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3.33 pm

Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): I suppose I should begin by declaring an interest of sorts, in that I edit a magazine which received Andrew Gilligan's reports throughout the Gulf war—and very proud we were of those reports, none of which was remotely anti-war.

I shall now do a very unfashionable thing, which is to stick up for Andrew Gilligan. We heard from the Labour benches about how people have been pilloried and vilified. No one has been more pilloried and vilified than that journalist. I propose to try to vindicate what he said.

This debate takes place after the Prime Minister has announced an inquiry into the Government's extraordinary failure to give an accurate picture of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before the war. I hope that Lord Butler will somehow in his findings pay tribute to the work of Andrew Gilligan in exposing the way in which Downing Street revised raw intelligence material in the hope of making it sound more alarming and making the threat sound more imminent.

To understand what I think happened—and I am paid to say what I think—one must remember the origins of Alastair Campbell as a tabloid journalist. He was political editor of the Daily Mirror, and went to Downing street as editor-in-chief of the propaganda campaign, in particular the propaganda campaign to convince the public—and especially Labour Members, whose votes were very important—that Saddam was a clear and present threat to this country. In his office in Downing street, Alastair Campbell chaired a series of very important meetings. Very senior civil servants were there, among them John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC. Alastair Campbell told John Scarlett

"I will chair a team that will go through the document from a presentational point of view, and make recommendations to you."

Everyone who has worked on a newspaper, tabloid or broadsheet—as I have—will know that newspapers are basically monarchical in structure. If the editor is known to be partial to a certain story or a certain subject—pheasants, say—loyal underlings will provide the editor

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with pheasants. Or a story about topless models, or whatever it happens to be. That is how it works. He is the Sun King, and they are sunflowers who turn their faces towards him.

Andrew Mackinlay: Their faces?

Mr. Johnson: The hon. Gentleman clearly has a keen understanding of these matters.

As Lord Hutton himself observed, this may be subconsciously—he said "subconsciously"—corrupting. But I think that in the case of the influence of Downing street on the intelligence services it was clearly more than subconsciously corrupting, for there was a whole series of overt and explicit memos. In the spring and summer of 2002, the intelligence services had produced a fairly cautious document about the state of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It may be remembered that the original document, which was not published because it was too feeble, said that there was a chemical and biological weapons capability, but made no mention of actual weapons. It said that Iraq was at least five years away from producing a nuclear weapon. That, of course, was not exactly what the editorial staff in Downing street wanted to hear.

Phil Bassett, himself a former journalist and a member of the Downing street press office, sent a memo saying,

"We're in a lot of trouble as it stands now."

Another memo went out from Downing street saying,

"No 10 through the Chairman wants the document to be as strong as possible within the bounds of the available"

evidence.

"Therefore this is a last (!) call for elements that agencies think can and should be included."

In due course, naturally, Scarlett obliged. He produced a dossier in which some of the language had been strengthened. But Campbell, the editor-in-chief, still was not happy. There was a sentence that read

"The Iraq military may be able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so".

Mr. Campbell pointed out that that was weaker than the wording of the summary, and requested that it be changed. That request was granted, along with requests for a dozen other material changes designed to beef up the language.

Some analysts on the Defence Intelligence Staff were uneasy about the 45-minute claim. Dr. Brian Jones—whose intimate involvement with the whole business was discussed earlier by the Prime Minister—said:

"The way the intelligence was reported did not give us any confidence that the primary source knew very much about the subject."

He went to see Dr. Kelly, who himself expressed some doubts about, for instance, the biological weapons claim, but when they passed their concerns up to their superiors those concerns were ignored. Jones said he felt that

"the shutters were coming down".

An unnamed official was so alarmed by the draft that he wrote a highly unusual memo of protest:

The 20th September draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by the evidence available to me . . . What I wish to record is that based on the intelligence available to me, it has NOT been established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons."

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As for the notorious 45-minute claim, he said

"This is based on a single source. It is not clear what is meant by 'weapons are deployable within 45 minutes'. The judgment is too strong considering the evidence on which it is based".

Yet four days later the Prime Minister was at the Dispatch Box waving a dossier and making that claim no fewer than four times. He made it in his own foreword. He said:

"The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda. The history and present threat are real".

A couple of hours beforehand Jonathan Powell had sent a memo to Alastair Campbell—someone mentioned this earlier—saying:

"Alastair, what will the headline be in the Standard"

after they had published this thing?

"What do we want it to be?"

We do not have Campbell's answer, but I think we can guess, because the Evening Standard duly obliged the Government's propaganda machine and said "45 minutes from attack".

The Sun said, "He's got 'em . . . Let's get him." It was nonsense, of course. It was an inverted pyramid of piffle. To make matters worse, the Government allowed the tabloids to misconstrue the 45-minute reference to mean ground or air-launched missiles rather than battlefield weapons. In other words, a claim that was rubbish had been embellished at the Government's behest and at the specific request of Alastair Campbell.

Let us go back to the fateful change and the psychology of the parties involved. The intelligence services are already straining to oblige their political masters and they have beefed up the language as far as they dare, but Campbell comes back to Scarlett and wants him to ratchet it up one notch higher. He wants to move the claim from the conditional to the indicative mood, as the grammarians would say. Why does Scarlett accede to that? Because he is in the position of a foreign correspondent who has before him a campaigning editor, but the story is not quite hot or strong enough, so he agrees to hype it up. He takes a risk because he thinks he can get away with it because the facts may well turn out to support his editor's desire and he wants a quiet life and to be obliging.

That is, in essence, what Andrew Gilligan reported. He said that the Government probably knew that the figure was wrong. They and Campbell certainly did not know that the figure was right, yet they put it before the public and before Parliament as an incontrovertible fact. Gilligan said that his source was involved in the production of the dossier, which was certainly true. He said that there was anxiety in the intelligence services about the dossier, which has been amply confirmed.

I ask Labour Members who deride Gilligan whether they are happy that those facts were brought into the public domain. I also ask them in their triumphalism to reflect on whether it is possible that the Government made mistakes in the production of the dossier—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. The hon. Gentleman's time is up. I call Dr. Gavin Strang.

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3.41 pm

Dr. Gavin Strang (Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh) (Lab): The time limit makes it difficult for me to respond to the interesting remarks of the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson). I will focus my brief remarks on three areas: the publication of intelligence, the future of the BBC and the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

First, on the publication of intelligence, the Intelligence and Security Committee's report on Iraqi WMD says that we intended to examine the agencies' relationship with the media and the use of intelligence-derived material by the Government to brief the public. The dossier published in September 2002 was the first of its kind, and we can learn much from the experiment. Lord Hutton has shown us that the rules were not broken in the drafting of the dossier, and I am pleased that the Government have been cleared in that way.

The rules were not broken, but the question we must ask ourselves now is whether we have the right rules. My view is that we do not—not yet. I believe that the Government should operate with a presumption of openness. Intelligence, however, is obviously inherently different. For good reason, the intelligence agencies work in secret and much of their findings is kept secret. If, however, intelligence on issues of great national importance can be made public without jeopardising the work of the agencies, a case can be made for publishing it. In theory, that should enable the public to have a more informed debate on the subject in question. The question is: who should publish that work and on what terms?

Let me be clear: I do not condemn the decision of my right hon. Friends to publish the dossier in September 2002. The House may recall that the Intelligence and Security Committee supported that decision in our annual report last year. But we have to learn the lessons of this whole affair, and my conclusion is that Governments should not, in future, be involved in the publication of intelligence-based documents.

Intelligence does not readily lend itself to publication. It is rarely cut and dried. The intelligence received is a stream of often conflicting or inconclusive data, from which people have to make judgments. It is for the Government to take decisions based on those judgments.

My view is that, by their very nature, Governments will be selective in their use of intelligence. A Government will tend to cite intelligence publicly only when trying to persuade the public on a difficult point. Sometimes a Government may take a decision that is in conflict with the balance of the available intelligence, but it is difficult to imagine such a Government choosing to publish a dossier full of that intelligence.

An alternative approach could be for the intelligence agencies alone to draft any intelligence-related documents to be published. Ministers would not be answerable for them, but the documents could be debated. One advantage of such an approach would be that there could then be no suspicion—however unfounded—of Government pressure or interference; and no possibility that any members of the Joint Intelligence Committee might be "sub-consciously influenced", as Lord Hutton put it, to use wording stronger than would otherwise be used. The hon. Member for Henley made a lot of that.

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A further advantage of that approach is that authorship of such reports would be clear. That is an important point for members of the public looking at the statements made at the time of the dossier's publication. Its authorship is not clear. Was it written by the intelligence services, or the Government?

In that context, one option would be for the intelligence agencies to publish annually a report of their assessment of security issues. My view, based on what has happened in the past couple of years, is that, as a general rule, intelligence material should not be published. Instead, the Government should set out their judgments in the normal way, in a statement to the House or in an official Government document. In the case of Iraq, the Government would have published their own document, setting out their considered view of the nature of the threat.

I turn now to the future of the BBC. It is important that we do not overreact. Clearly, Andrew Gilligan made a mistake in his broadcast, which was compounded by the way that it was dealt with in the BBC chains of command. However, we must not respond in a way that would damage the BBC, which is a truly great British institution.

I was pleased that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister assured my right hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth), my colleague on the Intelligence and Security Committee, that Lord Hutton's strictures against the BBC will not bias the Government in their consideration of the future of the charter and the licence fee.

Much of what the BBC currently does is policed by Ofcom, but I believe that regulation of the BBC should not be transferred entirely to that body. The BBC is different from other broadcasters: it is a public service, paid for and owned by everyone. The BBC exists to set standards for others and to play a vital role in our democracy. One only has to look at what is served up in news bulletins in other countries to begin to recognise what an asset we have in the BBC.

Finally, important though the questions surrounding Andrew Gilligan's broadcasts were, and tragic though the death of Dr Kelly was, at some point we must leave these discussions behind us. The real question is, why did we go to war?

For the UK, the central case was Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There is the separate question of regime change, but the stated basis of the British Government's decision to go to war was Iraq's WMD.

The past is the past. Whether or not there actually were WMD in Iraq, I believed that the UN weapons inspectors should have been given more time to do their job. The Government disagreed. I do not doubt that they acted in good faith, on the basis of the intelligence that they had. However, statements were made—about 45 minutes, the thousands of tonnes of WMD agent, and so on—that I do not believe that anyone here would make now.

As I have said, I do not doubt that the Government acted in good faith. We therefore have to ask ourselves whether the intelligence was wrong. We have all heard the statements by David Kay, the outgoing leader of the Iraq survey group. He put the matter starkly when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Wednesday,

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"We were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."

I am not saying that there is nothing there. David Kay himself spoke of a programme to develop a weapon using ricin that was active until the war, and the Iraq survey group has not finished its work. However, it is looking less and less likely that Iraq possessed great stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, or that there was large-scale production of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.

Lord Hutton did not address that matter, and it is wrong to criticise him for not doing so, as that was not in his remit. Instead, he was judging whether the intelligence was properly presented, but the time has come to take stock of the intelligence itself. The fundamental questions now have to do with whether it was right to go to war in the first place and, given the present situation in Iraq, with the proper role of Britain and its armed forces.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) noted, intelligence material is only one of a number of factors that the Government had to weigh in the balance in taking the momentous decision to go to war. There is a feeling among the public that the intelligence may have been flawed. If the further inquiry that the Foreign Secretary announced yesterday is able to cast some light on that, then it will be doing the country a service.

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