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Iraq Inquiry

Obviously, I was completely misled by what was said in the House at the time. I am sure that closer textual analysis would have revealed all the caveats in place then, but I am explaining why it is difficult to sign up to the Conservative motion today, even though I think that its terms are entirely right. I think that we have to do better with the inquiry's terms of reference; it is not satisfactory to have an inquiry with no formal terms of reference. The period that has been set out is the correct one, and there has been a statement about learning the lessons of what happened in that time, but we must do better in establishing the inquiry's formal terms of reference—that is, what its purpose is. Should the inquiry be public or private? Anyone who has thought about that for a moment will understand that, 30-odd years after Franks, it is not possible to announce that an inquiry of this kind on a central public policy issue could be conducted entirely in private. We have only to sniff the air to know that that is not doable any more. It is right to say that, after Hutton, some people will damn all inquiries even before they start. Yet the Hutton inquiry operated in public and had its own website: all the material was posted there for people to interrogate for themselves, and the sky did not fall in. Government did not become impossible, and in the present circumstances it was just not sustainable—and nor should it be—to announce an inquiry into the Iraq war and say that it would be held entirely in private. The composition of the inquiry is well worth attending to, as several hon. Members have noted. What is the best balance of expertise that will be required? How will the inquiry be conducted? There is much merit in thinking about segmenting the inquiry. The huge, dominant issue has to do with the run-up to the war and the decision to go to war, but a second issue is what happened with the preparation for after the war. What was the cause of all the trouble then? I can see that it would be possible to conduct the first part of such an inquiry in a much shorter time than the whole thing would need. It may well be that Sir John Chilcot will think that a sensible way to proceed, but he certainly could have been pointed in that direction. I want to repeat, very quickly, the point that I made in my intervention on the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), as the House needs to understand why it has been marginalised in these matters. I set out the position under the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921 because it inserted Parliament, albeit in a formal sense, in the centre of the process involved in setting up an inquiry. That process gave an inquiry all the powers of a High Court judge. All the procedural rules were in place, and the inquiry had all the authority of Parliament behind it. That was converted into a parliamentary resolution, with terms of reference. What we have done is to allow the Executive to remove Parliament's residual role from the process of setting up an inquiry. When our Select Committee looked at this, we were particularly concerned about circumstances where Governments did not want to set up an inquiry, but having one was in the public interest. In those circumstances, how could Parliament itself initiate the process of having an inquiry? For a time, that was the issue with Iraq. It looked as though the Government were less than keen about having an Iraq inquiry, and Parliament did not have any mechanism to bring one about. Now we have had the announcement on the Iraq inquiry, but Parliament has not been involved in the process of thinking about some of the issues—about purpose, terms of reference, composition and so forth. That would have been the normal procedure until the previous position was abolished. I thus invite the House of Commons as part of its general project at the moment of reclaiming—