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Mr. McLoughlin: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
David Cairns: No, I will not give way; I have less than a minute left to speak.
The Saville inquiry is considering not a previous Government, but what happened on a fateful day in Northern Ireland.
I believe that we were right to go to war. I believe that history will show that that was the right thing to do. I believe that weapons of mass destruction will be found in that massive country, which is the size of France, when the inspectors go about their job unhindered by the Iraqi regime. I will await the outcome of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I have confidence in its ability to get to the heart and truth of this matter.
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Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): I do not know whether weapons of mass destruction will be found. I believe that they probably will be, but I agree very much with the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns) when he talked about being most influenced by the Command Paper that tabulated all the United Nations resolutions. On this occasion, if perhaps on no other, the hon. Gentleman and I are very much on the same side.
I am bound to say that when the House, very ill advisedly in my view, changed its hours, I hoped that there might be the compensating advantage that short debates early in the afternoon would at least be attended by the protagonists. Yet it is perhaps less than an hour before the winding-up speeches and there is no Foreign Secretary and no shadow Foreign Secretary. The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) has, to his credit, returned to the Chamber, but where is the right hon. Member for Swansea, East (Donald Anderson), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, whose report is central to the debate? He made his speech and off he went.
I have a great regard for the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but his place is above all in the Chamber while this matter is being debated. I am particularly sorry that he is not here because I want to talk a little bit about the Foreign Affairs Committee. I
had the privilege of serving on it until a few weeks ago. I voted with the Government and against setting up a judicial inquiry when we last debated this issue. I made it plain that I was unhappy about the fact that the Foreign Affairs Committee had decided to embark on this road and I said then, and I have said since, that I believe that the Intelligence and Security Committee is the right Committee to investigate the matter. I still hold to that view.The report, published after prodigious labour and a great deal of burning of midnight oil, has not taken us very much further forward, save to indicate that the one degree of unanimity appears to be that the members of the Foreign Affairs Committee do not believe that the House was deliberately misled. That at least is good, but I argued on the Foreign Affairs Committee that we should not have this inquiry. I did not leave the Foreign Affairs Committee specifically because of that. I do not want to mislead the House myself. I had already informed my hon. Friend the deputy Chief Whip and the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee that, for various reasons that they fully understood, I would not remain on the Committee beyond the end of the summer. I came to that conclusion very reluctantly.
When we came to discuss this issue, I argued—the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Mr. Pope) knows this very well, as he is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee—very forcefully that we should not have the inquiry. I asked for my dissent to be minuted, and it was. When I then discovered that I could not, for very good reason, attend two crucial sittings, I felt that I should not put myself or my colleagues in the position where I would probably write a minority report not having heard all the evidence. No one should put his name to that report, for or against, without hearing every last bit of evidence.
So I brought forward my withdrawal and the House discharged me from the Committee, and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway) was appointed in my stead. I wish him happy years on the Committee, but he has not been able to begin on a very good note because one of the great defining characteristics of Select Committees is that they try to examine issues without being over-influenced by party prejudice. The Select Committee reports that have most effect in the House—I speak as someone who has been a Member for a very long time and been involved in a number of such reports—are those that are unanimous or near unanimous.
The Committee has done what I prophesied would happen if it embarked on the inquiry: it has divided more or less on party lines. On one or two occasions, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) voted with my right hon. and hon. Friends, but the Committee has divided more or less on party lines, and I believe that that is a very great pity indeed. It will undermine the effectiveness of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and it will take a long while to recover from that.
Sir John Stanley: I invite my hon. Friend to look at the Votes and Proceedings, and he will see not merely that the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew
Mackinlay) voted with both Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members, but that the Chairman of the Committee also did so on two or three occasions.
Sir Patrick Cormack: My right hon. Friend's intervention, frankly, in no way demolishes the point that I am making. If one looks at the significant Divisions, one finds that they were along party lines. One even finds that what was arguably the most significant Division of all was carried by the casting vote of the Chairman. That is a fact; it is there for everyone to read, and it does not reflect credit on the House when that sort of thing happens with one of its very senior Select Committees. I deeply regret that because I cherished my membership of that Committee. I tried to be an assiduous member, and I wish it every possible success in the future. That is totally genuine.
When we come to this particular issue, however, nothing has significantly changed apart from the attitude of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. I deeply regret that. I thought that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition made a brave and proper speech in support of the Prime Minister on 18 March. The Prime Minister made what was probably the best prime ministerial speech that I have heard in 33 years in this House. I have certainly never heard a better one. It was as good as that by Mrs. Thatcher on the Falklands and other great prime ministerial speeches that I have been privileged to hear. When the Prime Minister addressed this House, as I said in the previous debate, I believe that he spoke in good faith.
Of course, the so-called dodgy dossier incident was not particularly well handled. Does that seriously alter the material facts of the case, however? No, it does not. One is tempted to think that dodgy dossiers have had a place in the history of the Labour party—I am surprised that no one has yet resurrected the Zinoviev letter. The fact is, however, that although elements of the Government's handling could have been better, although the Prime Minister, as I have said before, has created difficulties for himself by his over-reliance on spin on many issues, and although he has my implacable opposition to many things that he has done and proposes to do—and will continue to have it—nevertheless, on this issue, he behaved as a proper national leader should. He had the support from my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary that he deserved. Nothing that has happened since has altered my opinion on that.
I must say this to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench: rehearsing the mantra, "Nobody will ever believe a word that he says," does no good to them, the political process or this place. Yes, Labour Members did it to us as our Government fell apart between 1992 and 1997. By visiting on them what they did to us, or seeking to do so, especially over a grave national issue, however, we serve only to increase public cynicism and dislike of the political process, on which the House should be united to allay and to answer.
I therefore beg my right hon. and hon. Friends to take heed of a quotation from Jonathan Swift:
- "Lash the vice but spare the name".
On this issue above all, let us not undermine the honourable credibility of our position as the Opposition by nitpicking over these matters, which do not affect the
material issues that we are discussing—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) says from a sedentary position that this is a question of weapons of mass destruction. No one who has studied the matter, who has taken part in the debates in the House, or who was here at the time of the first Gulf war, can doubt that we were dealing with one of the most evil tyrants to deface the world scene since the second world war. No one can doubt that not only did he have the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction but that he produced weapons of mass destruction. What was the state of those particular weapons at the time that we went to war in March I do not know, and I do not much care. I believe that the decision to go to war was entirely justified. All the UN resolutions, which were detailed in the Command Paper, and which showed this man thumbing his nose at the international community, gave sufficient justification for this country to go to war.It grieves me deeply that my party, to which I am honoured to belong, should have started nitpicking when it was so right to give support on the principal issue. It also grieves me that those young men and women in Iraq at the moment—I have spoken to some of them, and we still have 11,000 out there—are wondering whether we have lost our marbles in this place. They are helping to bring to Iraq—a country that has been subjugated to an evil regime for the best part of half a century and that has never known democracy—an infrastructure, both physical and political, that will allow that nation to exploit properly in its own interests its indigenous oil wealth and to become a force for stability in the middle east and in the world beyond. What do we do? We spend our time looking at these silly accusations, which have no substance, and I am ashamed of my party for doing it. I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends will desist—certainly, if they do not, I will not.
Let us move on. Perhaps there is a paucity of attendance in the Chamber this afternoon because our colleagues think that we have said enough.
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