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Mr. Howard: I have given way very generously and I want—
Mr. Speaker: Order. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is not giving way.
Mr. Howard: That is why the Prime Minister's credibility is at stake today. As I said last week, I hope that Britain will not face another war in the foreseeable future but, if we do, and the Prime Minister identified the threat, the question remains: would anyone believe him?
Mr. Speaker: Order. The Leader of the Opposition has said that he is not giving way.
Mr. Howard: We all know now that, when it came to the Iraq war, the qualified judgments of the intelligence services became the unqualified certainties of the Prime Minister. Last week, I asked the Prime Minister to explain exactly why. He studiously failed to answer that question and he has refused to answer it again today. I think that this House and the country deserve an answer. We are entitled to know why the Prime Minister said what he did.
The Prime Minister says that he accepts full personal responsibility for the way in which the issue was presented and for any errors that were made, but what does that actually mean? He still has not told us what errors he thinks he has made. He has not told us why he made them, and he has not told us what steps he has taken to ensure that they will not happen again. Without answers to those vital questions, how can this House be sure that those lessons will be learned and that the things that went wrong will be put right?
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Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con): I am most grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for giving way. Is he saying to the House that he believes that he and I, and those who voted as we did on 18 March 2003, were deliberately deceived?
Mr. Howard: I will answer my hon. Friend. I think that the Prime Minister thought throughout that he was acting in the best interests of the country. I have absolutely no doubt about that, but what he told us about the basis for the intelligence was different from what the intelligence told him. Before I can answer my hon. Friend's question, I want to know how that difference came about and why it came about. When the Prime Minister has answered that question—I have put it to him several times and he has yet to answer it—I will be able to answer the question put by my hon. Friend.
It is now clear that, in many ways, the intelligence services got it wrong, but their assessments included serious caveats, qualifications and cautions. When presenting his case to the country, the Prime Minister chose to leave out those caveats, qualifications and cautions, and as a result the country was given a misleading impression of what the intelligence services had said. So why will he not just come clean? Why will he not tell us why he did it? Why will he not just give the country the facts?
The Prime Minister once said that he was a pretty straight kind of guy, but he has not been straight with the British people today. Why is it that, for this Prime Minister, sorry seems to be the hardest word?
3.32 pm
Mr. Charles Kennedy (Ross, Skye and Inverness, West) (LD): The immediate background to both the Butler report and today's debate remains a war that we did not believe was necessary, that we could not support and that we believe has gone on to do lasting international damage to our country's interests. That is our fundamental starting point, however deep, but none the less principled, the disagreements may be with the Government.
Whatever our respective viewpoints were about this war, none of us can ever erase the fact that the lives of brave and loyal British personnel and civilians have been lost—and as we have seen again in the past day or two they continue to be lost, along with the lives of countless and, perhaps most disgracefully of all, uncounted, Iraqi civilians. That legacy will never be forgotten.
Our principal point of disagreement and departure from the Government's position over the war was clear from the outset, and remains clear. Our issue is: were the political judgments involved the correct ones and were we led into the war on what constituted a false prospectus? We believe that those all-important political judgments were the wrong judgments and that the case for war was fatally flawed. The justifications that were presented at the time, and the way in which they were presented, are the fundamental point of dispute. The central core is that issue of political judgment, and in the aftermath of the war we have all witnessed a profound loss of public trust in both the Prime Minister and his Government, very largely as a result.
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In so many respects, Lord Butler's report has raised as many questions as it has answered. I do not find that highly surprising, given the very specific, tightly drawn remit that was set for Lord Butler by the Prime Minister. The fact that the Prime Minister specifically excluded a proper public assessment of those political judgments led me and colleagues to conclude that we should not participate in the work of the report. Indeed, the Prime Minister put it to me across the Floor of the House when he announced the setting up of the Butler inquiry that
"to subcontract to some committee the issue of whether it was right or wrong to go to war is not merely wrong: ultimately it is profoundly undemocratic."—[Official Report, 4 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 755.]
In the absence of Butler and his colleagues being able to make such an assessment, the only outlet for public judgment thus far has been the ballot box. Both last month and in the two parliamentary by-elections last week, people have given their answers. Their verdicts must to a significant extent—although not exclusively—contain a public reflection on the merits of the war.
In the run-up to the war, I repeatedly asked the Prime Minister at Question Time what, if any, circumstances would lead him into support for, or indeed opposition to, a US-led invasion of Iraq that did not have the explicit sanction and mandate of the United Nations. As hon. Members of all parties will recall, he refused ever to address that question directly. Looking back over the events of the past 18 months and the various reports, including the Butler report, that the events have spawned, given the immense and unprecedented lengths to which the Government went to try to win over an understandably worried public, I find it hard to believe that the die for the war had not been cast a considerable time before.
Mr. George Foulkes (Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley) (Lab/Co-op): Does the leader of the Liberal party agree that failure to take action against dictators should come under equal scrutiny? Does he agree that if we had failed to take action, Saddam Hussein would still be there, murdering and killing?
Mr. Kennedy: I draw the right hon. Gentleman's attention to the words of his leader on 25 February 2003 in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister spoke of the very regime to which the right hon. Gentleman referred and said of Saddam:
"I detest his regime—I hope most people do—but even now, he could save it by complying with the UN's demand."—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 124.]
That was the Prime Minister's and the Government's position. Saddam Hussein could have remained in place, so all this post-event moral justification does not square with what they were saying beforehand.
Mr. Kennedy: I shall leave Labour Members to square their own consciences with that of the Prime Minister.
We know from the revealing account given by the distinguished American journalist, Bob Woodward, that for the Bush Administration, the desirability of regime change in Iraq had been in place and much favoured since President Bush took office, so my first
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question to the Prime Minister is quite simply this: did he advise President Bush privately—long before the United Nations route was formally abandoned—that if the President decided to prosecute an invasion of Iraq, the British would be in active military support, come what may? If he did advise the President to that effect, when did such an exchange take place? That was fundamentally important at the time, and remains so to this day.
At the time, the Prime Minister said that he reached the final conclusion that war had become inevitable only the weekend before the hostilities commenced.
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