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Iraq Inquiry

I shall be extremely brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have not intervened in the debate, and did not stand up to speak, because although I had put my name down to do so, I had to attend a funeral earlier and so missed the introductory speeches. I did not want to intervene on others who had put their names down in advance. My point follows on from that made by my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). There is an hour and 10 minutes of this debate left, and to be frank to the Government, whatever the outcome of the vote tonight, the inquiry is now in disarray. If it cannot command the cross-party support of the House, it will not command the support of the people outside. Many arguments have been set out—on the lack of terms of reference, on the lack of consultation with, and involvement of, the House on that, on the composition, on the remit, and on oaths. The oath is absolutely critical. As my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) has said, the equivalent to the oath will elicit the equivalent to the truth. The whole point of the exercise is to try to get to the truth. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock says, I wonder whether, in view of the new practices that we are trying to introduce in Parliament, tonight could be the one occasion when a Minister contacts No. 10 and says, "The game's up. What we need to do now is try to find consensus in the House on this important issue." This started with a tragedy. I voted against the war after one of the most heart-rending debates that we have had. It was heart-rending because at every Prime Minister's Question Time since then, a Prime Minister has announced the names of the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan; I think that the Iraq war led to the climate that enabled the Government to go into Afghanistan. Now, we are going from tragedy to absolute farce. I was at the parliamentary Labour party meeting only two Mondays ago. I do not often attend these days, but I did on that occasion. The Prime Minister discussed change and learning the lessons from the European elections. It was an excellent speech, in which he said that there would be change, we would learn lessons and we would listen. When he announced, the following day, that there would be an inquiry on Iraq, I was absolutely heartened. I thought, "We've learned a lesson; we're now going to address one of the central issues that stained the history of this Government." I thought that we would look for consensus across parties, establish terms of reference, and have complete openness and transparency, because that is what we are supposed to be all about these days. Within 24 hours, we realised that it was—someone said spin, but I think that it was absolute incompetence, to put it charitably.