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The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. Geoffrey Hoon): Will the right hon. Gentleman inform the House of his view of the proper limits of ministerial responsibility? Does he judge, in fact, that Ministers are responsible for operational decisions?

Mr. Lilley: That is probably a trick question, and does not strike me as terribly worthy. It depends on the Ministry—I took decisions that affected the operations of my Department, which would not have been appropriate in other Departments.

We need to ask whether the intelligence was as much at fault as everyone has assumed. I believe that it was far less at fault than most people suppose. It was presented

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in a very sexed-up fashion, not so much in the preparation of the document as in its presentation to the House and the public. The document said:

"The JIC concluded that Iraq had sufficient expertise, equipment and materials to produce biological warfare agents within weeks using its legitimate biotechnology facilities."

In the case of chemicals, the document said that Iraq could

"produce significant quantities of mustard gas within weeks, and of nerve agents within months"

and that the JIC concluded that

"these chemical and biological capabilities represented the most immediate threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."

In other words, it was not that Iraq possessed such weapons but that it had the ability to produce them within weeks or months.

The 45-minute claim was used so frequently not because it could be linked to the threat of missiles reaching here but because it was the only information in the document that implied that Iraq must already have the weapons, because it could get them to an unstated location 45 minutes later. That was the only evidence, and it contradicted the actual conclusions of the JIC, which is why so much was made of that claim.

The new inquiry should not start from the presumption that its task is to attach blame to the intelligence services. It should question how Ministers assessed the intelligence and presented it to the country. It should also ask whether the actual justification—a pre-emptive regime change—was justified in law, and whether we should be bound by the subjective opinion of the Law Officers.

4.31 pm

Mr. Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab): Lord Hutton judged the BBC to be culpable. As a consequence, Gavyn Davies has gone, rightly and with dignity, and Greg Dyke has gone, unwillingly and behaving like a buffoon. However, it is clear that those directly implicated in the Gilligan story, which Lord Hutton judged to be unfounded, remain active in the BBC.

On 6 July last year, the BBC governors issued a statement endorsing the Gilligan story. The statement said that the story was in the public interest and that BBC journalists had good contacts in the security services. Four weeks after the Gilligan report, Richard Sambrook, the director of news, said in an interview on the "Today" programme:

"we have nothing to apologise for . . . we had one senior and credible source in the intelligence services".

He continued deceptively to imply that the Gilligan story was based on a security or intelligence source. What is more, having learned that the source was not an intelligence official, he deliberately withheld that information from the board of governors, leading it to claim that there was an intelligence source. On that basis, the governors negligently and culpably endorsed the story and did not do their job.

Richard Sambrook was involved not only in that but, along with Kevin Marsh, in Gilligan's suborning of members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. That is demonstrated by an e-mail—oh that mine enemy should

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send an e-mail—that Gilligan sent to Mark Damazer, Richard Sambrook and Kevin Marsh in which, among other things, he said:

"Spoke to Ottaway again and he's happy".

He also discussed briefing members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and suggested more briefing and suborning of members of that Committee—that is all in the Hutton evidence.

The situation is worse than that. Downing street concentrated on The Mail on Sunday article of 1 June written by Gilligan, but he wrote two articles for the paper, the second one of which was published on 8 June. It said, among other things, that the Prime Minister

"is charged with exaggeration, distortion, over-emphasis."

Kevin Marsh cleared that article. He read it, endorsed it and said, "It seems fine." That was the editor of the "Today" programme endorsing a contentious political article in a newspaper, and not seeing anything wrong in doing so. Indeed, far from it; the day after the Gilligan report on the "Today" programme that started this whole train of events, Marsh e-mailed Gilligan to say:

"Great week; great stories, well handled and well told."

Those two, Sambrook and Marsh, are clinging to their jobs when it is clear that any sort of BBC journalistic probity demands that they go. A leading article in The Economist at the weekend said that the Gilligan report

"was typical of much of modern British journalism: twisting or falsifying the supposed news to fit a journalist's opinion".

It went on to say that this action had been committed by

"a public-service broadcaster, whose reputation for reliability and authority gave the report its very credibility."

Yet those people are still there. We do not simply have those executives; we also have a situation in which a publicly funded, public service broadcasting organisation has revealed its governance to be unacceptable. That was said in relation to this issue by Lord Hutton.

I had a long correspondence with Gavyn Davies, which began long before the Gilligan affair, in which he insisted that the BBC's

"system of governance is a critical protection for the BBC's editorial independence from politicians".

As a member of the National Union of Journalists for 49 years, I am strongly in favour of the BBC and, indeed, the printed press, being totally independent of any interference by politicians. However, if that is to happen, there has to be a converse. The converse is that the BBC, above all, has a duty to behave with responsibility and with a great respect for truth.

Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Kaufman: Perhaps the hon. and learned Gentleman will allow me to continue for a moment.

I champion the right of the printed press to be irresponsible, inaccurate, biased and politically motivated. It finances itself; it does not ask every household in the country to finance it. That is the burden of a free press. The BBC is different. It needs to be totally independent of all Governments.

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Governments must not interfere with the BBC's content, but if that is to be so, the BBC's governance must be changed. As many hon. Members know, I said this long before the Gilligan affair or the Iraq war.

The BBC is governed and run as it was 77 years ago. It is time that we had a public sector, public service broadcasting organisation that was independent of the Government but, nevertheless, run like a business in this cut-throat world of the media. In my view, that involves an executive chairman, a board of directors and a chief executive. In this episode, the members of the BBC's board of governors did not simply allow a wrong to continue; they let themselves down. They betrayed themselves and the BBC. I do not believe that that system of governance can be allowed to continue when the charter review takes place.

4.39 pm

Mr. Elfyn Llwyd (Meirionnydd Nant Conwy) (PC): Given the time available, I shall obviously have to choose carefully what I talk about.

Who took the decision to name Dr. Kelly, and why? Alastair Campbell's diaries reveal that he and the Defence Secretary were keen to reveal the source, in order to strike back at Gilligan—to "****" him, to use the communication chief's own word. Dr. Kelly remained anonymous after the Prime Minister expressed concern about the plan. However, Sir Kevin Tebbit, the MOD's most senior civil servant, told the inquiry that the Prime Minister agreed with the strategy that led to the eventual outing of Dr. Kelly, in order, I think, to put him before parliamentary Committees.

We know of the discussion on the plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong, where the Prime Minister emphatically denied that he had had anything to do with it. On the other hand, on 13 October Sir Kevin Tebbit said:

"A policy decision on the handling of this matter had not been taken until the Prime Minister's meeting on Tuesday [8 July]. And it was only after that that any of the press people had an authoritative basis on which to proceed."

So obviously there is a doubt there.

On the question whether the dossier was embellished, sexed up or whatever, it seems plain to anyone who has read the evidence that that must be the case. Lord Hutton may have concluded in another manner. That is fine. I am not impugning his impartiality, but I am calling into question the way in which he arrived at the decision. I am supported in that by several prominent lawyers, many of them Labour-supporting, such as Geoffrey Bindman. It is extraordinary that Lord Hutton should ignore the inconsistencies in coming to his conclusions.

What I am concerned about is that in the run-up to the debate and the vote we were not given evidence that could be relied upon. I am not all that upset about it, because I did not vote for the war, but I take issue over the Prime Minister's having said, in the foreword to the dossier,

"I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current"

4 Feb 2004 : Column 834

and so on, and then in September that the threat of the weapons of mass destruction programme was

"active, detailed and growing . . . It is up and running".

John Scarlett, on the other hand, said when the document was launched:

"We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat."

That was the week before the Prime Minister said that the programme was up and running and that it was active, detailed and growing. There are evident inconsistencies here as well.

In today's edition of The Independent Dr. Brian Jones wrote:

"the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

I will not dwell on the 45 minutes claim. Suffice it to say that enough has been said about that today. I am far from clear as to what the truth is in that part of the report as well.

A letter from Martin Howard, deputy chief of defence intelligence, to the Secretary of State for Defence attempted to brief the right hon. Gentleman about DIS dissent before he gave evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee. I do not think that that took us anywhere. It is astonishing that the Government chose not to take the advice of these people, who were very concerned about embellishments and very concerned about the way in which the evidence was presented.

At page 133 of the report we have Alastair Campbell's minute to Scarlett of 17 September:

"Please find below a number of drafting points. As I was writing this, the Prime Minister had a read of the draft you gave me this morning, and he too made a number of points."

So it goes on.

Earlier today I referred to the appointment of the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor) to the forthcoming inquiry. I think that it is inappropriate that she should serve on it. I shall read out verbatim an e-mail from Matthew Rycroft, dated 19 September 2002:

"Ann Taylor read the draft dossier this morning and passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just rung me to underline the following points. The dossier should more explicitly refer back to the end of the Gulf war, the cessation of hostilities agreement and the demands of Iraq arising from the UNCR then. This is a baseline that people will understand. The dossier itself needs to come across as an impartial professional assessment of the threat. The political policy questions of the response to the threat need to be separate. The PM's statement to the House should make this distinction. The hardest questions in the debate, not fully answered by the dossier, remain why now and why Saddam. The PM should take these on in his statement to undercut critics."

The strongest defence of what I said about the right hon. Member for Dewsbury came from the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates), who has been appointed to the committee. I do not hold out much hope for the committee. As I have said, many lawyers who have looked at the conclusions of the first inquiry believe it is flawed.

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