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Iraq Inquiry

I will leave the interpreter of mandarin to draw his own conclusions. The whole UK-US relationship must obviously be examined too. There are reams of papers that explain and reveal how the two were interacting in that relationship and how that led to certain decisions being taken that, if they had been presented differently, might have been taken differently. There were crucial reports of the key moments in the decision-making process. First, there was the meeting between the Prime Minister and the President in Texas, at President Bush's ranch in Crawford. Then there was the meeting between the Prime Minister and the President in Washington from which Sir Christopher Meyer was excluded. Then there is a series of documents written by Sir David Manning, the Prime Minister's adviser on overseas and foreign policy. Those documents are crucial to understanding the way in which all the decisions were made. The press have speculated about them—sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly—and some have been leaked. Having seen them all, I know how crucial those documents are for the Chilcot inquiry to be able to do its job properly. Last of all, if ever there was a war in which politics—that is, in the decision to go to war, not the war itself—played such a major part, it was this one, given the political decisions taken here and in the United States. As I speak these words, I can hear colleagues saying, "He would say this, wouldn't he?" Why are there no politicians on the committee? That point was made very well by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and the hon. and learned Member for Medway, as well as by others, from all round the House. The reason the Prime Minister gave us was this:""the membership of the committee will consist entirely of non-partisan public figures acknowledged to be experts and leaders…There will be no representatives of political parties from either side of this House."—[Official Report, 15 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 24.]"