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Iraq Inquiry

I voted for the Iraq war, which I now bitterly regret. I therefore make these remarks much more in a spirit of contrition than of rebuke. I strongly believe that this issue will not go away. It continues to damage public opinion, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) has just so rightly said, and, like all painful traumas, it can only be exorcised by facing up to it, warts and all, and by an admission of mistakes, misjudgments and misrepresentations being made, with a full account being given of the changes to be implemented to prevent any such events from happening again. That is the only sure way in which to restore confidence and trust, which is what my party is now, rightly, urgently trying to do. Indeed, that has been the central refrain in the leadership and deputy leadership election contests in the party. The Chancellor—the Prime Minister in waiting—has made it clear that he wants a much more open and transparent form of Government to be a key means of winning back the votes that we have lost. I say to him that the Iraq war is unquestionably the place to begin. A wholly independent and thorough inquiry—not only into the war’s origins, which have already been explored to some degree, but into its handling and its aftermath—will do far more to restore confidence and trust than any other single issue. I take the Government’s point that there have already been four separate inquiries, but none of them addresses what is clearly still needed. The Hutton inquiry was widely dismissed as a whitewash. The members of the Intelligence and Security Committee are appointed by the Prime Minister and the Committee reports to the Prime Minister. For all its seniority and expertise, which are undoubted, it cannot be regarded as wholly independent. The Foreign Affairs Committee is inhibited because it does not have access to the crucial intelligence data. The Butler review, to be fair, did produce a pretty damning report which drew attention to many high-level failures. However, it concluded that no one was really responsible, and drew no conclusions about how a debacle of this kind could be prevented in the future. None of the inquiries dealt with the handling or the aftermath of the war. What has happened since the war is, arguably, even more important. Having said that, I do not endorse either the proposal in the Opposition motion that a committee of Privy Councillors should undertake the inquiry. Apart from the fact that the matter was debated less than eight months ago, which makes it hard to believe that there is not a measure of political opportunism in raising it again so soon, I do not believe that it would provide the degree of independence that is vital for the purpose. The committee of inquiry, which I strongly endorse in principle, should be headed by a senior judge or similar person. However, unlike in the case of Lord Hutton, the chairman, members and terms of reference of the inquiry should all have to be approved by Parliament. The acceptance of its independence would therefore be assured from the outset. The appropriate Select Committee might be the Public Administration Committee, whose Chairman I am glad to see in the Chamber today. A great deal of information relevant to such an inquiry has already been documented. However, several key issues that led directly to the Iraqi disaster have simply been left hanging in the air—they have been debated endlessly, but no conclusions or determination about a different Government action later have been reached. No recommendation has been made for reform to prevent a repetition in future.