Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Dominic Grieve Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

That is a serious point, and I hope that Members will consider it. The question is whether the House was deliberately misled. Chilcot concluded that, although the intelligence may have been flawed and the House misled, it was not deliberately misled. Therefore, in my opinion, if the House tried to make any findings of fact and act on them, it would move away from those previous times when the instrument of a contempt motion has been used. When it has been used previously, there has been a finding of fact upon which the House has been able to act, meaning that someone has either been found guilty or admitted an offence. There has been no admission of deliberately misleading the House, so if the House attempted to make a factual finding, it would become a kangaroo court, because the person accused would not be allowed to represent themselves or speak. In my view, such circumstances would fly in the face of this country’s established principles of justice. Opposition Members are particularly interested in the Human Rights Act, and in article 6, on the right to a fair trial.

[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

The hon. Lady has pre-empted what I was about to say. It seems somewhat strange that some Members who rightly proclaim our need to adhere to the European convention on human rights should suggest a process that cannot meet article 6 requirements under any circumstances.

[Emily Thornberry]

I always get very worried when I agree so thoroughly with the right hon. and learned Gentleman, but I find it happening on many occasions. [Interruption.] I hear from a sedentary position, “You lawyers are all the same”, but we do agree on certain principles. Frankly, our concern is sometimes to ensure that our colleagues who are not lawyers understand these basic legal principles.

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[Emily Thornberry]

It is interesting to hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, but that issue is one of speculation. In my view it is not legal to intervene in a country to topple a regime, and morally we should not intervene in a country unless we have some form of strategy to ensure that the country we leave is in a better state than when we first arrived.

[Mr Grieve]

When I was in government I had some involvement in the Libyan intervention, and from memory I do not think that there was a blinding of oneself to potential problems as a result of that intervention. We must also bear it in mind that the trigger for the intervention was the fact that Colonel Gaddafi was about to kill tens of thousands of his own citizens. That prompted the Security Council resolution that provided the legal basis for the intervention. That highlights—I will come on to speak about this—some of the really difficult decisions in those areas, where even questions of legality do not come into it. I certainly would not be willing to characterise that intervention as having been wrong in the circumstances that prevailed at the time.

[Emily Thornberry]

I hear what the right hon. and learned Gentleman says, but my point is that, again, information was available and could have informed the intervention. Once the initial intervention had been made, what happened thereafter? How were manifest and obvious dangers protected against? I do not think that those important points were considered, and again we learn a lesson from Chilcot and Iraq that is so much more important that any form of soap opera regarding Tony Blair or not Tony Blair.

The other important issue is post-war planning, some of which has been touched on—this is my final point, Mr Speaker, as everyone will be glad to hear. Perhaps most devastatingly, Chilcot highlights the total absence of adequate planning for what would happen after the war and the long-term strategy for Iraq. If ever a mistake should never be repeated, it is the idea that we enter into another military intervention with no idea of its consequences, no plan for the aftermath, and no long-term strategy. And yet, that is the exact hallmark of all the outgoing Prime Minister’s interventions.

Again, we see the evidence in Libya. In the words of President Obama, the Prime Minister became “distracted”, and once the Gaddafi regime had been overthrown, the lengthy, arduous task of post-war reconstruction was all but ignored. In the years since, Libya has been riven by factionalism and violence. Its experiment with democracy was brief, with power in the hands of rival militias, and the ungoverned space that that created was an invitation for Daesh to establish a strategic foothold on the Libyan coast. It is a stain on this Government that they began to pay real attention to the mess they had left in Libya only once that terrorist threat from Daesh became too urgent to ignore.

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[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). There is no doubt that they have two very clear advantages over me in this debate, in that both of them opposed the motion in the House in 2003, which initiated our military action in Iraq. I, on the other hand, supported it—something that I have come very much to regret. I supported it at the time because I was persuaded by the arguments eloquently put forward by the Prime Minister, Mr Blair. He said that, in his view, Saddam Hussein was a real and present danger in the immediate context and that that justified taking military action against him, even without going back for a further resolution of the United Nations Security Council, but relying on the previous resolutions, which, as considerable evidence showed, had been serially breached by Saddam Hussein, certainly in his non co-operation. On that basis, I voted for the motion, as did many others who are still Members and present in this House today.

Sir John Chilcot’s report highlights how the decision-making processes of government can become distorted under pressure of events. I should like to think that I am always a bit wary of that. The distortions highlighted in the report are so considerable that it highlights a dysfunctionality at the heart of Mr Blair’s Government that I hope may have been exceptional to him. For all that, there are plenty of cautionary tales for us in this House today that we can look at in the current context just as much as they would have been considered at the time.

This point seems to have been rather well made already that, and I will not repeat it, because Mr Blair had formed in his view a very strong resolution that we should support the United States, including in removing Saddam Hussein and effecting regime change, the entirety of the processes of government and of Whitehall were then skewed in order to achieve that aim and had the mischief of disregarding all the evidence that might be available to contradict the belief that that was the right course of action to take—whether it was intelligence information or the thorny problem of legality, both of which I wish to touch on briefly this afternoon.

On the question of the intelligence, those of us who have been in government, or who have served on the National Security Council as I have—indeed it is also true of my current role as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee—know perfectly well that intelligence, often obtained at great risk and which is with difficulty, can only be what it is, a tool in decision making. The intelligence may be mistaken. One cannot prevent that in a human society, and one cannot guarantee that its interpretation will be correct. My impression during my time in government was that the intelligence agencies and the Joint Intelligence Committee now go to very considerable lengths to point out the limits of the use to which intelligence can properly be put—a lesson which, I suspect, they derived from this experience.

Reading Sir John Chilcot’s report, one can only conclude that the way in which intelligence was handled during the run-up to the Iraq war is, in some cases, truly breathtaking. It makes very troublesome reading. I hope very much—I am not going to say anything more about this—that those within the agencies who now do the work will read and reread Sir John’s report in order to remind themselves of how perfectly reasonable intelligence was skewed and, I have to say, misused for the purposes of justifying a theory, and then, I am afraid, misused by Mr Blair when he came to address this House in the defining moment before the war was sanctioned by this Parliament.

The certainties that were engendered were never present. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) made a very good intervention about this last week when he said that if we had taken the time and trouble to read some of the background information available, we might have doubted some of the certainties that were being expressed. I think he was absolutely right about that, and that is another burden that Members of this House who participated in that debate will have to bear.

So much for the intelligence. What about the process of legal advice? I was at the heart of trying to provide legal advice to Government when I was a Law Officer. My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General is on the Front Bench and he, too, has been involved in those processes. As Law Officers know, legal advice is often advice which cannot in any way be certain. Legal advice is exactly what it says it is. In some cases, particularly when one is dealing with international law, the question whether one is on the right side or the wrong side of international law is an intensely grey area, precisely because there is no ultimate tribunal to determine those issues. Yet at the heart of the British Government’s doctrine and ethics is the principle that we have to act lawfully at all times. It is for the Law Officers to try to steer that course.

What shines through to me, reading the Chilcot inquiry report, is not, as some critics have said, that Lord Goldsmith as Attorney General abandoned legal objectivity. Now that I have read the Chilcot inquiry report and looked at these passages very carefully, it seems to me that he fulfilled those criteria as best he possibly could, but that he was drawn into a process which in itself was utterly flawed, because it cherry-picked whatever bit of the advice that he provided suited those who wanted to present it, and then sold it in that way both to the Cabinet, who never properly inquired or scrutinised it at all, and ultimately to the public.

[Mr David Davis]

Does my right hon. and learned Friend really think that the Attorney General met all his duties? The report refers to the final question to Tony Blair, which it says was answered perfunctorily, about whether the conditions had been met. Surely he should have been a little more pressing, rather than accepting a perfunctory reply before changing his view.

[Mr Grieve]

I simply quote from paragraph 810 of the executive summary:

“It is an essential part of the legal basis for military action”—

this was written by an official in the Attorney General’s Department—

“without a further resolution of the Security Council that there is strong evidence that Iraq has failed to comply with and co-operate fully in the implementation of resolution 1441 and has thus failed to take the final opportunity offered by the Security Council in that resolution. The Attorney General understands that it is unequivocally the Prime Minister’s view that Iraq has committed further material breaches as specified in [operative] paragraph 4 of resolution 1441, but as this is a judgment for the Prime Minister, the Attorney would be grateful for confirmation that this is the case.”

It is important to understand one of the big changes that has probably taken place between 2003 and today in the way in which a Law Officer’s advice is secured. My impression from reading Chilcot—I hope I have got this right—is that, in practice, the Attorney General was provided with only sketched backgrounds of the factual analysis on which his legal opinion was being sought. The big difference now, and I can tell the House this without giving away state secrets, is that if Law Officers are asked to advise on a factual basis that involves a serious or complex problem of international law, they will receive briefing that is as good as, and—if they demand it—potentially better than, that which would be provided to the Prime Minister himself as to the intelligence and factual base that justifies it, so they have to make their own independent assessment. However, it is quite clear that, in 2003, and, I suspect, even before then—I do not think this was peculiar to 2003—that was not the practice that was adopted; it was not how Government worked. In practice, the Law Officer, Lord Goldsmith, was placed in a position where he had, reasonably, to take on trust the factual assessments made by others, and particularly the Prime Minister.

I want to make it clear that I cannot make a judgment on whether Lord Goldsmith’s advice of 7 March was right or not, but he set out—correctly, in my view—the alternative interpretations available for resolution 1441. I simply make the point, as I did in my intervention, that there are areas of international law that raise massive difficulties of interpretation. If, for example, we stuck, as some jurists would argue, to the principle that no military intervention can take place without UN Security Council authorisation, the well-established United Kingdom doctrine of intervening on the basis of humanitarian necessity, which is what led us to be able to take action in Kosovo, would never have come about. I simply chuck that into the pool of the debate the House has had in trying to understand some of the complexities.

Of course, none of that gets away from the fact that the debate would likely have been very different in Cabinet if Lord Goldsmith’s advice in its original form had been properly presented, circulated and discussed. As any of us who have been in government know, the process by which we moderate each other’s opinions is by challenging them. If we do not have a process of challenge, we should not be surprised that, at the end of the day, people simply end up rubber-stamping decisions because it appears convenient to do so. One of the interesting features, I might add, of being in coalition was that one quickly realised that because some members of, for example, the National Security Council or the Cabinet were not beholden to the Prime Minister, the level of challenge was raised in a manner that one might not necessarily have found in a single-party Government, which is an interesting reflection on some of the problems that flow from it. Of course, when one has a Prime Minister who is utterly dominant after four or five years in government and receiving a triumphant second mandate, these things become even harder.

Those, then, are my thoughts on those two principal issues. There are lots of other issues in the report, which is one of the most compelling reads I have had. I am not sure I am going to be able to get through the whole lot, but I will certainly try to read much more of it.

Let me just make two final points. First, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) expressed the desire that accountability should lead to somebody being held at least in contempt of this House if Mr Blair did act improperly. I simply say to him that, just as some people were talking about impeachment, which was last used in 1806, contempt proceedings in Parliament—unless they are based on findings made in an external tribunal that meets article 6 compliance —will, in practice, be very difficult. I would strongly argue that, tempting as such a route might suggest itself to be, the practical difficulties are likely to make it impossible to follow. I say that in all sincerity.

[Joanna Cherry]

I would like to explore this with the right hon. and learned Gentleman. I am not quite clear in what way he considers that the former Prime Minister’s civil rights and obligations would be determined in a contempt motion. As I understand it, as a novice in parliamentary procedure, it is a breach of privilege. It is not a determination of the former PM’s civil rights or obligations, and it is clearly not a criminal charge—a contempt of court. Could the right hon. and learned Gentleman elucidate on what basis he thinks that article 6 would be engaged?

[Mr Grieve]

It depends, I suppose, on what sanction this House wishes to follow. However, there is a second issue. We may have examples where somebody says one thing to this House and, in front of a tribunal or court of record, when giving evidence on oath, says something different. The House can then look at those two things juxtaposed and conclude, for example, that the House was misled in evidence that it was given. That might well give rise to a finding of breach of privilege for contempt, although that still leaves unanswered the question of sanctions.

I do understand the hon. and learned Lady’s point. However, I am not, in this case, making some definitive statement; I am simply describing what, to my mind, appear to be the difficulties that are likely to come from trying to pursue this particular course of action. As, on the whole, I would like the reputation of this House to stand enhanced by the way in which we approach the Chilcot inquiry report and its aftermath, I am always wary of suggesting, counselling or recommending a course of action that might lead to the very opposite of what is intended.

[Joanna Cherry]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman knows that I hold his legal expertise in the highest regard. He says that it is important that the reputation of this House is enhanced by the way in which it deals with the outcome of this report. Surely the reputation of this House will not be enhanced if there is no attempt to hold the former Prime Minister to account.

[Mr Grieve]

I have listened to the hon. and learned Lady, and this matter can be debated or discussed at greater length, but, as I say, I counsel caution. The truth is that the then Prime Minister, Mr Blair, has been examined at the court of public opinion and, I suspect, of history, and I think it is likely that that judgment is going to be pretty unkind to the way in which this process was carried out. Whether the House feels that it wants to do more immediately is a matter that we can debate another time.

The point has been made that the outcome of this process in the middle east has been, on the evidence, lamentable. Of course, the middle east is a place of massive dysfunctionality. It may be that even if we had not intervened in 2003, we would find that another pattern of war and bloody conflict would have occurred, based on a whole series of disintegrations of the social fabric of that area that has been going on for some time, and that we can see manifested in the current conflicts in Iraq and Syria. That is not, I think, entirely due to our intervention in 2003, but has elements inherent within those societies themselves. I worry very much—indeed, this has coloured my view as a politician ever since—that this has also had a terrible effect on public trust in us and our institutions in this country that carries itself all the way into the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. On that, I rather agreed, for once, with an article in the New Statesman.

We have much to learn from this very sorry episode. The nugget I derive from it is that we must have open debate and that we must avoid simply treating politics as presentational gimmicks. That has become a habit in modern western society because of the development of social media, the press and the way in which we communicate ideas, but if we continue to do it we will ruthlessly undermine sensible decision making and the ability to come to the right conclusions by debate, which is absolutely the heart of what this House should be about.