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Iraq Inquiry

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Let me finish by saying that it is rather an insult to us as professional politicians to be told by a Prime Minister that we would be partisan if we took part in such an inquiry. I had the pleasure of chairing the Select Committee on Defence for six years—I was a member of it for 12 years—and I chaired the Northern Ireland Committee for four years. I have also sat on the Security and Intelligence Committee for 15 years. Never, in any of those Committee deliberations, has party politics played a part, other than as a joke at the periphery. There was never a vote taken in any Committee that I chaired; had there been a vote taken, I would have considered that I had failed in my job. We are perfectly able to serve in a non-partisan way. More importantly, we are able to bring our political expertise to a committee that, however good and worthy it might be, does not have such expertise. Nor does it have military or legal expertise. Simply to say that it will be able to get the necessary advice from the second row of the stalls is not good enough. The question of its membership must be revisited.