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Iraq Inquiry

I voted against the invasion of Iraq. As we have all heard, we have already had four inquiries and one might ask why we need a fifth. There are just two arguments in favour of that—one is on account of the scale of the disaster that has flowed from the invasion; the other is the need to know how it came about that we invaded Iraq in the first place. I thought that the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), who was such a distinguished foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal party, put his finger absolutely on the real reason why the Government do not want an inquiry. Actually, we all know what has gone wrong. Anyone who has followed what happened knows perfectly well what went wrong in the Iraq war. We do not need another inquiry on that score, although the people in charge are, of course, reproducing the same mistakes in Afghanistan. The fact that they are doing so shows that no inquiry is going to educate them on these matters. No, the real reason is that Labour Members are frightened that the activities of the then Prime Minister in the run-up to the war will be exposed in detail. Three inquiries—into the Crimea, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli—have already been mentioned, but one much more relevant inquiry has not been mentioned: the Jameson raid inquiry—[Hon. Members: ““Ah.””] The key issue there was whether Joseph Chamberlain, without the knowledge of his Cabinet colleagues or of civil servants in his Colonial Office or the Foreign Office, conspired with Cecil Rhodes to launch that raid. It led, of course, to the disastrous Boer war, in which British casualties were incomparably higher than in Iraq so far—tragic though those have been. The voting on the inquiry was entirely on party lines, as it always is in the end, so no one knows to this day whether or not Joe Chamberlain was a scoundrel. However, Enoch Powell, who wrote a biography of Joe Chamberlain, told me that when he started studying and writing about Chamberlain's career, he thought he was a great hero, but by the time he had finished, he was convinced that he was a scoundrel. That is also my view, in that I am pretty certain that he had foreknowledge of the Jameson raid. I am also convinced that Mr. Tony Blair entered into a conspiracy—in September 2002, if not earlier—with President George W. Bush to attack Iraq in the early months of 2003.