Chilcot Inquiry

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, for initiating the debate. It is important for us to realise that this inquiry is crucial to the family and friends of those who lost their lives in Iraq, who must feel very badly treated in this sorry affair. To them it must feel that the decision to lay down the lives of their loved ones must have been taken in weeks or perhaps months, yet the analysis of why those decisions were taken—the basis of their understanding why it appears that this was embarked on almost with such carelessness—is still incomplete 12 years after the commencement of that war.

I start by making it clear that I have the greatest respect for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, but I do not agree with discharging the inquiry at this point. It would be invidious because the report would be published incomplete—we all want a full and thorough account of what happened. Also, in any event, it would not come out very shortly because security clearances would have to be obtained before publication.

Before I go any further in my analysis of the failings of the inquiry, I should say that we have been talking about what led to the Iraq war. I bring to the House one other fact that my noble friend Lady Williams, in her extraordinary recall of how hard the Liberal Democrats worked at the time to influence the outcome of that decision, pointed out to me: that Liberal Democrat spokespeople in both Houses repeatedly pressed for UNMOVIC—the team of UN inspectors—to be given full authority by the UN to inspect Iraq for any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on getting rid of such weapons would have been more effective and cost far less in lives and destruction than an invasion.

The British Government’s own dossier, published on 24 September 2002, stated that the inspectors had achieved a great deal in Iraq. The leader of the Iraq inspectors, Hans Blix, pleaded for more time to complete the inspection of all the suspect sites, but the US Government were not in any mood to concede this. So we lost an opportunity at that point, and it was clear that that particular US Government did not really want evidence or inspection; they just wanted to proceed to war—and it might now appear that that is what they had been promised by their ally, the United Kingdom.

Coming back to the Chilcot inquiry, it is worth noting that Sir John Chilcot has announced that he will write to the Prime Minister on 3 November with the timeline. I do not know to what extent the fact that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, had tabled his Question to be debated today led to Sir John deciding to do that. I suspect that the Question was on the Order Paper before the decision was taken to set a date to publish the timeline.

In this sorry affair there have been big issues of judgment. The inquiry was announced on 15 June 2009. In this House on that day, as is recorded in the Hansard report, I said that given the very wide scope of the inquiry it should be in two parts—the first looking at the events that led up to the war, and the second looking at the conduct of the war. The response of the then Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, was that:

“It is up to the committee how it structures its work”.—[Official Report, 15/6/09; col. 866.]

Three days later, the Public Administration Committee also recommended the same thing—a two-part inquiry into the decision to go to war, and another on the conduct of the war. The Labour Government again stated that it was up to the inquiry to decide what it wanted to do. So the question has to arise: given how very wide the scope was—everybody who has spoken has commented on that aspect—and that that was known from the outset, why did the inquiry decide to do its work as a single comprehensive exercise? Ultimately, that is a matter of judgment.

When Sir John gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the other place on 4 February 2015, he admitted that he was not consulted on the scope of the inquiry; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, said that in his opening remarks. In other words, Sir John was given the absolute thinnest of job descriptions: perhaps an analogy would be the kind of initial job advert that we see in newspapers. Rather than asking for a detailed job description with a detailed specification, and arguing the case for a different kind of inquiry or a different timeline—or different staff, more resources or whatever—he accepted the job in 10 minutes flat; frankly, I felt embarrassed reading that part of his evidence.

It therefore seems a fair criticism to ask why, once he had agreed to do the job, he did not take the opportunity to consider the recommendation that he proceed down a different course. Never mind the fact that I made that recommendation; it was also made by a serious committee in the other place, the Public Administration Committee. Sir John said in his evidence that the inquiry took evidence from 150 witnesses and saw thousands of documents. One is tempted to suggest that he might have foreseen that.

My second point is about the delays. Looking at the sequencing of events, it is clear that there was some kind of stand-off between the Cabinet Secretary and the inquiry team, which lasted for a while. Sir John is not ready to criticise the Cabinet Secretary for delay; none the less it took from July 2012 to January 2015 to reach an agreement on publishing the Blair-Bush correspondence. It is perhaps worth noting that Messrs Blair and Campbell, and Jonathan Powell, had been able to publish their reports of these conversations without hindrance.

I am running out of time, so let me conclude with this: the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, has put up a spirited defence about how long it takes to measure the march of history, by telling the House how long it takes to write a biography. I say to him that his colleague Charles Moore has written volume 2 of Margaret Thatcher’s biography, which I am reading at the moment, with great aplomb, in an extremely short time.

I want to pick up the issue of our continuing intervention in the Middle East. Let us go back to the August 2013 vote on not intervening in Syria. We as a country cannot, and should not, make a decision on that until we know of our hand in setting that region ablaze in the first instance. That is the least we owe the country.