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3.45 pm
Mr. Michael Portillo (Kensington and Chelsea): I join others in thanking the Committee for its extremely useful work. Paragraph 82 of the report refers to the dodgy dossier. In a way, this is water under the bridge, as the Government have conceded that errors were made, and apologies have been issued. I do not know whether they yet realise the immense damage that they did to themselves and to the intelligence services. I am not sure whether the Prime Minister realises the extent to which the reduction in his reputation and in his trustworthiness rating in opinion polls is attributable to the dodgy dossier.
It seems absolutely extraordinary that the dossier came into the public domain apparently without either Alastair Campbell or the Prime Minister understanding its nature—the fact that it contained plagiarised material. My right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) was absolutely right to dwell on what the Prime Minister said to the House on 3 February at column 25. There was no hint in what he said at that time that he had any understanding that the dossier was, as it were, adulterated. That in turn seems strange, because even if Mr. Campbell did not know that it contained adulterated, plagiarised material, he clearly did know that it had been prepared in a way that was quite different from the dossier that was prepared in September 2002. The processes were quite different, as he has said in evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
The dodgy dossier was prepared by a team working on information. It was prepared by an organisation called the communications and information centre. There remains a question, which I add to the list already supplied to the House by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), about how the Prime Minister could want to commit himself unequivocally, and without caveat, to telling the House that he had published a new intelligence document, when at the very least Alastair Campbell knew that the document had been prepared in a way that simply would not allow such a description of it to stand up to further scrutiny.
The Committee's report also refers to the famous 45-minute claim in the September 2002 dossier. The Minister for the armed forces has said that the claim was substantiated by only a single source—it was not corroborated by further evidence—and as far as I know, there has been no attempt by the Government to row back on that. The Government maintain that it was derived from intelligence and was not invented by politicians or people dealing with the media, and that there was no objection to its being in the document, but I am not sure that I have had an explanation of how it got into the foreword, which was signed by the Prime Minister and constituted an Executive summary, thus giving it tremendous prominence.
I questioned the Foreign Secretary in the House about that, and he made it clear that no member of the intelligence community had objected in any way or
proposed that the 45-minute claim should not be included in the foreword. Of course, I have to take the Foreign Secretary's word for it, but if it is true that no intelligence official objected to the claim's being given that level of prominence, the Government ought to be extremely angry with intelligence officials for failing to make that point. The Government were clearly riding for a fall by putting a point that relied on only a single source of evidence into the prime ministerial foreword, standing above his signature. Indeed, the special advisers themselves—who, I am afraid, do not appear to be a very distinguished group in this Government—should have urged that this point be not included in the foreword. They should have had regard to the importance of the integrity of the Prime Minister's word, as the Prime Minister was leading the country on a course that might involve us in military action, as indeed it did.Another point, made by the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) in his opening statement to the Foreign Affairs Committee, is that the 45-minute claim was not then used in this House during the debates in March. That leads to another question that I should like to add to the list provided by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife, and which has been raised by the right hon. Member for Livingston: whether the Government already had cold feet about the 45-minute claim before troops were committed, and, if so, why they did not say to this House that they no longer had the confidence in that information that they had when the Prime Minister decided to put his signature to it.
The broad point, if I may suggest, for the Committee is to look in its future deliberations at how on earth such things can happen. The Committee says that it has been assured that such things cannot happen again, but I should like to broaden the issue by pointing out that a climate has been established in government that makes it difficult to accept the degree of assurance that has been expressed by the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor). It is clear that there was a breakdown in the machinery of government, but I would go further and say that there exists in this Government a strongly politicised atmosphere at the top. Many roles and decisions are taken by people who are not accountable to this House, and the feverish state in which information is dragooned for the cause—the point applies not only in this case—certainly pushes officials to the limits of what is proper. Perhaps it is for the Committee to decide whether it sometimes pushes them further.
It might be rather surprising to hear me say that one needs also to look into the degree of pressure that was exercised in a situation in which the British Government were determined, for understandable reasons, to be in step with the United States, and felt that they had to be a strong rhetorical contributor, at least, to the case that was being made for action.
Mr. Mates: What matters is not the assurance that my right hon. Friend got from the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor) that this will not happen again but the assurance given to us by those who gave evidence in Committee that they had made certain—and that
through that, the Prime Minister has made certain—that it will not happen again. So if it does happen again, we must question not the word of the right hon. Member for Dewsbury, but that of the entire Government.
Mr. Portillo: That is a useful clarification, but I hope that my hon. Friend will accept the broader point that even if the Government can say that they have changed their procedures so that this exact sequence of events cannot occur again, they have not dealt with the broader, feverish climate at the centre of government, in which officials are being pushed very far indeed.
Paragraph 80 of the report states:
- "Intelligence . . . played a key role in the military action",
That fact that that question is no longer hypothetical matters very much, because the Prime Minister based his cause for going to war very firmly on the existence of weapons of mass destruction. In this case, he contrasted himself somewhat with President Bush. The President was quite happy to talk about regime change being a cause for war, but the Prime Minister said no, that was not what it was about. Indeed, he told this House that as long as Saddam Hussein gave up his weapons of mass destruction, the regime could remain in place. That is why it matters so much to establish precisely how that intelligence was derived and whether it was plain wrong. In my view, it has already emerged that the intelligence was not of high quality. That should be of immense concern to the Committee, which I am sure will want to pursue it further in future.
The Prime Minister then told us—I refer particularly to what he said to the House on 4 and 5 June—that we should not worry so much about the causes of the war that he had advanced before, because we got rid of a barbarous regime, for which we should all be grateful and proud. We are grateful and, speaking for myself, I am proud of our role in getting rid of that barbarous regime, but that is not the case that the Prime Minister made to the House before going to war. He specifically said that the regime, barbarous though it was, would be allowed to remain in position as long as it gave up its weapons of mass destruction.
There are other examples of the Prime Minister's shifting from one argument to another. In the build-up to war, he told us that he was very worried—I remember his hands expressing the fact—about the day on which WMD on the one hand and terrorism on the other would come together. Paragraph 75 of the report alludes to that. However, when the Prime Minister returned to the House in June, he seemed to argue rather that the search for WMD was not particularly urgent. The priority, he said, was to restore law and order. The
House of Commons should understand perfectly well, he claimed, how long it would take to establish a proper team to get looking for WMD. For goodness sake, that argument is implausible from a man who had said that he was terrified that WMD would fall into the wrong hands. Was he really telling us that al-Qaeda had given us a three-month breathing space so that we could get our teams organised, and that in that period they would no longer go shopping for WMD in Iraq?Hans Blix used to criticise Saddam's regime firmly on the basis that it was always changing its story. It would say one thing one day, another thing another day. That is why Blix felt that the regime was unconvincing, suggesting that there might be a real problem. All I can say is that it is a good job that Hans Blix is not around today to apply the same high standards to the stories used by the Prime Minister, which also shift from day to day.
For the avoidance of doubt, let me make it clear that I was supportive of the war and that I still believe that there was a good reason for it. However, it was not the reason on which the Prime Minister rested most heavily. The stronger argument was that there had been 12 years of steady defiance of UN resolutions by Saddam Hussein, which was intolerable in any case. After 11 September, however, when we saw the consequences of ignoring the steady escalation of terrorism, it became clearer why we should not ignore the steady escalation of defiance by a thoroughly hideous rogue state represented by Saddam Hussein. That was a perfectly strong argument.
A book recently published by Sir Peter Stothard, who spent some time in Downing street during the period of the conflict, reveals that the Prime Minister was not happy with the WMD argument and that he longed to move on to the argument that I have just outlined or President Bush's argument for changing the regime. It demonstrates that he was uncomfortable about relying on the WMD argument, but that he believed that it was the only one likely to get through the UN.
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