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5.33 pm
Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): Nobody could question the sincerity of the hon. Member for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon). She has held to her view throughout, she believes it with passionate sincerity, and she speaks with personal conviction. I happen to believe that she is wrong.
I voted on 18 March that this country should go to war. I did not do so joyfully, and I do not suppose that any Member of this House did, but I believed that it was the lesser of two evils and that it was the right decision. My view was swayed not by any dossier but rather by the certain knowledge of a repressive and bestial regime that had for decades subjugated its own people with torture,
murder and rapine of Hitlerian proportions. That is why I voted without any qualms to support the Prime Minister. He made on that day a speech of surpassing elegance and conviction, which will go down as one of the great speeches of the last 10 or 20 years in this House. I believed then, and I believe now, that he spoke in good faith, and because he believed that what he was saying was right.I can pick many quarrels with the Prime Minister. On many things, he is profoundly wrong. His treatment of our constitution has been cavalier in the extreme, but that is not what we are debating today and it is not the point. I was very glad that both he and my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition made such very good and persuasive speeches this afternoon, and I thought it right that the official Opposition supported the Government in their decision last year.
I am saddened by the fact that there has been a little flaking off. Of course, I am not referring to those such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) or my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who have always been against the war, as has the hon. Member for Halifax. But the point is that whatever inquiry we have, whatever committee we set up and however we approach this issue, they are not going to be satisfied. We had a democratic vote in the most democratic assembly in the world, and we voted by a large majority to take such action and to support the Government.
Of course, intelligence is an inexact science, as has been said many times in recent weeks. But it was appalling that the BBC should have allowed such stories to be peddled without checking their veracity. I am delighted that Lord Hutton reported as he did. I came to, and aspired to come to, this place—many Members on both sides of the House doubtless felt the same—because I believed in the essential integrity of British public life, and in the central place of the House of Commons within it. To me, the Hutton report is a vindication of both those beliefs. There are many things about the culture of spin that I do not like, and to some degree the Government are the architects of their own misfortunes, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal said. But the essential point is whether the Prime Minister acted in good faith last year, and the unequivocal answer in Hutton is yes.
People say that this report is a whitewash merely because it has not come out with what they call a balanced judgment. But as my right hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) said, Lord Hutton is a judge of great eminence. Indeed, he was spoken of as being perhaps the best judge of all, and certainly the best person to conduct this inquiry. He reached an emphatic verdict: he said that certain people were guilty of certain things, and that others were innocent of the charges made against them. Reference was not made to degrees of guilt or degrees of innocence. On the essential issues, the Government—I am delighted that the Secretary of State was exonerated, too—were not guilty.
Mr. Garnier: I hope that my hon. Friend does not think this an impertinent intervention, but is he suggesting that Lord Hutton is infallible?
Sir Patrick Cormack: I am not suggesting that anybody is infallible—even my hon. and learned
Friend—but I am saying that Lord Hutton's being lauded as perhaps the best person to conduct this inquiry, until he reported, and his then being castigated in certain quarters because the prejudices of certain people had not been fulfilled, was really rather strange. Of course Lord Hutton is not infallible. No man or woman alive is infallible—except to those Roman Catholics who subscribe absolutely to the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Huw Irranca-Davies: I did some research into the number of Members who, before Hutton had reported, had objected on the Floor of the House to his style and his professional integrity. To my surprise, I found that none had, yet today many seem to be questioning if not his personal integrity, then certainly the way in which he conducted the report's final stages.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Yes, and they were the very people who, until 12 noon on Wednesday last, were saying, "This man has done it thoroughly and brilliantly; it is going to be a marvellous report." But once they realised that he was taking a certain line, they took a different one themselves. [Interruption.] As one of my colleagues mutters from a sedentary position, "They would, wouldn't they?"
We have a great deal to be thankful for in this country. We can be thankful that we have this Parliament, where we can have debates with honest differences of opinion and can refer to our own Committees. I believe that the Prime Minister was right. I have argued against special inquiries before. My colleagues on the Foreign Affairs Committee know that I had real misgivings about the inquiry, and made my position plain both in the Committee and on the Floor of the House. I thought that the Intelligence and Security Committee was the right body to deal with this, and I wish it had done, but because that was clearly not acceptable to my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition, for perfectly honourable reasons, the Prime Minister has gone down a different road. One person who was unrelievedly pleased about this was of course my newly right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates), whom we all congratulate and wish success.
Although I have faith in those five people, I am sorry that there is not a Liberal Democrat representative, and the party has not covered itself in glory in this respect. When the Butler committee reports, let us read its findings extremely carefully. Let us not prejudge. We must accept that it would be wrong for it to express a view on whether it was right or wrong to go to war. That is not within its terms of reference, nor should it be.
This morning I was talking to a Russian-speaking friend, who told me about a programme on Iraq that was apparently screened on Russian television last night. The verdict was that if "we"—that is, the Russians—had said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there would have been. We have a great deal to be thankful for: the openness, honesty and transparency of both the British and American Governments, who have not sought to hide the facts from us. The Prime Minister believed genuinely, as many of us believed, that the weapons would be there.
We all know that they were there in the past and we saw the destruction that was wrought with them, but even if they are not there now, that does not in my view undermine the essential validity of the case against Iraq. I believe that both that and the Hutton report should allow us to draw a line under the fractiousness that has rather spoiled the cross-party accord, and now move on and look forward to the Butler committee's report.5.42 pm
Mr. Peter Mandelson (Hartlepool) (Lab): The hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) spoke with great thoughtfulness and wisdom, and I suspect that his views command considerable support across the House.
I want to speak chiefly about the BBC, not because I am a Beeb-basher, but because I am a long-standing supporter of the BBC who once worked for it. I stress at the outset that we can all celebrate the fact that the Hutton report did not reveal rotten politics or wicked politicians, and did not produce any political scalps. Thank goodness we still live in a country where these matters are determined on the basis of facts, evidence and judgments reached by learned people such as Lord Hutton, rather than on the basis of media show trials and kangaroo courts. If it were otherwise, it would be like living in a reverse police state, presided over by a clutch of newspaper editors.
I am very pleased indeed that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence survived the scalp hunting. It was entirely right that he should do so. However, just because the Government were not criticised by Lord Hutton, it does not mean that they are above criticism or above at least some reflection about certain aspects of what happened. I thought that the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) made an important point in the early part of his speech about the presentational tensions and issues that arise when intelligence is put into the public domain. As the phenomenon of terrorism grows, the pressure will grow from the public and the media to put more, not less, classified information and intelligence into the public domain. The Government must carefully consider their relationship with the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Dr. Kelly's unauthorised media contact led to his unwelcome exposure, but it is worth bearing in mind that he had previously been employed routinely to brief journalists when it suited his line managers for him to do so. He probably mistook the type and quality of journalist with whom he was dealing when he met Andrew Gilligan, and he subsequently over-spoke, but the far worse crime was not what Dr. Kelly said but what Andrew Gilligan misrepresented him as saying—what some have described since as the "detail of the story". Rod Liddle, not only the last man left in the bar at midnight but the editor of the "Today" programme who employed Andrew Gilligan, said:
- "Andrew gets great stories and some of them are even true".
- "our defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan has found evidence that the Government's dossier on Iraq that was produced last September was cobbled together at the last minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the security services".
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