Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee

Cheryl Gillan Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. I voted for the Iraq invasion. I still do not know whether I would have voted the same way had we known much more about it. The salient part is the lack of preparation, and I would not have voted for it had I thought that there had been so little preparation. Having said that, I think the jury is still out on whether, in the long term, the invasion of Iraq will have been of benefit to global peace and security.

On whether Parliament was deliberately misled, the Select Committee just did not feel qualified to make that judgment. We do not have the procedures and wherewithal in this House to conduct a fair trial of the facts. Were such a Committee to be established to do that, it would need to be a very different kind of Committee with a different kind of quasi-judicial procedures. We suggest that the House should be prepared to do that if further facts and information emerge, but Sir John Chilcot was clear that he did not hold former Prime Minister Tony Blair culpable in deliberately misleading the House, and we have to accept that view.

Finally, on whether our recommendations are timid, they are limited to what we felt able to make recommendations about. However we organise our politics, I am afraid that there will always be occasions when things go wrong. I do not think that any constitutional structure can protect us from that, although we have made some recommendations that would prevent certain things from happening again.

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

Being a member of the Select Committee, I come at this from a position similar to that of my hon. Friend who chairs it with such distinction, which is reflected in the calibre of the report. I have my doubts about whether my vote would have been different had we had more facts, but we take our votes in this House on the facts that are presented to us and then we move forward; we do not get our time over again to relive our votes.

One concern that we were able to cover in the report was the length of time and the unacceptable delays associated with the Chilcot report. The Cabinet Secretary indicated that the Government would consider further the question of how the Iraq inquiry could have been carried out more quickly. We urge that that assessment comes as a matter of urgency, so has my hon. Friend received any indication of the timescale, or will we be waiting a long time, as we did for the inquiry itself?

[Several hon. Members rose—]