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Iraq War Inquiry

That is absolutely right, and it is a point that I have made in at least one of the previous debates, and the hon. Gentleman may have made it, too. Yes, it is now six years since the start of the conflict, which is longer than the duration of the entire second world war. Faced with enormity of these issues and the extent of public expectation that an inquiry will be held, the Government have long since given up the argument that no inquiry may be necessary at all, although it was their starting-point in 2006, when this series of debates began—a debate that was actually launched by the nationalist parties. At that time, the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett), who was Foreign Secretary, was very careful not to commit the Government to an inquiry at all, saying that""this is not the time for making these decisions."" She also said:""Unlike at the time of the Falklands war we now have a framework of Select Committees that carry out independent inquiries."—[Official Report, 31 October 2006; Vol. 451, c. 172.]" True enough, that careful stonewalling was breached within minutes of the end of that debate by the right hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Des Browne), who was Secretary of State for Defence. He went out to St. Stephen's entrance and said:""When the time is right, of course there will be such an inquiry"." Government sources then said that he had made a "slip of the tongue". However, it was not many months—16 May 2007—before the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), showing early on in the Labour party's deputy leadership election the skill that she is now employing in the leadership manoeuvring, said:""I think that when the troops do finally come home, which we all hope will be as soon as possible, there will need to be an inquiry and I think that we also need to look at the circumstances in which we went in but at the planning and preparation for the aftermath as well, and we will need to learn lessons from that."" By the time that we returned to the issue on the Floor of the House in June 2007, the ministerial resistance to the idea that an inquiry might be necessary had totally collapsed.