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Mr. Ancram: The Leader of the House made the most serious accusations against those elements. He was not able to name them. There is no indication that disciplinary action is being taken against them. In short, in his ill-considered and ill-advised outburst, he has done more to undermine confidence in our intelligence services than all the allegations to which I have previously referred. So serious is his attack that it cannot possibly just be allowed to rest. He has single-handedly made the case for an inquiry. We had hoped that clear answers might have pre-empted that, but they were not forthcoming. The serious charges levelled by a very senior member of the Government at the intelligence services compounds that situation. We now believe that an inquiry is necessary.
We have considered the various forms that such an inquiry might take. It will have to be independent and open if it is to dispel suspicions and doubts not just in the House but among members of the public. Although we have the greatest respect for the Intelligence and Security Committee and welcome the inquiry that it will undertake, it does not fit those two criteria simply because of the way in which it is set up and the way in which it takes evidence.
Sir Patrick Cormack: I am disturbed by my right hon. Friend's comments. He undermines the integrity of Parliament. There is no reason why the ISC should not conduct a rigorous, honest and open inquiry and report when it has done so.
Mr. Ancram: I am not suggesting that it should not. In fact, I told the House that I welcome the fact that it is undertaking the inquiry. What I am saying is that it
cannot by definition be called an open inquiry because it hears its evidence in private. To dispel the doubts on this occasion, the inquiry needs to be open.
Mr. Straw: What exactly does the right hon. Gentleman mean by an open inquiry? Surely he is not seriously suggesting that all the evidence for his model of inquiry should be taken in public in the open.
Mr. Ancram: The point about the ISC is that none of the evidence will be taken in public. I shall deal with how that could be done in a moment.
We also respect and welcome the decision of the Foreign Affairs Committee to conduct a similar inquiry. It is right that Parliament, through that Committee, is able to have such an inquiry, but I do not believe that it can satisfy the criterion of independence which I believe public opinion now requires, especially in the light of the outburst from the Leader of the House this morning.
If further damage is to be mitigated, the inquiry must be certain and clear. Our proposal is for a resolution in both Houses of Parliament under the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921. That is the most powerful form of inquiry and is appropriate for an issue of this gravity. The tribunal would be chaired by a senior judge with judicial powers to force witnesses to attend on oath and require the production of documents. It would be a contempt of court to refuse any of those requirements.
Under the Act, the tribunal is not allowed to refuse the public, including the press, to be present at any proceedings unless in the sole opinion of the tribunal it decides that it is in the public interest to refuse public access, probably because the subject matter is sensitive. In that case, the nature of the evidence would be to do with national security. On those specific points, the tribunal might decide to exclude the public for the time when those particular issues are considered.
The problem is not one of security, but of the Government's handling of security information. I was amazed by the Foreign Secretary's reaction to the idea of judge-led inquiries. I hope that in the privacy of his room tonight he will blush when he recalls the words that he used. It is interesting that all those inquiries into our conduct when we were in government that were set up by this Government were judge led. There is no problem with judge-led inquiries that deal with the previous Government, but if they are into this Government they do not want them.
The allegations are not about the justification for action in Iraq; nor are they about the conduct of that action. Those were clear and evident and are not affected by the allegations with which we are dealing today. The allegations are concerned with the way in which the Government handled intelligence material and whether, in doing so, they were always totally open and honest with the House. That is what an inquiry must establish, as well as dealing with the serious assertions made by the Leader of the House this morning.
Conservative Members are not in the habit of supporting Liberal Democrat motions, not least because they are rarely sufficiently clear to support. This motion does, however, call for
- "an independent inquiry into the handling of the intelligence received".
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind hon. Members that Mr. Speaker has imposed a 10-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.
3.19 pm
Clare Short (Birmingham, Ladywood): The conclusions that I have reached about the way in which the Prime Minister misled us in order to rush to war in Iraq are serious indeed. I am well aware of that. I wish that I had not reached those conclusions, but I fear that they reflect my opinion and I need to put my case. Obviously, loyalty to one's Government is an important quality, but loyalty to the truth is a higher imperative.
If I am right in my conclusions, it is a very serious matter indeed. The truth must be found and lessons must be learned by the Government and by our system of government, so that such things can never happen again.
The Christian teaching on just war, to which the Liberal Democrat spokesman referred—and I understand that the Muslim teaching is very similar, unsurprisingly—says that the cause must be just, the remedy proportionate, the war winnable, and that there must be no other way of putting right the wrong. The problem with the war in Iraq is that the possibility of resolving the problem in another way was not exhausted. It was therefore not a just war. That is why the Churches all over the world, including all the American Churches apart from the Southern Baptists, opposed the war at that time.
As the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said, most of us thought that we had to adhere to the possibility of military action to uphold the authority of the UN, but we wanted to exhaust the possibility of disarming Saddam Hussein and, if possible, displacing him without going to war and inflicting more hurt and suffering on the people of Iraq. We did not exhaust all the possibilities of achieving that.
I am not one of those who believe that we could ignore the problem of Saddam Hussein and continue with the policy of containment. On that, I agree with the United States neo-conservatives, now the hawks in the Bush Administration. Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant, guilty of grave crimes against humanity, he was defying the UN, and sanctions were causing enormous suffering to the people of Iraq. But Saddam Hussein was the problem, not the people of Iraq. We therefore needed to try to find a way to resolve the problem without inflicting on the people of Iraq further suffering, war and the chaos that has come after war.
The US Churches put forward such a plan. It came late, but it was well thought through. It included a proposal for coercive disarmament backed up by a UN-
mandated force, the indictment of Saddam Hussein in order to bring him down and then a UN mandate in order to bring Iraq to democracy. There were other proposals that we should have tried, but I was always of the view that we had to be willing to contemplate the use of military force ultimately, and that we could not leave the situation as it was for a further 12 years.On weapons of mass destruction, there has been a great deal of discussion today and my time is limited. I saw all the written intelligence for a number of months and had a number of personal briefings from the security services. We are all agreed that the regime was determined to experiment with chemical and biological weapons. It had previously tried to have nuclear weapons, which had been dismantled by the previous weapons inspectors. That is why Saddam Hussein continued to defy the UN and why sanctions continued. That is not in dispute among us. The question is how weaponised were the materials, how imminent was the threat, and why could we not wait for the Blix process to be exhausted.
The only reason not to allow Blix to go on, and thereby to throw away the unanimity that had been achieved in the Security Council on resolution 1441, was if there was some kind of urgency. I believe that the security services briefing was that there was a threat, as I have briefly tried to summarise, but then there was an exaggeration of the imminence of that danger. That is the importance of the 45 minutes and the suggestion of the potential link to al-Qaeda. There was an attempt to suggest an imminent threat that did not, in fact, exist.
Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton): Will the right hon. Lady give way?
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