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Intelligence and Security Committee

There were a lot of points in that intervention and I shall not try to answer them all—indeed, I am not quite sure that I can remember them all. The first point that I took from the right hon. Gentleman's comments was that he is happy with the principle that we should have a short judge-led inquiry to draw a line under this and to give the public the confidence that we are moving forward in the right way. The right hon. Gentleman's second point was that he could not have done any better and he was acting on the basis of all the information that was available. I do not doubt that; I am quite sure that he did not look at some document and say, "Well, I think I'll keep that under wraps." I am not suggesting that for a moment, but I am suggesting that there might have been something defective in the way we set about finding out what is going on and making sure information is properly reported to Ministers. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) also made that point, with specific examples. The right hon. Gentleman's third point was to suggest that we are supposed to be doing this work ourselves, rather than having a host of judge-led inquiries, and that was precisely the point I was about to make. It is important to draw a distinction in respect of what has been going on in the courts—between what is or is not sub judice. I have been surprised at some of the rulings on that, in that either something is sub judice or it is not sub judice, and the police are investigating things all the time. It strikes me that that process should, and will have to, continue. I have never been a strong supporter of the view that the only way to solve this is by going around trying to find as many people as we can to prosecute. Besides, it seems to me that the fact that there is the threat of prosecution may in some cases make it more difficult to get to the truth, because people will be extremely cautious about what they say or divulge. My view is that a short judge-led inquiry might provide a way for us more quickly to draw a line under this than we can through a much more protracted process in the courts. That protracted process might also, whether fairly or not, lead to a further degradation of respect for both the intelligence services and the ISC. I want this process to be brought to an end as soon as possible. Reading between the lines of Baroness Manningham-Buller's speech, I had the impression that she and I were not a long way apart on that point. The right hon. Gentleman's final point was about judicial inquiries substituting for Parliament. I completely agree that it is a sad reflection on the apparent inadequacy of parliamentary scrutiny that we have had a string of failures by Select Committees to achieve what we expect of them and that we have had a string of inquiries such as Hutton, Butler and Chilcot. My overriding conclusion is that rather than leave this area to Parliament, the need to get to the truth trumps any constitutional concern. In my view, an inquiry is not only necessary, but almost inevitable, not least because I suspect that if we can get round the problems triggered by evidence to it generating prosecutions —that was the point I made a moment ago—the security services may soon conclude that they would benefit from this as a means of drawing a line as quickly as possible. Only by drawing that line can we move on, and to do that we must get to the truth. Of course I recognise that parts—perhaps quite a bit—of such an inquiry would have to be conducted in private, but once we have accomplished that we can rebuild confidence in the security services and maximise their ability to protect us within a framework of law. It is with that in mind, above all, that I have come forward with the proposal that we should have an inquiry.