Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Elystan-Morgan Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

My Lords, the House is deeply indebted to my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, for initiating this debate.

Of course, it is a very great pity that, whenever the Chilcot inquiry reports, it will be more than 11 years since the military operations occurred in Iraq, but that is not the issue before the House tonight. We are not considering whether Prime Minister Blair involved this kingdom in an illegal war or whether he is as pure as the driven snow as far as that matter is concerned. We are not concerned in any way with the issue of weapons of mass destruction or what was genuinely or not genuinely believed in that regard. We are concerned only with seeking to ask the question: why has the Chilcot inquiry been held up in the way that it has?

The truth is that the Chilcot inquiry has run into a massive roadblock. As described by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, this is the release—not to the members of the Chilcot inquiry because they have seen them already but to the public if the opportunity arises—of three groups of documents: 25 notes passed between Prime Minister Blair and the President of the United States; 200 Cabinet or Cabinet-style discussions relating to the relevant matters; and 130 conversations between either Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Brown and the President of the United States. That is the issue.

The relevance of those documents is not that they have been seen by the Chilcot inquiry but that the Chilcot inquiry wants to use them for a very specific and very significant purpose: the so-called Maxwellisation principle, which was established in relation to the inquiry following the death of Sir Robert Maxwell. In other words, a body such as the Chilcot inquiry wants to be able to say, “We have examined all the evidence. We have come to the conclusion that there is a prima facie case against A, B, C and D—the finger of blame appears to point to them as persons who ought to be criticised. But we are not going to do that without giving them the opportunity of replying to that situation and calling evidence if they wish”. That seems an unimpeachable principle of fairness.

However, the Chilcot inquiry goes one step beyond that and says, “It is not enough that we should be able to do that. We should be able to show to the public, if our conclusions remain the same, why we regard those persons as blameworthy; in other words, that they should be condemned not out of the generality of our conclusions but out of the specific evidence that is contained in these particular pieces of documentary evidence. Unless Maxwellisation is made public and those documents are produced and published at the time the report is published, Chilcot will not be regarded as having full validity”. I absolutely say amen to that.

Who is holding up this disclosure, which, in my submission, is utterly essential to the fairness of this inquiry? It is apparently the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. He is saying, “I am opposing this on grounds of sound precedent, a precedent laid by my predecessor” —the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell—“that is, the law of the Medes and Persians”. I would challenge that completely and make the following submissions. First, it does not matter what the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, or any other civil servant in the past 1,000 years has said. It can make no difference whatever. It is not a matter for a civil servant to decide.

Secondly, it is a matter for the Government, as the sovereign and ultimate legal authority, to decide, and nobody else. The Prime Minister, making a statement on this matter last year, said that Government were responsible for disclosure. It does not matter what pressures there might be from the United States or the Civil Service. The Government are legally and morally responsible.

Thirdly, a long, long time ago when I was a law student—it almost seems like 1,000 years ago—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, and I were in the same department at Aberystwyth and we were taught sound principles of equity. One of the principles of equity was: no man shall be a judge in his own suit. In other words, there are certain people who should not adjudicate in this matter. Who would be the last person who should ever be allowed to adjudicate on the question of whether or not these documents should be made public? Clearly, that is either Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Brown. Who would be the next? You might say someone who was the alter ego of one of the two persons. Who was the alter ego of Prime Minister Blair? It was Sir Jeremy Heywood—one of the main protagonists in this confused, complicated and altogether very strange story.

I am not saying for a moment that Sir Jeremy is other than a fair, honourable and thoroughly decent man, but there is a principle of law which says that justice must be done and must be manifestly seen to be done. Unless the Government intervene here, as it is their moral and legal responsibility to do, this matter will fester and I think it will contaminate and poison the whole body politic. The confidence that people have in parliamentary democracy, already injured, will be further demeaned.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I suppose I ought to declare an interest in this debate in that I worked at No. 10 at the time of the Iraq war. Indeed, I sat opposite some of the foreign affairs private secretaries whose minutes are now to be found on the Chilcot inquiry website. I saw some of it pretty much at first hand, although I was not directly involved with Iraq. It was not a very easy period, I can tell your Lordships.

I do not think it is right for our debate tonight to get into the substance of the issues that the Chilcot inquiry is addressing. It has been an extremely good debate and the speeches, as usual for the House of Lords, have been of exceptionally high quality, and I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, who obviously put an awful lot of thought into what he had to say in opening the debate.

I will confine my remarks from these Benches to the question of delay and the view the Government take of that delay and of the questions relating to the disclosure that are at the heart of that delay. It is important to be clear: as I understand it, it is not that written evidence has been withheld from the inquiry; the inquiry has seen all the relevant papers. The issue at stake is how much of that evidence it can actually quote in its final report. So the question is: does the committee base its conclusions on the public taking it on trust that it has read the material and this is what it concludes, or is it able to quote from the documents?

Everyone will agree that the Chilcot process has been very thorough. If you look at that website, you will see that far more government papers are available than for any precedent that I can recall. The comparison with Suez, where no one was told about the secret deal that was done with the French and the Israelis, is very striking.

However, there are questions about the extent of disclosure. I want to see the Iraq question and as many of these issues as possible put to rest, but even then there are three areas in which questions of disclosure raise awkward issues. These are questions not just for civil servants, but for any responsible Government of any party acting in the national interest.

I think one of these questions has already been sorted out: the question about dealing with the use of intelligence, and the worries as to whether disclosure of anything to do with intelligence compromises sources. I should like the Government to confirm what I think to be the position: that in the case of Iraq those questions were sorted out in the Butler inquiry in 2004, and that there are no new intelligence issues arising in the case of Chilcot. These issues relate to national security. From our Benches, as my party leader said only yesterday, we support greater scrutiny of the way in which intelligence operates. There are obvious limits as well.

The second issue concerns relations with our allies. The committee wants to quote from private correspondence between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. If we see ourselves as America’s closest ally there is a real question, not just of the past but for the future, as to the obligation that places on us to protect confidences in that relationship. On that point I am sure a lot of people would say, “Damn the Americans”. I do not take that view. If we are serious about our alliances—and the same would be true of our close partners in Europe in other situations—we do have obligations to our allies and partners. How do the Government see that question? Time makes a great difference, but we are talking about something that happened a little over 10 years ago. What view do the Government take of what is a reasonable time to disclose things that affect our closest allies?

Thirdly, there is the issue about freedom of information and what are called Cabinet-level discussions. Whatever decisions the Government make on disclosure as far as the Chilcot inquiry is concerned could have long-term implications for freedom of information more generally. This is a serious issue. My party introduced freedom of information in 1998. We are proud of that achievement, but there were always boundaries that had to be set. I have always thought of freedom of information, in simplistic terms, as meaning that expert advice should be open but confidential discussion should remain confidential. How do the Government see this question about disclosure of discussions right at the centre of government on the basis of papers provided? Much of the content is now available on the website, but how do the Government see this question of disclosure of Cabinet-level decisions? This will have an impact on all future Governments. This is not just about dealing with the Iraq issue. This is about whether disclosure is going to affect the relationship between Ministers and civil servants for decades ahead. We have to get that right.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

Two points arise. First, if it be the case that information of a confidential nature between states is always to be kept in the background, that is an end to any question of transparency. Does the noble Lord accept first of all that many of the thousands of documents that have been disclosed to Chilcot on the basis that they are declassified and therefore open to publication come into that particular area that he mentions?

The other matter is that it appears—if the responsible press is to be believed—that Mr Brown, in so far as his position as Prime Minister or as Chancellor is concerned during the period from 2001 to 2009 that is covered by the inquiry, says that he has no objection to the disclosure of any of the three groups of documents that have been referred to.

[Lord Liddle]

I am arguing here that these are very difficult decisions and that we have to have a clear view for the future. I am not looking to the past; I am wondering what the impact of this will be on future relations between Ministers and between Ministers and civil servants. I would simply be grateful if the Minister was able to give us an answer.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for that extremely constructive and helpful speech, which took a number of themes which I, too, wish to cover.

Perhaps I, like others, should admit that I am not entirely a neutral observer in this. I was my party’s defence spokesman at the time, and I was involved in the development of what was then Liberal Democrat opposition to the war. Part of my reason for being so was that I had been a relatively frequent visitor to Washington both before and after 9/11. I met there people whom I had known when I was a graduate student in the United States in the early 1960s and who had become some of the leading neo-conservatives within the Administration. It was because of what I knew of some of their underlying assumptions and of my participation in two National Intelligence Council-sponsored conferences in Washington, one in the autumn of 2001 and one in the summer of 2002, that I concluded that the Bush Administration were determined to go to war with Iraq against the advice of some of their own intelligence analysts who knew the Middle East well.

Having said that, I should say that this is a very different inquiry from the Franks inquiry. It starts with the examination of the Government’s Iraq policy papers in 2000, before 9/11, and concludes with the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq 10 years later. It therefore covers a much longer period than the short period of the Franks report and deals with a coalition war in which we were only a secondary contender. Franks was concluded in six months, but evidence was taken in private; the report covered only the period before the conflict; it did not publish many of the documents. I again declare an interest: I was one of those who reviewed it very critically on publication because it seemed to me that it had distorted the actual situation. The intelligence community had indeed got it right. The only mistake that it had made was in thinking that the Argentinians would not be unwise enough to try to invade the Falklands before the winter; it thought that it would do it six months later.

I also looked back at the Dardanelles inquiry, and reference has been made to the situation after Suez. What we now have with the Chilcot inquiry is a very much more thorough examination in which we are talking about several thousand documents—I must correct the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan: they have not been declassified by being released to the Chilcot inquiry. This is an inquiry by privy counsellors; they have access to everything that they wish to see, including intelligence documents et cetera. The question at stake is not access; it is publication.

I am informed that, when we see the eventual publication, a great deal will be published that it has not been the custom of British Governments to publish before. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, when you get into the question of how far you publish Cabinet minutes that appeared less than 20 or 30 years ago, clearly, whatever happens, you will be seen to have been setting a number of precedents. Another question is how far you publish documents which relate to conversations with some of our closest allies, whether or not you have their permission. There are here some very large issues of national policy and national interest which we all have to consider.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

I quote here from the Prime Minister’s letter of 5 November in reply to the letter of the day before from Sir John Chilcot. He states:

“I am aware of the scale of the task declassification has presented to a number of Government departments, and it is good to have the acknowledgement of the work that has been done by the Cabinet Office and other departments to deal with the disclosure requests, involving several thousand documents, including many hundreds since the summer”.

That seems to me to say—I may be wrong and I apologise if I am—that thousands of documents have been declassified, but I will be corrected.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would distinguish between access and publication. The delay is very much about working through thousands of documents, many of them very lengthy, and deciding how much can safely be declassified for publication—how much therefore can be published, how much some documents should be redacted in part and whether there are documents which it would be safer not to publish at all. That has taken a good deal longer than was hoped, but it is now well under way and is what we are currently considering.