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Iraq War Inquiry

I think the whole House knows the answer to the hon. Gentleman's question. Let me return to the Foreign Secretary and his rather inadequate performance last year. Having failed to deal with the argument that an early inquiry would get in the way of our troops' operations, he then said we did not need an inquiry to learn any lessons because, somehow, miraculously—in a way that everyone else had clearly missed—the lessons had already been learned. According to the Foreign Secretary, there had been two studies by the Ministry of Defence of the operations in Iraq. There had been internal reviews. The Foreign Secretary said with a straight face that the civil service and armed forces continually adjusted and updated their strategies in the light of experience. I am not joking. That argument was served up to us a year ago by the Foreign Secretary. He was effectively saying that although the Government supported an inquiry at some stage in the future, that inquiry would not be about learning lessons because they had already been learned. That was an astonishing argument to make and showed how weak the Government's position is.