Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Morris of Aberavon Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Morris of Aberavon]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the case for discharging the Chairman and members of the Chilcot Inquiry, and inviting the Cabinet Secretary to set out a mechanism for an interim report to be produced on the basis of the evidence gathered.

[Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome at last the opportunity to debate the Chilcot inquiry. I have been very critical of the scandalous delays in publication. It may well be that the members of the committee will, after all, turn out to be knights in shining armour and produce an authoritative report that completely justifies its delays—in which case, I would withdraw my criticism. This committee was set up in June 2009, but it is still not able to give us a firm date for publication. Sir John recently promised to write to the Prime Minister in November with a timetable but, crucially, will not give a date for publication. The proposed legal action of some of the families of the 179 soldiers killed may have moved him. They are the ones most directly concerned in the establishment of the truth as to why we went to war. They have been badly let down: justice delayed is justice denied.

As an ex-Law Officer, I am concerned with upholding the rule of law in all its manifestations. A public inquiry is set up where there is widespread public concern on an issue of great importance. Although the cynical may portray it as kicking something into the long grass, we have no means other than that: to identify distinguished persons, be they lawyers or others, to identify the facts, deliver an authoritative judgment and publish their conclusions in good time for lessons to be learned. Respect for good governance is undermined if reports do not see the light of day before issues become dimmer and dimmer in public memory. Failure to publish reports in a timely way is indeed kicking it into the long grass.

The Franks committee into the Falklands War took about six months. Prime Minister Brown accepted the Cabinet Secretary’s recommendation to accept it as a model, and probably its terms of reference, the choice of members and perhaps also the mistaken advice to choose a non-statutory inquiry without the controls of the Inquiries Act 2005. I believe that the committee’s remit into an eight-year war might have been more tightly drawn. In the view of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, the terms of reference are so wide as to be almost infinite.

Sir John has said that he was not given the opportunity to discuss the scope of the inquiry. The Cabinet Office was in such a hurry that he was given only 10 minutes to decide whether to accept the chair or not.

I trust that the inquiry has concentrated on two fundamental issues, rather than chase every hare. First, what was the cause of the war? Did the Government believe the claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or was the aim regime change, which has no basis whatsoever in international law? Was this the real motivation? Secondly, when was the decision taken to go to war? Was it at Crawford or Camp David, in April 2002, in discussions between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush? Even the British ambassador was excluded from those discussions and apparently no note was taken. If the decision was taken then, any subsequent discussions at the United Nations would have been a charade. It might explain why, blaming the apparent unwillingness of the French, no further effort was made to get an agreed political solution at the Security Council. In my memoirs I say that the Chilcot Inquiry may tell us.

The saddest feature of the inquiry process was the strenuous efforts of the Cabinet Office to block the committee from having access to whole swathes of vital documentation, including notes from Blair to Bush. Eventually, the Cabinet Office’s arguments could not be sustained and the committee deserves our congratulations on winning this argument. However, the agreed redactions and the agreement to publish just some of the documents will need very close examination. Sir John is not clear as to how much time was lost in the argument. At one stage the evidence was 13 months, but it could have been up to two years. The Minister’s comments on these two aspects will be of great interest.

The lost time is not the most glorious period in the history of the Cabinet Office. I presume that the committee has not considered the memorandum, disclosed last weekend, from Secretary Powell to President Bush. Sir John has stated that he has seen 30 minutes from Blair to Bush and records of conversations between Powell and Jack Straw. However, he did not have access to the archives of foreign Governments. Assuming the validity of the memo, will the committee need to reflect on it and will it affect its conclusions and the date of publication? Regrettably, there was no counsel to the inquiry, which can do the spade work, assemble the evidence and save a great deal of time.

The next cause of delay is the doctrine of Maxwellisation—briefly, in common law, fairness to all concerned. The criticised should have the opportunity to comment before publication. The Times has published some very important letters on Maxwellisation—for example, from Sir Robert Francis and Sir Stanley Burnton. In my view, the process of Maxwellisation, much criticised by a Select Committee of this House on which I had the honour of serving, is open to criticism for statutory inquiries. This doctrine and the fear of judicial review have been elevated to a far higher level than previously envisaged. We do not know how much time has been lost, how many witnesses were involved, and what has been deemed a reasonable time for replies. In his evidence, Sir John kept his cards very close to his chest.

The Prime Minister, who complained so much when the inquiry was set up about its estimated time of one year, has since been wringing his hands as he says the inquiry is independent. It may now be counterproductive to dispense with the committee’s services, although I have been calling since 1 July—and indeed earlier—for the Cabinet Secretary to assess the evidence and produce an interim report for Parliament to consider what further action could be taken. If this had been a statutory inquiry, Section 14 of the Inquiries Act 2005 would have allowed the Minister, with notice, to pull the plug and bring the inquiry to an end. Every public inquiry, one way or another, is subject to the will of Parliament. In this instance, I have a feeling that we went down the wrong way in not having a statutory inquiry with the controls of such an inquiry.