Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
We are committed to this electrification all the way to Swansea, and we are making record investments in our railway line. Many of us, including Opposition Members, were privileged to be at Newton Aycliffe for the opening of the Hitachi factory that will be providing the state-of-the-art trains—trains built not in Japan, but here in Britain, bringing 700 new jobs to the north-east of England.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend recall that in the debate about Syria two years ago there were voices around this Chamber arguing that the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere were nothing to do with us and should not involve us? Is it not clear that the failure of western security strategy in the middle east and elsewhere is the main driver of this migration crisis, and may I endorse his requirement for a full-spectrum response to ISIS? Will he consider setting that out in a comprehensive White Paper in order to lead world opinion?
The Prime Minister
First, we should be very clear about who is responsible for the refugee crisis in Syria. I would lay it firmly at the door of Bashar al-Assad, who assaulted his own people, and ISIL, who, even today, are throwing gay people off buildings, raping women, terrorising communities and driving people to take to the road and leave their country. They are the ones responsible. But my hon. Friend makes an important point: when we do not involve ourselves in these issues and take difficult decisions, that is a decision in itself, and it has consequences. That is what I hope we can debate and discuss in the coming months. He talked about White Papers and so on. There are many different ways of presenting this information. I think we need to look at all the arguments for what he and I would call a comprehensive approach to these issues.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Matthew Hancock
I certainly strongly agree that it is important that as well as considering gender, ethnicity and other characteristics we ensure that people from all backgrounds—whichever school they went to and whichever part of the country they come from—can get to senior levels in the civil service. We have a programme under way to ensure that that happens.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his appointment as Minister for the civil service and assure him that the now Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee will look forward to working with him on civil service reform, as we did with his predecessor, who did so much during his term of office. May I also give my fullest support to his objective of achieving diversity? That is a vital part of having an agile civil service and requires the challenging of attitudes and habits of behaviour as much as setting targets.
Matthew Hancock
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his re-election—unopposed—to the Chair of the Select Committee. I very much look forward to working with him, although I say that with some trepidation, knowing his depth of understanding of these issues. I entirely agree that this is about culture and agility in the civil service as much as it is about tick-box targets.
Tunisia, and European Council
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. A single, short sentence question could now represent a parliamentary triumph. I call Mr Bernard Jenkin.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Will the Prime Minister explain how a mere promise of treaty change can be made legally binding?
The Prime Minister
In very much the same way, when Ireland had a treaty change and a protocol addressing that treaty change, the referendum took place in Ireland before all the other countries’ Parliaments had passed the treaty change, so this has happened on previous occasions across the European Union.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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David Mundell
The hon. Gentleman will know from the Second Reading debate on the Scotland Bill that there was some uncertainty on the SNP Benches about whether proposals would be brought forward to put in place the SNP’s previous policy of full fiscal autonomy. I now understand that such proposals will be brought forward, but only on the basis that other parties with a real interest in Scotland will vote them down.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend explain to SNP Members how the Barnett formula actually works? If there are spending cuts in English Departments, it follows that there are cuts in Scottish spending as well. If they support the Barnett formula in the vow, they presumably understand why these reductions have to be made.
David Mundell
It is not clear what the SNP understands in relation to fiscal matters, but I agree at least with the new hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) that fiscal autonomy for Scotland would be “a disaster”.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. There are so many noisy private conversations taking place it is quite difficult to hear the Minister’s answer. Let us have a bit of order for the Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee of the House of Commons.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
At what may well be my right hon. Friend’s last appearance in the House of Commons at the Dispatch Box, may I remark that his five-year term as Minister for the Cabinet Office in charge of civil service policy for the Government will have truly left its mark not just on the civil service but on this House? His tenacity, commitment and sincerity are of great credit to him.
Mr Maude
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. I pay tribute to him for the way in which he and his Committee have held us to account for what we do. He has done that consistently and persistently. It has not always been comfortable, but that is what the House of Commons is for.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. A great many very noisy private conversations are taking place in the Chamber. We should have a bit of order, not least so that we can hear the Chair of the Public Administration Committee, Mr Bernard Jenkin.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
7. What plans he has to improve the effectiveness of his Department in co-ordinating planning and implementation across Government Departments.
The Minister for Government Policy and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr Oliver Letwin)
That is a question on which the Public Administration Committee has focused for a long time, and very welcome it is too.
The creation of the implementation unit in the Cabinet Office has done a great deal to increase implementation capabilities throughout the Government, and I am glad to say that we have launched a series of other initiatives to bring Departments together. We have created the better care fund, the stabilisation unit, the international energy unit and the troubled families programme, and we intend to continue the process.
Mr Jenkin
During the inquiry that we conducted on future challenges facing the machinery of Whitehall, we found that, so far, the Government have been very good at imposing departmental spending limits, but there is a capability deficit when it comes to cross-departmental financial planning and management. How do the Government propose to address that?
Mr Letwin
I agree that it needs to be tackled. I think that the most signal example is the relationship between local authorities—in particular, adult social care departments—and the health service. We are now focusing on that above all, and trying to prevent circumstances in which a failure to pool budgets leads to worse results for patients. I think that we shall then have a model that we will try to use in many other areas.
Iraq Inquiry
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Davis
When the hon. Gentleman listens to what I intend to say shortly, he will realise that Sir Jeremy Heywood certainly does not want to rush the report, and there are some reasons for that of which I do not approve.
I have been asked by a number of colleagues why I believe that the delay has occurred. The truth is that no one in this House knows, not even the Minister. There is not enough information in the public domain, which is why the motion requires an answer to that exact question from Sir John Chilcot. Nevertheless, there are some clues. For clarity, I should say that I do not believe, at this stage at least, that the witnesses are the cause of the delay, and I say that because I think that one of them will be speaking later.
Some of the delay is undoubtedly down to the conflict between the inquiry and Whitehall—Sir Jeremy Heywood and others—about what can and cannot be disclosed. What the inquiry can publish is wrapped up in a series of protocols that have criteria so broad that a veto on publication can virtually be applied at Whitehall’s discretion. Compare this with the Scott inquiry into the Iraqi supergun affair. It also covered issues of incredible sensitivity in terms of national security, international relations, intelligence agency involvement, judicial propriety and ministerial decision making. Sir Richard Scott was allowed to decide himself what he would release into the public domain, unfettered by Whitehall. By contrast, Sir John Chilcot, who is a past Northern Ireland Office permanent secretary, who chaired an incredibly sensitive inquiry into intercept evidence, and who is considered a responsible keeper of Government secrets, is tied up in protocols, subject to the whim of Whitehall.
We know there have been long negotiations between the inquiry and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, and his predecessors over the disclosure of some material, most notably correspondence between ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush. There is no point whatsoever in the inquiry if it cannot publish the documents that show how the decision to go to war was arrived at. Chilcot himself wrote in a letter to the Cabinet Secretary:
“The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK's involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK's continuing involvement, is central to its considerations”.
The negotiations between Chilcot and Jeremy Heywood concluded only in May last year, when it was announced that an agreement had been reached. The process was clearly frustrating for the inquiry: Sir John Chilcot queries why it was that
“individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot”.
He was of course referring to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell’s respective diaries, which quoted such information. Sir John stated in his letter that documents
“vital to the public understanding of the inquiry's conclusions”
were being suppressed by Whitehall. That is ridiculous. If that is the approach taken, nothing will be learned and there is little purpose in the inquiry.
The inquiry protocols are symptomatic of a mindset that seems to assume that serving civil servants are the only proper guardians of the public interest. That leads me to a particular problem: if a Minister is asked to make a decision that affects him, his family, his property or even his constituency, he is required to withdraw—in the jargon, to recuse himself—from the decision and have somebody else make it. That does not say that the Minister is corrupt; it simply means that one can avoid the appearance of corruption and any chance of an improper decision, and it removes the risk of unconscious bias. It is a proper procedure. No such rule applies for civil servants.
This inquiry process is littered with people who were central to the very decisions the inquiry is investigating. Sir Jeremy Heywood was principal private secretary to Tony Blair for the entire period, from the 9/11 atrocity through to the first stage of the Gulf war, yet he is Whitehall’s gatekeeper for what can and cannot be published. Even the head of the inquiry secretariat, Margaret Aldred, was deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat and therefore responsible for providing Ministers with advice on defence and policy matters on Iraq, and she was nominated to the inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary of the day.
All of that would matter less if the ridiculous restrictive protocols that Whitehall has imposed on the Chilcot inquiry were not there. Like Scott, Sir John Chilcot should be allowed to publish what he thinks is in the public interest, and not what Whitehall thinks is acceptable.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend allow me to intervene?
Mr Davis
No.
To finish my point, if that had been the case, we might well have had the inquiry report already and there would be less public concern about an establishment cover-up.
We also know that the Maxwellisation process is causing some delay. Those due to be criticised in the final report are being allowed lengthy legal consultation. Although this is a necessary part of the process, strict time controls are needed. It cannot be right that those who are to be criticised can delay publication for their own benefit.
Finally, let me deal with the question of preventing publication during the run-up to the general election. Purdah periods exist for a simple reason: to prevent Governments from using their power to publish information that would give them electoral advantage. They are not to prevent impartial information from being put in the public domain—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear”]—so why delay a deliberately impartial report of vital interest to the nation just because the election is pending? It is nonsense. I say to those who are cheering that, frankly, it is not clear that there will be much political advantage anywhere. It was started by a Labour Government, but it was supported by the current Prime Minister, who spoke in favour of it even as late as 2006; the current Labour leader did not vote for it because he was not in the House. There is complete confusion about where there could be any advantage, but the public interest should trump any interest of party advantage and that is why publication should not be delayed by the election.
The Iraq inquiry has been a missed opportunity. Terrible mistakes were made but, fatally, we have so far failed to learn our proper lessons from them. Douglas Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary and in no way an anti-establishment figure, has branded the endless delays a “scandal”. He is right. It is a disgrace. It is an insult to those who died on our behalf in that war and a betrayal of the people they died to protect. That is why I ask the House to pass the motion today.
Sir Richard Ottaway
The hon. Gentleman is right—we have been debating these things for a long time. He neatly leads me into the final part of my speech, which is the appearance of Sir John Chilcot before the Foreign Affairs Committee next Wednesday, when, I hope, we can establish answers to such questions. I want to give him a chance to put the record straight.
Sir John Chilcot is a distinguished public servant who has done his best to assist the country. There is no finger of blame pointed at him, or there will not be next Wednesday afternoon, and I quite accept that he will not be able to discuss substantive matters when he appears before us. What I want him to talk about is the process, and I want him to guide us on how to streamline procedures for the future, and maybe to provide the answers to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).
Mr Jenkin
I am pleased that my right hon. Friend is going to see Sir John Chilcot in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Would he ask him about the role of the Cabinet Secretary? It is suggested by some, as we heard earlier from my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), that somehow he is irrevocably conflicted, even though he is only negotiating what might be published, not what the inquiry can see. Will my right hon. Friend put that question to Sir John, so that he can fairly say whether he feels that the Cabinet Secretary has been obstructing or not? I suspect not.
Sir Richard Ottaway
That is a fair point and I will have a look at my hon. Friend’s request. I do not make a promise but clearly, the Cabinet Secretary and the role of the Cabinet Office are highly relevant to all this. I want to give Sir John an opportunity to answer the questions. Whether he chooses to do so or feels able to do so is a matter for him.
In conclusion, what we want to try and find out is what has gone wrong and how we can deal with such matters in the future, so that these situations never happen again.
Mr Grieve
Yes, my hon. Friend is right. Maxwellisation provides people with the opportunity to respond to passages in a report that relate to them. In such circumstances, a reasonable period needs to be allowed for the process.
The point made by the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) is valid: if it is many years since a witness gave their evidence, it will take them longer to consider their response than if the process occurs a few weeks afterwards. However, I would still hope that a period of a few months was sufficient to conclude the process. That was why I was surprised, first, that the report was not published at the end of 2012 and, secondly—I must say that I am even more troubled by this—that we will not get it before the next general election.
Mr Jenkin
I will commit the sin of asking a question in the House to which I do not know the answer. Why is it called Maxwellisation? We used to talk about Salmon letters.? Is this process different or more protracted, and is it an opportunity for lawyers to extend the process for which they are paid?
Mr Grieve
The terms mean one and the same thing. As with so many descriptions used in government, there is no difference between them. They started out as Salmon letters, but since Mr Maxwell’s experience the process has been described as Maxwellisation. I am sure that either term can be used.
Is Maxwellisation an opportunity for lawyers to crawl over the report? I hope not. At the end of the day, it gives the person going to be criticised an opportunity to explain whether they agree or disagree with the criticisms, and in the light of any representations made it gives the inquiry members an opportunity to think about whether they wish to change their conclusions.
I must say, however, that the report is not ultimately holy writ. It will obviously have a marked effect, but it is the opinion of the inquiry. As long as the opinion has been arrived at reasonably and the process has been fair, the inquiry has to go ahead and produce its conclusions. Disagreements should not therefore lead to endless ping-pong. At some point, the inquiry has to come to a conclusion about whether or not it wishes to accept a representation. That is why I would not expect a Maxwellisation process to go on endlessly.
What has made me anxious is my impression that the Maxwellisation process seems hardly to have begun in many cases. For me, that raises these questions: has a further problem over the documentation led to the delays or has some other phenomenon crept in and caused the delays, and why has the Maxwellisation process taken so long to commence?
Mr Grieve
I can see where my hon. Friend is coming from, but his question goes into the realms of speculation. On the face of it, if the inquiry, which has been properly set up and conducted, makes a report—a Privy Council report—to Parliament, I do not see why such an issue should arise. My concern is to get an explanation.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) spoke before me and came up with some very practical suggestions about how things could be done. I am particularly pleased because those suggestions really underline the fact that we allowed the Government of the day to set up this inquiry in a haphazard and casual way.
I speak as someone who straddles two aspects of this matter. I was shadow Defence Secretary at the time and often spoke from the Dispatch Box in the run-up to the Iraq war. I am also taking part in this debate, in answer to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), as someone who feels a deep responsibility for what has happened as a consequence of that war. It may surprise the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) that I agree with a phrase of his speech. It is that we need to understand the “set of conditions” that allowed us “to pursue this particular course of action”. It would have been nice if that had been put into the terms of reference, to which I will come in a moment.
The origins of the Chilcot inquiry go back beyond 2006, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) adverted. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing this debate, because it has proved already to be a very informative and interesting discussion.
Just to go back to the origins of the inquiry, I have in my hand the resolution that was tabled by the then Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). Another five of us were named on the motion, including me and a future leader of the Conservative party, now Lord Howard of Lympne. The motion said:
“This House is concerned at the growing public confusion since the summer adjournment as a result of increasingly conflicting accounts of intelligence relating to and events leading up to the recent Iraq war and what has happened since; and calls for the setting up of a comprehensive independent judicial inquiry into the Government’s handling of the run-up to the war, of the war itself, and of its aftermath, and into the legal advice which it received.”
How long was it before we actually got an inquiry, and a rather watered down inquiry at that? Let me explain why we called for the inquiry at that point—and this is a significant point. I came back from Iraq shortly after the invasion, having been on a shadow ministerial visit to Basra and had a comprehensive briefing. I then tabled a paper to the shadow Cabinet on what I had found that had caused me a great deal of concern. The paper on post conflict Iraq mentioned
“the widening gap between expectations and reality.”
It said:
“Many are wondering how much longer before the coalition’s window of opportunity closes.”
I went on to explain that what we needed was a proper comprehensive plan, a road map and benchmarks in order to structure a proper coalition provisional Administration, backed by the necessary civilian and military resources. In the addendum to the paper, I wrote, “Quagmire?” and for that I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway)—and it may disturb him that I am doing so. Of all the speeches that we heard on that fateful day when we voted to go to war, his was the most disturbing. I chose the word “quagmire” because I remembered him saying that we were entering into a quagmire.
We had done our best to satisfy ourselves from the Opposition perspective that there was plenty of planning. It is true that there was plenty of planning in Washington, but the problem was that the Americans had more than one plan. They had a Rumsfeld plan and a State Department plan and there was a competition between the two of them over which should be implemented. But neither plan was based on any proper understanding, depth of assessment or analysis of what we were going to find when we got in there, which is why it became evident so quickly that we were facing a disaster. I wrote:
“Currently all the elements for protracted insurgency warfare exist, though there is every opportunity to prevent the situation deteriorating.”
There was an inability to get anyone to hear this message in Government and, I confess, even some in my own party—this was the Government’s problem, not our problem. It is the same kind of truth blindness to which my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) referred in the British political establishment, in the civil service, among the political leaders.
Jeremy Corbyn
Who does the hon. Gentleman think took the extraordinary decision to destroy the whole of the state structures in Iraq after the invasion, dismiss all the armed forces and the police and leave chaos behind?
Mr Jenkin
Yes, it was Ambassador Bremer. In my paper, I wrote:
“The Bremer administration has 3,000 US officials, only 16 of which are Arab speakers. 650,000 Iraqi Government officials have failed to return to work.”
There was a complete misappreciation in the first 100 days —the golden 100 days after the invasion—that we were sitting on a volcano. I remember asking questions from the Opposition Benches such as, “What are we going to do about the Iranian insurgents coming over the border?” The border between Iraq and Iran was completely open. There was flat denial that any of this mattered or was actually happening.
What this inquiry cannot do is resolve the controversies about legality or intelligence, which have been raked over so many times. So many other inquiries have looked at those things. What this inquiry must do is address the machinery of government problem, the capacity problem—the understanding problem to which my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), the Chairman of the Defence Committee so capably referred.
The Select Committee on Public Administration produced—this is the other side of the equation in this debate—no fewer than three reports in the last Parliament about how to conduct inquiries. We produced a report at the beginning of this Parliament entitled “Who does UK National Strategy?” The informal answer that I received from the then Chief of the Defence Staff, which we put in our report, was nobody. Nobody holds a strategic concept for the United Kingdom. No one creates a single document and keeps it updated on how we are to conduct our statecraft in this increasingly troubled world in which we are increasingly vulnerable.
I say to the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) that we found that the Foreign Office had an aversion to any kind of strategy. Culturally, it does not like the idea of being tied to a plan, misunderstanding that a plan is different from strategy. We need to learn. How does the machinery of government allow us to go to war without a better understanding of the consequences? Those consequences have led to a complete loss of confidence in this Chamber in the ability of Whitehall to make those judgments, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham said.
What sort of reform do we want to be able to drive—as my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border asked? Why does this disconnect exist between what people in Whitehall think is going on or think that they are able to control and what the people on the ground find out is actually going on and are unable to control?
When I came back from Basra on that occasion, I remember reporting to the shadow Cabinet that I had asked the General Officer Commanding in Basra what message he wanted me to take back home. He said in slightly less proper language, “Where the hell is DFID? What is the plan? What are we meant to do now?” There was no plan. I do not apologise for complaining about the lack of a plan in the aftermath because it reflects exactly what the General was saying. There is a lack of seriousness, a lack of trusting people who come with challenging information and uncomfortable truths.
We need more capacity in Whitehall to learn and understand, to gather real knowledge and information—capacity for analysis and assessment, which paradoxically we do quite well in the intelligence field through the Joint Intelligence Committee, unless it is sat on by political appointees. We need the ability to choose realistic objectives for our foreign and security policy; to formulate comprehensive plans and then be able to implement them.
As we wait for the inquiry to conclude and to report its findings, we must reflect on the process that we feel has failed us. The first lesson is that it is too late—much too late. It started too late, and it is taking far too long. Why did we not set a time limit? Leveson was set a time limit; why did we not set one for the Iraq inquiry? I have struggled to find definitive terms of reference for the inquiry. In fact, the terms of reference are drawn from a long and rambling statement made from that Dispatch Box by the then Prime Minister, who boasted about how broad and comprehensive and utterly large it was going to be. One wonders whether the words “long grass” were lurking at the back of his mind—the longer the better.
This House failed. This House failed to create an accountable inquiry process. We let it happen. We were all so desperate for an inquiry, so desperate to get it started, that we lost our perspective. If this was a judicial inquiry, as we originally called for, the issues of conflict of interests of people involved on the fringes of the inquiry would not be allowed to arise. There would not be any question about people being able to give their evidence in public, immune from prosecution, which the Chilcot inquiry has been unable to do. We could have ensured the inquiry’s independence. Speakers in this debate have asked why there are no politicians, lawyers or military figures on the inquiry. All those questions were asked when the inquiry was set up, and we are all now ruing the fact that those suggestions were not adopted.
I will recommend that my Committee follows up this inquiry in the next Parliament, covering such questions as how inquiries are established, why, what for, how they operate, judicial or parliamentary, lessons from the terms of reference, how the timing is organised when they are set up and how long they are allowed to sit. I fear this inquiry will turn out to be a shadow of what we really need and we will not learn the lessons. We did not learn the lessons before we went to Afghanistan, before we went to Libya, before we threatened Syria, and these are lessons that we must learn.
Norman Baker (Lewes) (LD)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for facilitating this debate in my name and those of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland), who for personal reasons is not here today. I regret that we are debating the non-publication of the report rather than the report itself—a report that, as others have said, the previous Prime Minister, no doubt in good faith, indicated in 2009 should be published within a year. We still have no date for publication. Last week’s letter from Sir John Chilcot to the Prime Minister talked about taking “further months”—a phrase I think was also used in 2011. It is crucial that we have a time scale, which we do not have now.
It is a great disappointment to me and an insult to the British people that the report is not to be published before the general election. I am grateful that the Foreign Affairs Committee is to question Sir John Chilcot on 4 February. We do not know the reasons for the delay in publication, although some have been suggested today. One speaker suggested that there has been a shortage of staff, in which case, I suggest, Sir John Chilcot might have drawn that to people’s attention rather earlier, to get more resources. We have also heard about the Blair-Bush material—he says that that is now completed—and the Maxwellisation process, although we are not clear how far that has got.
May I ask the Foreign Affairs Committee to address these questions when it has Sir John Chilcot before it next week? How many people have been sent information to which they have been invited to respond? I am not asking for names, simply numbers. When did they receive the letter from the inquiry? What deadline was set for a response? There is some suggestion in the media that Maxwellees, if I can call them that, have sought expensive legal advice. Is any such person having his or her legal costs met from public funds? I think we ought to know that. Maxwellees have been given full access to the original documents or evidence used to support the criticism, and that is quite right, but we need to be clear whether their lawyers have been given the same access. I imagine they have been, if they are defending those individuals, in which case, have they been subject to clearance vetting for the material they see? Those all seem to me to be relevant questions.
Sir John Chilcot must have known of the desire of Members of Parliament to have the report published in good order, and of its importance. That is a point that many Members have made to Sir John, both publicly and privately. I made it to him when I saw him personally shortly after his inquiry was set up, and I reiterated it in a letter to him of 25 April 2014, which in turn followed an article in the Daily Mail the day before that suggested that a delay might take it past the general election. Why was no action taken at that point to ensure that the process could be speeded up, a whole year out, notwithstanding the other delays that have been referred to across the House this afternoon?
It is clear that Sir John Chilcot is totally independent—that is absolutely right—but we have a right to a statement from him next week on the process as to why the report is taking so long and a deadline for his action, which is one reason why I urge hon. Members to support the motion today.
The report is important because in the period 2002-03 the normal processes of Government were bypassed, the normal safeguards were trampled over, and a case was made for war that I believe the then Prime Minister knew to be false. We have talked about sofa government; that is exactly what happened at the time. I did not vote for the war, but other hon. Members did, believing that they should support the Prime Minister of the day when he had given such a clear undertaking that there was a problem. They feel betrayed by that process, as do our British servicemen and their families as a consequence of that war.
In September 2002 the Prime Minister told the House that the dossier—the famous dodgy dossier that was referred to earlier—was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. Lord Butler, in his subsequent and underrated report—in civil service jargonese, but quite useful—called the report “vague and ambiguous”—very different from what the Prime Minister said. But the dossier had one element that the press were actively encouraged to cover—the 45-minute claim. So we had headlines in The Sun, saying “Brits 45 mins from doom”, and in the Evening Standard, “45 mins from attack”. What utter nonsense. There was no basis for that whatsoever. It was known by those in government—I include the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), for whom I also have time—that if it was accurate in any sense, it related to battlefield munitions, not long-range weapons. Robin Cook raised those matters with the Prime Minister and others in government at the time, as he says in his diaries. The 45-minute claim was clearly bogus, yet it was allowed to be the headline, without correction. The then Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, when asked about this in the Hutton inquiry, refused to correct it and said it was not his business to correct what newspapers said that was not accurate.
How did this happen? We know that it happened because the Prime Minister of the day asked Alastair Campbell to chair meetings overseeing the production of the dossier. How can it be right that a political special adviser is asked to oversee intelligence information and is able to change the details of that intelligence information in the report? Alastair Campbell suggested 13 changes, 10 to strengthen language and three stylistic. These are not simply minor matters. The dossier, when it came to Alastair Campbell, said:
“The Iraqi military may be able to deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.”
He changed “may be” to “are”, and John Scarlett agreed with that alteration, which he should not have done either. Yet Alastair Campbell told Lord Hutton that he had no influence “whatsoever”—that is his word—on the words in the dossier. Hans Blix subsequently said that question marks in the dossier had been replaced by exclamation marks.
The second dossier, in February 2003, entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation”, was copied, as has been said, from an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs, and not even copied very well. It refers to the 1991 Gulf war, in any case. What a disgrace that that should have been put out in the Government’s name at the time.
Lastly, there is the Matthew Rycroft memo from July 2002, which subsequently appeared in the papers before 2005. That included an assessment from the head of MI6 at the time, Sir Richard Dearlove, of his recent visit to Washington. He was reported as saying:
“C reported on his recent talks from Washington…Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action…but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
That is what was said in 2002. In April 2002, Tony Blair, giving a speech to the George Bush Senior presidential library in Crawford, Texas, said:
“we must be prepared to act where terrorism or weapons of mass destruction threaten us…if necessary…it should involve regime change.”
There can be no question but that this was all ramped up in order to get the House of Commons to agree to a war that had no justification whatsoever, and that the Prime Minister was party to that, as were others in government at the time, who were clearly very serious.
The events of 2002 are important in themselves and also highly relevant to today. Processes were abandoned. One process that was abandoned—I tried to intervene on the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), who would not give way—was the so-called inquest on David Kelly. The right hon. Gentleman called it an inquest. It was not an inquest; it was a non-statutory inquiry under Lord Hutton. The inquest was stopped by Government Ministers, who took the coroner off the case. What a schoolboy error from the right hon. Gentleman. I am sorry to say that if he is going to throw insults at people, he should at least get his facts right when he does so.
Norman Baker
I had better not. I am sorry.
Normal processes were abandoned. We need to know what happened so that we can stop it happening again.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Although transferring civil servants to other locations and downsizing are necessary, do they not make the whole business of managing the personnel in the civil service much more difficult? Will my right hon. Friend give full backing to the new chief executive of the civil service to strengthen the data held by the Cabinet Office on the skills and capabilities among civil servants so that we do not disrupt the training and career paths of the people on whom we depend?
Mr Maude
As my hon. Friend well knows, the quality of data in central Government that we inherited was not good. It is getting better, but there is much more that needs to be done. The new chief executive of the civil service, who has got off to a terrific start, has a lot of experience in the management of big, complex dispersed organisations from his business background and I am sure that he will want to discuss that further with my hon. Friend.
European Council
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(10 years ago)
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The Prime Minister
As ever, the hon. Lady has hit the nail on the head: it is not the who knew what when, but the bottom line that matters. I have been very clear: we are not paying €2 billion on 1 December—[Interruption.] Let me finish. We are not paying a sum anything like that. That is very clear. As I have said, when the economy grows, we can pay a bit more, but when the economy shrinks, as it frequently did under Labour, we pay a bit less, but what is not acceptable is a €2 billion bill and we will not be paying it.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
May I remind my right hon. Friend that our net contribution to the European Union is already larger than our fastest growing expenditure programme on overseas aid and we are paying that money to an organisation that has not had its accounts signed off for 19 years? Therefore, may I commend him for taking a robust stand on this matter, and will he undertake to make sure that Parliament gets a vote before we pay another penny?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we should be seeking value for money for every penny that we give. Of course, we should not forget that every year we are effectively paying about £2 billion more because Labour gave away part of the rebate. That is what happens. Labour Front Benchers make plenty of noise now, but when they were sitting on the Government Benches they betrayed Britain by giving away the money. Let us remember: why did they give away the money? They gave away the money because there was a promise of reform of the common agricultural policy, and they got absolutely nothing.
Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
I do not think there is any significant controversy about the moral and legal case for what is proposed, and in five minutes I will not set it out. The world would be a better place if ISIS was destroyed, and Britain would be a safer country without doubt. The legal case for intervention in Iraq is clear with its Government’s inviting us, and I think it is pretty clear in Syria because of the genocide and the humanitarian disasters being inflicted on that country. I do agree that it is artificial to divide the two problems: the Sykes-Picot line is a theoretical line on the map now, and there is absolutely no doubt that ISIS has to be defeated in both countries.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Given that one of the principles of counter-insurgency is to deny the enemy a home base, is it not absolutely essential that we back the American efforts in Syria? Otherwise, we will never defeat ISIS in Iraq. For people to suggest that we cannot go to Syria is actually tying our hands behind our backs.
Mr Clarke
I agree with my hon. Friend. President Obama has been quite open that the alliance we are joining is going to launch attacks on ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, and it is unrealistic to proceed on any other basis.
The real debate, to which I would like to contribute briefly, and which is the only issue for the vast majority of people in this House and for the vast majority of our constituents, is: where are we going; what is the long-term purpose; what is the strategy; and how are our foreign policy, our politics and our diplomacy going to be better on this occasion than they have been for the last 15 years?
The disaster of past occasions is not that we attacked pleasant regimes; we attacked evil men when we attacked Hussein, when we got rid of Gaddafi, when we attacked al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and we would have been doing so if we had attacked Assad’s chemical installations last year. It is no good going back. I supported two of those: Libya and Syria last year. I was dubious about one of the others; and I opposed Iraq. That is not the point. What happened in all those cases was that the military deployment produced a situation at least as bad as it had been before and actually largely worse.