Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Alan Johnson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. and learned Friend is right that the way legal advice is produced and considered today is very different to then. We have the National Security Council, on which the Attorney General sits, and before such decisions are made a well-thought-through piece of written legal advice is produced. The Attorney General is not suddenly called on to do this; he is in the room while these vital meetings take place. That is something he did brilliantly and his successor is doing brilliantly.

My right hon. and learned Friend’s point on the collation of evidence and whether we are getting it right is a more difficult question to answer. There is no doubt that, post-Butler, the Joint Intelligence Committee is incredibly rigorous about reaching judgments: testing them around the experts in Whitehall, confirming them often with the Americans and others, and not pretending to know things that it does not know. On how well we test that, there is a role for the Intelligence and Security Committee in thinking about whether we have got judgments right after they have been made, but perhaps more thinking can be done on that.

I would just emphasise that for all the intelligence, briefing and information in the world, at the end we still have to make a decision. We never have perfect information on which we make that decision: we are weighing up a balance of risks. That is often the case, whether we are going to take action against terrorists or to try to help secure a particular national interest. In the end, we have to decide and then defend in this House the decision we have made.

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

The epitaph on Robin Cook’s headstone in the Grange cemetery in Edinburgh reads as follows:

“I may not have succeeded in halting the war, but I did secure the right of Parliament to decide on war.”

The Prime Minister is right in saying that, in these circumstances, Parliament cannot be involved in the decision and then simply try to duck responsibility for the ramifications of that decision. Does he agree that the main element in the debate in which Parliament decided, on 13 March 2003, was not the 45-minute claim, which was not mentioned anywhere in those hours of debate, but the fact that Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons had spent 13 years running rings around the United Nations, ignoring 17 UN resolutions, including resolutions calling for all necessary means to stop him? Was that not the main issue in that debate? Has the Prime Minister found any evidence whatever of any lies told to Parliament on that day?

[The Prime Minister]

My memory of the debate is that it was about the balance of risks between action and inaction. The case made by the then Prime Minister was that there was a real risk of inaction against someone who had been defying the UN, had done terrible things to his people and threatened his neighbours. The danger was of that coming together with a potential programme of weapons of mass destruction and the other instabilities in the world post-9/11. We have to remember that it was post-9/11 when we were considering all this. That is what I think I felt, as a relatively young Back Bencher, we were voting on. Weapons of mass destruction were a part of the picture, not the whole picture.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s question about deliberate deceit, I think we have to read the report very carefully. I cannot see in here an accusation of deliberately deceiving people, but there is certainly information that was not properly presented. Different justifications were given before and subsequently for the action that was taken, and there are a number of other criticisms about processes, but deliberate deceit—I can find no reference to it.