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Iraq Inquiry

With respect, I think that the hon. Gentleman has missed the point; the point is that the intelligence services themselves did not think that the issue merited inclusion in the dossier. At the meeting of 9 September, at which spin doctors were present, the decision was made to upgrade the claim, despite the lack of evidence. The strongest word that the intelligence services could bring forward was "indicates"—in other words, there were "indications". That was vastly firmed up and included in the dossier after that meeting. However, we still do not know what happened for sure, because the sitting took place in private and names were redacted. That is why I firmly believe that there should be no private sittings during the inquiry. If we do not know what the questions are and we get answers that are largely redacted out, that will not satisfy the public anger and sense of betrayal about the war and the reasons why we went to war. If the Government are to purge that sense of betrayal, they have to do everything that they can to put the sittings into the public domain. Even written parliamentary questions to the Cabinet Office about who was responsible for including the 45-minute claim met a blank refusal. We want to know the answers, because the claim was an integral part of the case for war at the time. There are two key questions that the inquiry needs to answer about how the decision to go to war was made. The first is about how the entire political structure—the system, the constitutional arrangements—failed to check the deluded ambitions, folly and hubris of one man. The second is about how the evidence of weapons of mass destruction came to be so exaggerated. We all know that war should be the weapon of last resort, but on this occasion it was not. Why were the UN weapons inspectors not given more time? Many believe that the decision to go to war was taken well in advance of our vote in this place in March 2003. Many papers are available—some have been alluded to in this debate—that suggest that the decision was made by President Bush and the then Prime Minister Tony Blair back in April 2002 in Crawford. There are minutes and briefing notes for Ministers with regard to that meeting, dated July 2002, that clearly make the point that the decision had been taken and that the question was about how it would be justified to the public. The point that the then Prime Minister was making was that he had to justify the decision and that the WMD claim was perhaps the route to take. Those documents have never been denied by the Government. Again, it all begs the question how the political system and constitutional safeguards—party control, collective government, parliamentary democracy itself—failed so spectacularly on that occasion. The other issue on which the inquiry should remain firmly focused is how the evidence was "sexed up"—to use that unfortunate phrase—once the decision had been taken. We must remember that previous inquiries did not fundamentally address that point. The Hutton inquiry, for example, cleared the Government of sexing the evidence up because it believed that the dossier was at all times under the control of the Joint Intelligence Committee. However, all the evidence since, which we have had to drag from the Government—through freedom of information requests or the intervention of the Information Commissioner—is that spin doctors were at the very heart of the drafting process. The fact that a spin doctor produced the first full draft of the dossier, one day before John Scarlett's official draft of 10 September 2002, is evidence of that. Scarlett himself acknowledges that he had considerable help from John Williams, the senior press officer at the Foreign Office at the time. Such questions need to be answered by the inquiry. But they will not be truly answered, and the sense of betrayal cannot be purged, unless the inquiry is made fully public.