Under the chairmanship of a High Court judge, Sir George Lynskey, it sat in November and December 1948, hearing testimony from some sixty witnesses who included a number of government ministers and other high-ranking public servants.
In its findings, published in January 1949, the tribunal found that Belcher, who admitted that he had accepted hospitality and small gifts from Stanley and from the distiller Sir Maurice Bloch, had been improperly influenced in his ministerial decision-making, although it dismissed allegations that he had received large sums of cash.
The enquiry was thought to be sufficiently important to recall Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross from his mission to the United Nations, where he was completing the administration of the Nuremberg Trials, so that he could lead for the government's interest.
[1][3][4] Stanley mixed with the great and the good of London society and rumours circulated that he was able, through his government contacts, to shortcut "red tape" and arrange preferential treatment, in return for monetary bribes.
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Hugh Dalton was also accused, as was Minister of Works Charles Key,[1] and Robert Liversidge, a businessman whose internment during World War II had been something of a cause célèbre.
[1] Though Stanley had been named as a Zionist spy by an MI5 report,[7] which accused him of passing on information gained from Manny Shinwell a Jewish cabinet minister and known supporter of Zionism, to the extreme Zionist terrorist group Irgun which at the time was carrying out a campaign of bombings and assassinations, against British officials and Palestinian civilians, in an attempt to overthrow the British Mandatory Government of Palestine.
[14] The Tribunal led to the establishment of a Committee on Intermediaries to examine "how far persons are making a business of acting as ... intermediaries between Government Departments and the public, and to report whether the activities of such persons are liable to give rise to abuses..."[15] Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, seemed to capture much public distaste for the revelations of the tribunal when he observed:[16] We jealously keep our political life and Civil Service above suspicion, but does this mean that we do not expect business life to be too honest?