett when he was home secretary? Wallace couldn’t possibly say as he was legally bound not to say anything but on balance it probably was Blunkett’s fault.

Another wondered whether the real problem was letting Harith out of Guantánamo in the first place. If we had just kept him locked up and thrown away the key, none of this would have happened. Wallace tried not to agree too much. Locking people up on suspicion they might later get radicalised as a result of being locked up was a stretch even for him.

It wasn’t long before it was just Labour and SNP MPs who still had questions for the minister. And some of them were getting dangerously close to implicating Theresa May, who had cut 50% of border staff while she was home secretary. “Our e-machines work perfectly at airports,” Wallace blustered. Though not so well to have noticed Harith had gone on hols to Iraq. “In any case, we took the decision as a government.” So leave Theresa alone. No greater love... “In any case, I am legally bound to be confidential so I can’t say anything.”

“Surely if al-Harith is dead, then the case is no longer legally binding,” observed Labour’s Chris Bryant.

Wallace spluttered as the Speaker called time. His waterboarding was over.