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Intelligence and Security Committee

We must make sure that we get this point right. As my hon. Friend says, neither the ISC nor the Government got to the truth about Diego Garcia initially. Both we and the Government asked questions of the United States Government, who are in control there. They who gave us a flat and definitive answer—they were not in any doubt—which we therefore accepted. If my hon. Friend is telling me that a judge would have got a different answer out of them, that is one thing; but what subsequently happened, to the embarrassment of the Foreign Secretary, the Government and, indeed, all of us, was that the United States Government changed their story. We were never going to get to the truth of what the Americans were doing on an island which is within our sovereignty but totally under their control until they told us the truth. How would any form of judicial or extra-judicial inquiry have got that out of the Americans before they chose to tell us?