Business of the House
Debate between Jesse Norman and Tom Tugendhat(1 week, 6 days ago)
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Jesse Norman
Mr Speaker, let me start by associating myself with your remarks just now from the Chair. It is plain to all Members of the House that the Government Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip have badly mis-stepped. Indeed, there has been scant respect for the House more generally from the Government Whips Office. I cannot believe that such a thing would have happened when the Leader of the House was Chief Whip.
If I may, let me join the Prime Minister yesterday, and I am sure the whole House today, in remembering the dreadful events of 30 years ago in Dunblane and paying tribute to the victims and their families.
On a happier note, last Monday saw the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s immortal masterpiece “The Wealth of Nations”.
Jesse Norman
Hon. Members may wish, if they like, to consult works by the shadow Leader of the House on this topic. I doubt whether any other book or any single body of thought has had more effect in improving the lives and livelihoods of people across the world in the intervening 250 years.
We celebrate the service of our armed forces and we rightly treat defence matters, wherever possible, as bound by a united focus on the national interest, but it is precisely that focus on the national interest that requires us now to acknowledge that the past two weeks have been a disaster for this country. Our allies in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and across the Gulf have criticised this country for its “slow” and “weak” response to date. The Cypriot high commissioner and the President of Cyprus have publicly expressed their disappointment and dissatisfaction. Why? Because we have exposed their people and our people to drone attacks as targets, placed weapons systems on their territories, made solemn undertakings to them over many years and now failed to come to their defence in time.
It did not have to be this way, so we must ask how this can possibly have happened. Let us review the history. It was being publicly reported by 15 January that America was starting to build a carrier strike force around the USS Abraham Lincoln, targeted at Iran. On 26 January, The Washington Post reported that this force had arrived in the middle east. On 31 January, our own Prime Minister told the BBC:
“The aim is that Iran shouldn’t be able to develop nuclear weapons…we support the goal and we are talking to allies about how we get to that goal.”
Those remarks come close to an explicit endorsement of the United States on its operation, as they were doubtless intended to.
The key point is this: all this happened four full weeks before the start of the attack. Last week, at this Dispatch Box, I highlighted the gaps and inconsistencies in the Government’s position, between their supposedly settled legal view and the last-ditch political decision reportedly taken in Cabinet on the Friday before hostilities began, and secondly between the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, whose original instinct was to support the USA but who was overruled.
It is now clear that there has also been a disastrous failure of political leadership. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet knew, or should have known, for a full month that the USA was mustering a vast body of forces to attack Iran, that it could not remain on high readiness indefinitely, and so an attack must surely follow. The Prime Minister himself said last week that the Government had pre-deployed some weapons to the region, yet he failed to give instructions in time to the Navy to prepare HMS Dragon, he failed to notify the Cypriots, and he failed to warn our allies and other friends across the region.
Now that they are engaged, our armed forces are discharging their duties with distinction, but the result of this political incompetence has been a fiasco, which brought shame and dishonour on this country. We have the disgraceful sight now of the Government anonymously trashing the Chief of the Defence Staff, in a desperate attempt to deflect responsibility for their own inadequacies, not just via an anonymous leak in The Spectator, repeated in The Telegraph, but by a quoted, but of course unnamed, official to the Financial Times. I cannot recall that a political hatchet job of this kind has ever been performed on a commanding officer in the course of a military operation. It is deeply dishonourable and itself a further sign of failure in No. 10.
Will the Leader of the House support an inquiry into these leaks and briefings? Will he support an investigation, in due course, as to how this embarrassing fiasco can have been allowed to happen and what can be done to prevent it from ever happening again?