Iraq Inquiry
Debate between Norman Baker and Richard Ottaway(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). He and I have sparred over this issue for the best part of a decade, but I welcome the clarity of his remarks. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing the debate. On his very last point about political advantage, I could not agree with him more. This was a political decision, and when can the public pass comment and judgment on a public decision but at a general election? So it would be entirely appropriate if the report was ready for publication in the next few months.
On 18 March 2003, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, stood at the Dispatch Box and looked Parliament and the nation in the eye and said that the security of the western world was threatened. He was not my party leader, but he was my Prime Minister, and I reached the conclusion, while I was sitting in the Chamber on the Opposition Benches, that it would be irresponsible not to accept his warning and his advice. The question I have asked myself ever since was whether that was the right decision. Twelve years later, we still do not have a definitive answer, and in truth I have regretted that decision that I made to support the Prime Minister, in the absence of clear evidence, ever since.
There have been no fewer than four inquiries into this subject during my time in Parliament. None of them has taken more than six months. The first was conducted by the Foreign Affairs Committee, of which I was a member, and resulted in a split decision. The key passages of the report were carried on the casting vote of the Chairman, but I did not agree with its conclusion that the action taken was justified by the information available at the time. That inquiry was triggered by a report on the “Today” programme by Mr Andrew Gilligan, who said that he had evidence that the case for war had been “sexed up”. That led to war between No. 10 and the BBC, largely provoked by Alastair Campbell. It led to the resignation of the director-general, Greg Dyke, and the chairman, Gavyn Davies.
During that inquiry, the Government put up Dr David Kelly to give evidence to the Committee. It was done by a devious process and eventually the media managed to ascertain the name of Dr Kelly. It was an unfathomable tragedy for him and his family, and the mystery to this day is why the Government put him up to give evidence in the first place. During his evidence he denied that he said to Andrew Gilligan the words that were quoted, but more critically, he had given a briefing to Susan Watts of “Newsnight”, and “Newsnight” published the quotation that he had given to it. When questioned by myself and David—now Lord—Chidgey as to whether he had said those words, Dr Kelly denied saying them. In fact, the BBC had recorded the conversation, and it is believed that he died on the day that he discovered this and was about to be outed as having misled the Committee.
That led to the second inquiry, the inquest conducted by Lord Hutton, which concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life.
Sir Richard Ottaway
I will not give way to the right hon. Gentleman because I know exactly what he has to say and I will let him give his conspiratorial twaddle to the House in his own time, rather than mine. [Interruption.] I am sure he will let the House know shortly.
In the inquest conducted by Lord Hutton, he concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. Although the case for war may have been exaggerated, he concluded that it was not “sexed up” in the sense that it contained false or unreliable intelligence. But the evidence that came out during that hearing was that the weapons of mass destruction that we had invaded Iraq to remove were, in fact, small-calibre shells and battlefield weapons—in other words, they were defensive weapons, not offensive weapons that would threaten the security of the western world.
When the report was published and we had the debate in the House on the Hutton inquiry, I intervened on Tony Blair and asked him if he knew that information on the day that we voted to go to war, and if not, why he had not told the House that. He replied that he did not know. So the question is, how could we be going to war when the Prime Minister of the day, who made the decision to go to war, was not properly briefed about the threat that we faced? I, the House and the nation want to know the answer to that. We expect that the Chilcot inquiry will provide the answers.
That the threat was only battlefield weapons was confirmed by the third inquiry, which was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2003. It made no judgment on the rights or wrongs of the case for war, but it looked at the use of intelligence and it accepted that there had been convincing intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programmes. That has subsequently been established to be manifestly wrong, so why was that information there? Again, we want the Chilcot inquiry and the Iraq inquiry to provide the answer.
The Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry led to the fourth inquiry—the Butler inquiry of 2004, which was a continuation of the ISC inquiry. Two members of the Intelligence and Security Committee sat on the Butler inquiry, together with Lord Butler, the chairman, who is now a member of the ISC, and Field Marshal Inge, who gave military advice to the committee. The final member was Sir John Chilcot. This was by far the most in-depth inquiry and looked at the many issues that had surfaced. It concluded that the 45-minute claim should not have been made in the way that it was. But—and it is an absolutely critical but—the inquiry still had not had full access to all the information, and questions remained. Those questions continue to reverberate. Eventually the Chilcot inquiry was established, and Chilcot had the great advantage that he was at least briefed when he started.
I feel that I have only scraped the surface of the high number of unanswered questions. I appreciate the enormity of the task faced by the Iraq inquiry. It has had to deal with former President Bush’s office, the security services, the Cabinet Office, Tony Blair’s office and the offices of the witnesses. It has had to cope with hundreds of hours of oral evidence and thousands of pages of written evidence. There has been personal illness on the committee. The committee has my sympathy, but six years? The prediction at the time, as has just been said, was that it would take two years. The Franks inquiry took six months and the issue in 2009, as has been said, was whether the Iraq inquiry’s report would be ready by the 2010 election. My only regret is that when it is published, I will not be here to debate fully the issues that have been raised.