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Mr. Robert Walter (North Dorset) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Kilfoyle: No, I do not have much time.

We can go through issue after issue. We have already disposed of weapons of mass destruction. I think that everybody, perhaps with the notable exception of the Prime Minister, is now convinced that they do not exist. Did Kamal Hussein tell the truth when he came across? Hon. Members might recall that he was Saddam Hussein's nephew. He did tell the truth to the intelligence services of this country and others. Presumably that is partly why Saddam Hussein had him murdered when he returned to Iraq. We did not get a full account of what he said, however. Apart from talking about the existence of the programmes in the 1980s and through to the beginning of the 1990s, he also said that he had been personally instrumental in instructing the Iraqi forces to destroy whatever stockpiles they had left after the 1991 war. Hon. Members might say, "Well, he would say that, and he died for it." But the reality is that he said it, yet we have heard only a partial account.

Another claim that is often made is that the UN inspectors were forced out. I have no better source to refer to on this than my right hon. Friend the Member

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for Livingston (Mr. Cook), who told the Foreign Affairs Committee that the coalition bombing forced them out, not the Iraqis. That was a deliberate policy move. We could go on to examine the September dossier, the links with al-Qaeda, or the allegations that President Chirac was about to veto whatever came forward when we were battling over the second resolution. All of that is demonstrably untrue.

My contention is that we had a partial context, in which people formed opinions often on the basis of half-truth and omission, as much as anything that was positively said which people would take exception to.

We end up now with yet another committee coming up. It will be chaired by Lord Butler. How he views responding in such an inquiry is quoted in early day motion No. 540, as follows:

"You have to be selective about the facts",

he told the Scott inquiry. He went on:

"The purpose . . . was to give an answer which itself was true. It did not give the full picture. It was half an answer".

I am mindful of past exercises by senior civil servants and the sophistry that they employ on behalf of their political masters. I do not know whether it is something that is imbued in them from birth or that is transplanted once they reach the heady heights of the First Division. All I know is that it does not lead the British public to feel more confident about arriving at the ultimate truth to the ultimate question.

But truth is where we came in, and truth, like every other object in this world, has its season and its time. The time for truth is now. The Government should not constrain the truth. They will rue the day that they have done so. I believe that a case is still maintained by Government that the truth cannot come out fully.

6.6 pm

Mr. Robert Jackson (Wantage) (Con): As Mrs. Janice Kelly's Member of Parliament, I have naturally been in touch with her several times since the tragic event of last July. I have had no specific requests from her, but on her behalf and in the light of Lord Hutton's findings, I should like to press the Secretary of State for some answers.

Specifically, I should like the right hon. Gentleman to spell out, as fully as he can, what action the Government—and especially the Ministry of Defence—will take to ensure that, in Mrs Kelly's words, no other public servants will in future be unjustifiably be exposed to the ordeal through which her husband passed. There may need to be, for example, further codification of the confidentiality rights of officials. I hope that the Minister will say something about that.

Lord Hutton's findings raised questions for all of us. We have had a wide-ranging debate, and I think that there has been an admirable spirit of self-criticism, particularly on the part of the governing party. But Lord Hutton's findings are really about the BBC and the media. That is what I want to say a few words about, following in the footsteps of the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) and the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Beard), who spoke very well on this point.

Two camps have emerged in the media since Hutton reported. On the one hand, there are the BBC, its allies and its clients, who have been seeking to portray the

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Hutton report as an attack on not only the BBC, but also the freedom of the press in general. On the other, there are what I would describe as the honest journalists, who recognise that something serious has gone wrong, not only with the BBC, but also with British journalism in general.

With regard to the BBC camp, I will pass over the commentary of such luminaries as Sir Simon Jenkins, who thinks that it is no big deal to say that the Prime Minister is a liar, and Lord Rees-Mogg, who does not think that the BBC has any obligation to provide balanced reporting. I refer only to the thoroughly discredited figure of Mr. Greg Dyke, who has still not realised that if the editorial processes for which he was responsible had been working properly, my distinguished constituent, Dr. David Kelly, would still be alive.

It is typical of the mendacity with which the BBC conducted its defence after the death of Dr. Kelly that Mr Dyke should now be claiming that Lord Hutton's conclusions will prevent whistleblowers from being reported, unless it can be demonstrated that what they are saying is true. Lord Hutton's report in fact says no such thing, as was pointed out by the distinguished former provincial editor, Sir Richard Storey, in a letter in Monday's edition of The Times, in which he said:

"some dubiety is being cast"—

here he is referring to the egregious Mr. Dyke—

"on Lord Hutton's opinion that, in cases where there is serious contention over the accuracy of a journalist's report, there is a duty on the senior manager personally to check the alleged transgressor's interview notes."

On this, he says,

"Lord Hutton is correct in both theory and practice."

No one, says Sir Richard, is

"too superior, grand or aloof to be personally involved in assessing the accuracy of journalistic copy and the validity of its subsequent publication."

So much for Mr. Dyke, who notoriously did not even look at the transcript for a month.

Sir Richard Storey is a representative figure in what I have described as the camp of the honest journalists who are worried about what Lord Hutton has revealed about the state of British journalism. Another such is Sir Harold Evans, who in Tuesday's edition of The Times called for a royal commission to consider

"the practices, assumptions, and ethical standards prevailing in journalism/ broadcasting and government-press relations alike".

But the doyen of the honest journalists—he has been quoted several times, but I am going to quote him again—must surely be the editor of the Financial Times, in my view our most distinguished newspaper. Andrew Gowers wrote under his own name, in his newspaper, on Saturday. His article was headed "The BBC's failings are a warning to all journalists". If this were the legislature of ancient Athens, I might move a decree that his words be cast in tablets of bronze and compulsorily erected in every media office in the land.

Let me summarise his main points. He observes, correctly, that this episode

"exposed poor editing, deteriorating journalistic values and sloppy management at all levels of Britain's public service broadcaster".

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At the same time, he says, it

"holds up a mirror to British journalism as a whole, exposing its foibles and faults".

Mr Gowers goes on to say that what has happened must serve

"as a wake-up call for journalists"

against

"reflexive distrust of every government action or pronouncement",

against

"the easy, superficial certainties of party pris opinion",

and must remind them of

"the virtues of accuracy, context, and verification".

I say amen to that.

Let me finally turn to the man whose report has precipitated this long overdue crisis of self-criticism in British journalism, Lord Hutton. Here I emphatically disagree with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway). In the life of a great nation there are many contrasts, and one of the most interesting is always that between the occasional glimpse of bedrock and the froth and foam that usually prevent us from seeing it. We all know that experience from times when the country is at war and our television screens are briefly filled with unfamiliar figures in uniform, whose courage, objectivity and professionalism make us all feel somewhat tawdry and a bit beside the point. Well, watching Lord Hutton reading the findings on television last week, without even looking at the cameras, I had rather the same sensation. Here is a man rooted in his Province, rooted in his profession, rooted in such old-fashioned ideas as the idea of truth corresponding to fact. I salute him.

6.12 pm

Mr. Michael Meacher (Oldham, West and Royton) (Lab): Like other Members on both sides of the House who have spoken today, I certainly believe that throughout this episode the Prime Minister has always acted and spoken in good faith; but I also believe that in the aftermath of war Parliament has a right and, indeed, a duty to examine the Government's case for military action. In this case, it clearly rests on four main counts, each of which I believe needs to be examined not so much in terms of what we may know now as in terms of what information was available to the Government on each point before the war. I want to ask what I hope are some pertinent questions on that score.

First, there is the 45-minute claim, which we know from Alastair Campbell's evidence to the Hutton inquiry was included as a result of a request to the Prime Minister. Several Members have asked a question to which we need an answer. Why did the dossier not make it clear that the claim applied to battlefield weapons with a short range of only 20 to 40 km, and not to missiles that could strike Cyprus, let alone Britain?

There has been some discussion in the debate about whether the Prime Minister was aware of that. My right hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), in a diary entry on 5 March last year, recorded a conversation to that effect that he had had with the Prime Minister that day. It would seem to suggest that perhaps the Prime Minister did know. I think that we are entitled to ask: when the September dossier was

4 Feb 2004 : Column 859

published and the 45-minute claim was widely reported as applying to weapons of mass destruction—thus greatly exaggerating the threat from Saddam—why did the Government not make more effort to correct the misreporting, despite believing it to be wrong?

Secondly, the dossier claimed that Iraq was seeking to buy 500 tonnes of uranium yellow cake from Niger for nuclear weapons programmes. Britain allegedly received that intelligence from the Italians and passed it on immediately to Washington at the beginning of 2002. The CIA immediately dispatched a former US ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who went to Niger and rapidly confirmed in March 2002 that the claims were wholly bogus. We also know that the CIA later advised Britain for that reason to omit the Niger allegations from the September dossier, so we are entitled to ask why they were still included, even though it had been shown that they were false.

Thirdly, on the detailed lists in the dossier of the chemical and biological weapons that Saddam was alleged to have, all the UN inspectors had found was that such weapons were "unaccounted for". That was the relevant phrase, but the dossier clearly implies that the weapons actually existed. The point has been made, particularly by the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), that many of Iraq's chemical and biological agents produced before the Gulf war would, if they had not already been destroyed, be so degraded more than a decade later as to be ineffective as warfare agents.

More particularly, Dr. Brian Jones said in his evidence to the Hutton inquiry that his leading chemical weapons expert was concerned that he could not point to any solid evidence of the production of such weapons by Iraq, yet the Prime Minister's foreword to the September dossier said:

"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons."

Given that the defence intelligence so strongly and widely took the opposite view, how is such a breakdown—it may have been said in good faith—in political access to the relevant intelligence to be explained?

Fourthly, on the claim that Iraq had produced 4 tonnes of VX nerve agents—a claim made and supported by Colin Powell—the Prime Minister told the House on 25 February last year, a month before the war:

"It was only four years later"—

in 1995—

"after the defection of Saddam's son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered."—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 123.]

It so happened that, a week later, Newsweek obtained details of Hussein Kamal's actual International Atomic Energy Agency and UNSCOM debriefing interview. It revealed that he apparently said the reverse, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) has already mentioned. After setting out the evidence in great detail—embarrassingly so, as one official said—Kamal concluded that

"all weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."

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I believe that that deserves some explanation, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence can throw some light on that and other discrepancies when he winds up the debate.

We look to the Butler committee to explain why, in particular, we were told in the September dossier that Saddam's WMD programme was "active, detailed and growing" and that the intelligence that that judgment was based on was "extensive, detailed and authoritative", when, in fact, Saddam had no WMD at all. That must be central to the new inquiry.

There are two other key issues for the new Privy Councillor committee to throw some light on. The Intelligence and Security Committee report revealed that on 10 February, five weeks before the war, the Prime Minister received an intelligence assessment of the impact on international terrorism of taking military action against Iraq. It judged that al-Qaeda represented—and no one would dispute it—by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests and that the threat was heightened, not reduced, by military action against Iraq. Why was that rather crucial assessment not given to Parliament before the 18 March vote on military action? It could have had a significant effect on opinion in this House.

My second point returns to the central question. How is it that we were taken to war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam had WMD, when in fact he did not? Hutton says that the politicians did not manipulate the data, and I accept that. Did the intelligence services get the matter drastically wrong, or did they simply cherry-pick the data to provide the conclusions that they believed their political masters wanted?

The latter was clearly implied by Dr. Brian Jones. He has pointed out forcefully how widespread was the disgruntlement among defence intelligence staff at the way officials at the top of the intelligence hierarchy were consorting too closely—

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