Richard Ottaway
Main Page: Richard Ottaway (Conservative - Croydon South)Department Debates - View all Richard Ottaway's debates with the Cabinet Office
(13 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)
The conclusion by Sir Gus O’Donnell that the previous Government did “all it could” to facilitate the release of Mr Megrahi is bad enough, but it is also inconsistent with the impression created by the previous Government. Has the Prime Minister made any assessment of the motive for such behaviour?
The Prime Minister
It is for Ministers to explain what they said and what they did not say. Clearly, they can rely on what is in the report about not being contradicted, but I think they have to look—and I hope they will do it fairly—and ask themselves, “Given that I was receiving memos about a game plan of facilitating contact and given that I was signing off those memos, shouldn’t I have really said to the House of Commons and elsewhere that it was not just that we didn’t want this man to die in a Scottish jail but that we were working actively with the Libyans to try to secure his release?” I think they should have said something more along those lines. I have genuinely tried to approach this by asking what is fair in terms of what we should have been told when those questions were asked.