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Clare Short: I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. I think that it is now a matter of record that there was a detailed plan in the State Department—very detailed, lengthy and considered—but it was swept to one side when responsibility was given to the Pentagon, which had made insufficient preparation. That is what really happened.
Mr. Howard: I quite understand the basis on which the right hon. Lady says what she says. It is certainly true that the responsibility for the failure to draw up a plan does not rest with the British Government alone, but in the run-up to the war, the British Government were in a position of great strength. We were by a long way the second largest contingent in the coalition forces. We had stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States. We were in a position to make our voice heard. We were in a position to insist, in the circumstances described by the right hon. Lady, that a proper post-war plan was prepared and put into action. We should have done so, but we did not. Had we done so, I believe that at least some of the difficulties that have arisen in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad could have been avoided.
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): Has my right hon. and learned Friend seen the evidence of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who says:
"with hindsight the proper preparations were not made for what evolved on the ground in Iraq . . . relative deficiency in analysis and prediction of what was going to happen created effects in the immediate post-conflict period which allowed a much worse security situation to evolve than should have been the case"?
Of course, Sir Jeremy was, at the material time, our ambassador to the United Nations.
Mr. Howard: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding me of that. He is, of course, quite right and so was Sir Jeremy Greenstock.
Few of us would doubt that the most appalling and deeply damaging thing that has happened since the fall of Baghdad was the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. It was deeply humiliating for the victims. It has done long-lasting damage to the reputation of the west and it has gravely undermined our moral authority. The circumstances surrounding the timing and extent of the British Government's knowledge of what had gone on are covered in confusion. Just over two months ago, when the story broke, the Prime Minister assured the House that neither he nor his Ministers were aware of those allegations. [Interruption.] Labour Members may not be interested in what went on in Abu Ghraib prison, but their constituents will be and those Members should be. The assurance that the Prime Minister gave was wrong. We now know that the Minister responsible at the Foreign Office was told about the allegations nearly two months earlier at a meeting with the president of the Red Cross, so the Foreign Office Minister knew but the Prime Minister did not know and was not told. Why not?
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That was not the only issue that the Prime Minister did not know about. He did not know that vital evidence was kept from Lord Hutton's inquiry. In February, he assured the House:
"Everything that was relevant to the inquiry was made available to Lord Hutton . . . I do not believe that there is anything that we concealed from that inquiry".—[Official Report, 4 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 768.]
He said twice that Lord Hutton saw all the intelligence there was to see on the 45-minute claim. The Butler report makes it clear that those statements were not correct.
Mr. Howard: I want to finish this point.
We now know as a result of the Butler report that two crucial intelligence reports on chemical and biological weapons, to which the 45-minute claim related, had been withdrawn in July 2003. MI6 knew that, the Joint Intelligence Committee knew it, but Lord Hutton was not told. The Intelligence and Security Committee was not told and, apparently, the Prime Minister did not know. Why not?
Mr. Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op): In retrospect, when the right hon. and learned Gentleman thinks about the intelligence, does he think about what Lord Butler said—that the intelligence services were totally under-resourced, that that affected their performance and that under-resourcing went back to when he was a member of the Cabinet in 1995, when the Conservative Administration cut the intelligence services' budget by 25 per cent?
Mr. Howard: I am afraid that the Government whom the hon. Gentleman supports have been in power for seven years. If there were anything that needed to be put right, they have had ample time to put it right. I do not see how that excuses the failure to tell Lord Hutton's inquiry and the Intelligence and Security Committee about the fact that the intelligence had been withdrawn, which we now know from the Butler report.
Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle) (Lab): Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Howard: No; I want to make some progress.
MI6 knew that the intelligence had been withdrawn. The Joint Intelligence Committee knew that the intelligence had been withdrawn, but Lord Hutton was not told. The Intelligence and Security Committee was not told and again, apparently, the Prime Minister did not know. Why not?
Nor did the Prime Minister know that the 45-minute claim only referred to battlefield weapons and not to long-range missiles, a fact that we only discovered thanks to careful questioning by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway). The Prime Minister was forced to admit then that, unlike the Secretary of State for Defence, he did not know and had not been told. Why not? Why was it that the Prime Minister did not know and was not told any of those vital things?
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Part of the reason for that serial ignorance stems from the way in which the Prime Minister runs things. On that issue, the criticisms made by the Butler committee are damning. As Lord Butler says, important decisions should be taken after "informed, collective political judgment". Lord Butler also points out that
"without papers circulated in advance it remains possible, but it is obviously much more difficult, for members of the Cabinet to bring their political judgment and experience to bear on the major decisions for which the Cabinet as a whole must carry responsibility".
Judging from comments by the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) last week, when papers were prepared Cabinet Ministers were not even shown them. As he told the "Today" programme,
"I'm astonished to learn from the Butler Report that there were papers prepared for us but never circulated to us and I would like to know why".
In the last paragraph of his report, Lord Butler concluded that
"the informality and circumscribed character of the Government's procedures . . . reduce the scope for informed, collective political judgment",
or, in plain English, procedures in Downing street are such a shambles that proper decision making is impossible.
We should be clear about the implications of all this. This way of decision taking is not accidental. It is not a coincidence. It is the result of a deliberate set of decisions by a Prime Minister who thinks that he does not need, and certainly does not want, informed collective political judgment.
Mike Gapes (Ilford, South) (Lab/Co-op): I refer the right hon. and learned Gentleman to paragraph 611 of the conclusions of Lord Butler's report, which states:
"We do not suggest that there is or should be an ideal or unchangeable system of collective Government, still less that procedures are in aggregate any less effective now than in earlier times."
Mr. Howard: I think that if the hon. Gentleman reads on and comes to the last paragraph of the recommendations, he will find that the picture presented is somewhat different.
The consequences of all this are there for us all to see. That leads to the third issue at stake today: what the country was told in the run-up to the war. Last week, I set out in the House the contrast between the intelligence available to the Prime Minister and what he told the country. I did so in the context of what he said on 25 January:
"the issue vis-à-vis my integrity is: did we receive the intelligence and was it properly relayed to people?"
The intelligence he received was seriously flawed. Lord Butler made serious criticisms of the validation process of MI6. It is vital that the weaknesses that he identified are fully remedied. We shall study the decisions that the Prime Minister announced in his remarks earlier and see what assessment to make of the extent to which they are likely to remedy those weaknesses.
The other issue vis à vis the Prime Minister's integrity, in his own words, is: was the intelligence "properly relayed to people"? In March 2002, as has been pointed
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out, the Joint Intelligence Committee said that the intelligence was "sporadic and patchy". In August that year, the Joint Intelligence Committee said that it had "little intelligence". In September, it said that the intelligence was "limited", yet on 24 September 2002 the Prime Minister told the House that the picture painted by the intelligence services was "extensive, detailed and authoritative".
The Prime Minister read out from the conclusions of the reports. The question is: what was the intelligence basis for those conclusions? Was the intelligence on which those conclusions were based patchy, sporadic, limited and little, or was it, as he told the country, "extensive, detailed and authoritative"? There is an enormous difference between the two and he has yet to explain, and he certainly did not explain this afternoon, the basis for his statement. Nowhere in the reports of the Joint Intelligence Committee was there any basis for the Prime Minister's assertion that the intelligence was "extensive, detailed and authoritative".
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