---

Iran (Detention of Naval Personnel)

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his statement and for his briefing to colleagues last night. We should also be grateful to Tony Hall for giving us this report on the media handling. However, I still hold the view that I have held throughout: the media handling is something of a red herring. The Secretary of State has taken responsibility, which is right because permission for the revelations could only have been given by him or in his name. I simply seek a reassurance from him that among the lessons that are learned will not be a temptation to gag military officers from talking to the press in the course of their ordinary duties. Some of them have intimated to me that they occasionally feel that that is the case. The Secretary of State has told us that the Fulton inquiry was thorough; I have no reason to doubt that, and I entirely understand why it cannot be published. However, there are a number of unanswered questions. We gather from the statement that there was not a problem to do with equipment or lack of helicopters, that there was not a major intelligence failure and that there was not any particular serious error anywhere in the line of command. In that case, what exactly did go wrong? Did the Royal Navy simply fail to comprehend the level of threat that the Iranians posed? If so, that was in stark contrast to our land forces in Basra and on the border, who understood only too well what the threat was—and, indeed, that has been discussed many times in this House. The Secretary of State says that lessons must be learned quickly from the experiences of our partners. Do the other nations involved in this work use constant air cover? It remains to me unfathomable that these dangerous operations could be taking place in contested waterways without a greater degree of air cover than seemed to be available within the coalition at the time. This report seems to conclude that everyone was to blame a bit but no one was to blame a lot. Mercifully, this turned out in the end only to be a national embarrassment; it could have been a complete disaster. Who exactly will step up to the plate and accept responsibility for what happened?