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Sir John Stanley: I made it quite clear that I was expressing my personal conclusions.

Mr. Ross: I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman says, but he had said earlier that the Committee had received a specific briefing. People are bound to draw an inference, and see an implication, when two such statements are made in the same paragraph. That is a danger for Select Committees; they need to work out how to handle the information that they are given.

The way ahead for the House is to welcome the report and to look forward to the Foreign Secretary's response. Much more important, however, is dealing with the more immediate problems of Iraq and the middle east. On 14 and 15 April this year, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and I attended a conference in Doha, in Qatar. The experience was amazing. Although there was anger among the Arab participants about the action of the coalition forces, it was anger that someone had had to come from outside to do what they should probably have done themselves. They hoped that if we could give the Iraqi people the opportunity, they would demonstrate that they could run their country. That is the message that the Foreign Secretary gave us yesterday.

2.41 pm

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire): It seems that much of the past parliamentary year has been dominated by Iraq and the situation and circumstances leading up to our debate on 18 March. I congratulate the Foreign Affairs Committee on its report, although it is a pity that the Committee could not agree more generally on many issues. Some of the conclusions were pushed through on the Chairman's casting vote, which shows that the Committee was not wholly united on some serious questions.

The changes in the Government's attitude are interesting. Like many Members, I received numerous letters in the run-up to the debate on 18 March trying to persuade me not to support the war and that what the Government were doing was wrong. However, it was the first time that I had seen the Prime Minister take on public opinion. He did so because he passionately believed that he was right. I took the view that, if a right-wing American President and a centre-left British Prime Minister were assuring the House of Commons that there was grave danger to our country, we would have been foolish and, in some respects, irresponsible not to accept that assurance and that warning.

We had not held such a debate before, and it was with a heavy heart that I supported the war, because I was aware that people would lose their lives in conflict as a result of my using my vote. In conflict, lives are always lost. Sadly, that has been true for a number of families in this country, who have been devastated by the war—it will live with them for ever.

Sometimes, tough decisions have to be taken and the Prime Minister was courageous in the way that he persuaded the House. He spoke with a conviction that

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we have not heard from him before. As I said earlier, he took on public opinion, which, undoubtedly, was not with him.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), the Leader of the Opposition, throughout the run-up to, and the entirety of, the conflict in Iraq, also showed a sense of duty. He showed the right way for an Opposition to conduct themselves on such major issues. Had there been a Labour Opposition at that time, would we have had a similar response from the leader of the Labour party?

David Cairns : What about the Falklands?

Mr. McLoughlin: Yes, Labour did give support on the Falklands.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Bill Rammell): Does the hon. Gentleman recall the support that the then leader of the Labour party, Neil Kinnock, gave the Conservative Government during the first Gulf war?

Mr. McLoughlin: I accept that. But the first Gulf war was far easier to understand. There was an invasion, so it was easier to see the necessity for recapture. No vote was taken on that war, and most of the debates at that time were held on the Adjournment at the request of the then Opposition—[Interruption.] I was merely wondering whether, if there had been a substantive vote on such a matter, there would have been similar support from a Labour Opposition.

I want to explain why there should be a public inquiry and why this situation is different: I cannot recall a Cabinet Minister who had sat at the Cabinet table during the Falklands conflict and the first Gulf war, saying after those events that the Government's action had been wrong. On this occasion, that has happened. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) was a long-serving member of the Cabinet and she voted for the war, but now she says:

"I have concluded that the PM had decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along. He had decided for reasons that he alone knows to go to war over Iraq and to create this sense of urgency and drive it: the way the intelligence was spun was part of that drive. There was political spin put on the intelligence information to create a sense of urgency. It was a political decision that came from the Prime Minister. We were misled: I think we were deceived in the way it was done . . . The suggestion that there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponised and threatening us in a short time was spin...That didn't come from the security services."

That was a member of the Cabinet, someone who had access to information.

What did the former Leader of the House and the Foreign Secretary's predecessor say? The right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) called for a public inquiry. The calls for a public inquiry are not coming merely from an opportunist Opposition; they reflect serious concern in the nation about our deploying our forces in war. I believe that the Government are committing a serious folly by not accepting that such an inquiry should take place. People are asking what the Government have to hide. If they have nothing to hide, why are they afraid of the inquiry?

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I say sincerely to Members on the Treasury Bench that it comes a little rich from the Government when they tell us that the inquiry will take time, or when the Foreign Secretary told us, as he did a little while ago, of the huge cost of such a public inquiry, because the Labour Government have held more inquiries into the actions of the previous Government than ever before. We have had the Phillips inquiry, the Bloody Sunday inquiry and others that the Prime Minister has launched into the actions of the Conservative Government. Not so long ago, the Prime Minister used to accuse the Conservatives of being responsible for BSE, and he set up the Phillips inquiry. He can no longer make that charge, because the inquiry showed that his allegations were rubbish.

The Government have seriously mishandled Iraq since the war. That point cannot be made too strongly. They could have retained the unanimity of the parties as they moved forward. The hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns) mentioned Labour support for Baroness Thatcher when, as Prime Minister, she deployed her troops in the south Atlantic. Referring to the "awkward squad" in a response to the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), the then leader of the Labour party said:

"I can assure him that, if he had been a member of the last Labour Cabinet, he would know that my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Lever qualifies for that appellation better than anyone else in the country, rising even to the high standards of my hon. Friend the Member for West Lothian".

In those days, Michael Foot was very content that the inquiry should go ahead. He went on to say,

"For the rest, I believe that what the right hon. Lady has proposed is right and that the House would be wise to support it. I emphasise what she said, and what we have always understood in our discussions, about the fullness of the report to be made to the House and to the country. That is an absolute requirement, but I do not believe that there has been any difference between us on that."—[Official Report, 8 July 1982; Vol. 27, c. 477.]

What happened this year was right. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein has been a lesson to world order. I was immensely impressed, as I am sure were many of my hon. Friends, by the speech of the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) during the many debates that we had in the lead-up to the decision. We certainly did not expect her to propose that course of action. She was clear in her own mind. She said that she would support the Government if it were only a case of regime change. She was in no doubt about that. However, that was not the assurance that the Government gave us—it was not what the Prime Minister assured us was the reason for doing it.

I cannot understand why the Government are now so reluctant—why the matter has been so mishandled. For example, Alastair Campbell was not going to appear before the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, then he appeared before it and then we had that incredible outburst on the Channel 4 news of the same night and, all of a sudden, the Prime Minister's reputation has been put in grave jeopardy. If it has been put in jeopardy, it is because of the way he has run his Government in the past six years. They have become a Government almost created by spin and run by spin, but on a matter such as war we should get to the truth and that is why we should have an inquiry.

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