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The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Jack Straw): That is true.

Mr. Kennedy: The Foreign Secretary says that that is true and I do not doubt him. However, surely the extraordinary and prolonged build-up on all fronts over many months—militarily and diplomatically—must suggest that other considerations were also in mind. Indeed, the Ministry of Defence, with its duty to the Government of the day, in addition to its duty to serving personnel, must calculate for all possible contingencies. It would be illogical, apart from anything else, to suppose that it did not have at the back of its mind the fact that the political die might well have been cast.

The second issue that arises in that context, as the Government moved towards preparing and publishing the dossier on weapons of mass destruction, is the blurring of roles, acknowledged by Butler, that took place between principal advisers to the Prime Minister and the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the person who had assumed ownership of the report's contents. As Lord Butler observed, assessment and advocacy became conflated as a result. That should never have happened and, given what the Prime Minister said at the beginning of his speech, one assumes that it will never happen again, either under the new interim chair of the JIC or, indeed, under any of his longer-term successors. I welcome that acknowledgment from the Prime Minister.

Butler goes on to say that all of that was shot through and compounded by the informality of style that is an apparent hallmark of the Prime Minister. That style may have served him well on many occasions, but it cannot have served him or the rest of us well on an issue of such profound importance as the decision to take this country into war. So again I welcome the return, which has been acknowledged, to a more formal, minuted and civil-service driven approach on issues of this nature in future.

We know that critical caveats were removed or altered for the dossier as a result of the interplay between No. 10 and the intelligence chiefs. The effect was to maximise the persuasive force of the dossier itself. At the beginning of his speech, the Prime Minister said that he wanted again to respond to the allegation that the Government had deliberately sought to mislead us. I hope that whatever our differences, as far as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), myself and other colleagues are concerned, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and others will acknowledge that we have never made that allegation, and we do not make it today. Our differences were distinct but open. We did not allege motives that we did not think were there.
 
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On the patchiness and sporadic nature of the intelligence that Butler refers to—frankly, I shall leave the earlier exchanges on that to speak for themselves—it is clear that the ultimate responsibility for the final words in the dossier rest with the Prime Minister, even if, as the Government argue, it was not the case for war, but the case for drawing people's attention to the directness of the threat, although that does not look so direct now.

Mr. Foulkes: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Kennedy: If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I want to make progress.

Lord Butler was asked to conduct an inquiry into systems. As such, he concludes that the critical failings were of a collective nature, so he does not seek to apportion individual blame. Yet surely the court of public opinion is looking for something more definitive. When the Prime Minister made a statement on the Butler report last week, anyone who watched the evening news bulletins cannot have failed to be moved when they listened to the relatives of the forces personnel who have been killed in Iraq describe how people seem to carry the can in Washington, yet all these mistakes are made in all parts of our system—there is a big question mark over whether we needed to go into this war in the first place—and no one carries the can except those who have paid the ultimate price.

Kevin Brennan: The House is listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman. He has been careful all along to say that he does not underestimate the good faith shown by the Prime Minister throughout the proceedings. Can I take it from what he says that that is still his position?

Mr. Kennedy: I have just said so, so the answer is yes.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke : The right hon. Gentleman generously accords with the judgment of good faith, and I think that I am persuaded by it. However, does he acknowledge that good faith can involve a certain amount of self-persuasion that what is being done is in the legitimate public interest? Can he suggest what legitimate role Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell played when they discussed the presentation of the intelligence to the public, which was nothing other than presenting the world as policy makers would wish it to be, rather than the world as it actually was?

Mr. Kennedy: The right hon. and learned Gentleman, in his various senior incarnations under various Conservative leaders, will have had more experience of the trials and tribulations of such conversations in and around No. 10 Downing street than myself. Where he and I share a direct experience with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and, going back a number of years, Lord Heseltine, of the omnipresence of Mr. Campbell is in a meeting on the eve of the launch of Britain in Europe. On that occasion, we saw that Mr. Campbell was more than capable of a conflation of assessment and advocacy, which leads me to believe that that could well have fed through to another occasion such as the one we are talking about.
 
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Last Friday, Dr. Blix said of the Butler report:

"My main reflection on reading the Butler report was to share its regret (termed surprise in the report) that the UK and other countries did not reassess their intelligence in the light of the inspection reports of UNMOVIC."

Dr. David Kay, the former head of the Iraq survey group, said of Butler:

"I think the Prime Minister, as I would say the US President, should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction. That was not something that required a war."

Those are the considered, impartial assessments of the former head of the Iraq survey group and the former chief weapons inspector, acting with the authority of the United Nations. Their words are crystal clear, whatever the explanations and the spin put on them by those around the Prime Minister.

Mr. Marshall-Andrews : Will the right hon. Gentleman attempt to answer a question that I was going to put to the Prime Minister, who can at least listen to it, even if he cannot answer? The right hon. Gentleman referred to a passage in Lord Butler's report that deals with the assurance given to the Attorney-General that the Prime Minister was certain that Saddam was in breach. The report records its surprise, which is mandarin for shock, that policy makers—or politicians, including the Prime Minister—and the intelligence community did not,

"as the generally negative results of UNMOVIC inspections became increasingly apparent",

re-evaluate in early 2003 the quality of the intelligence. Will the right hon. Gentleman hazard a guess as to why the Prime Minister did not do so?

Mr. Kennedy: Following the surrogate question asked by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), I feel that I should send an invoice to the Prime Minister for having to answer on his behalf. The hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) is correct that the jigsaw remains frustratingly incomplete because we do not know what legal opinions were offered to the Government on the basis of the available intelligence. We know from the Butler report that the Attorney-General provided advice on a number of occasions, and it cites three in particular. However, Butler supports the view that publication of all the legal opinions

"might inhibit the provision of full and frank . . . advice."

In normal times, that argument would be extremely persuasive, but these are not normal times, as the unprecedented decision to publish the dossier demonstrated. Such an event had never happened before, and the Government made great play of that.

Given the extent to which a considerable amount of legal opinion is already in the public domain, the case for full disclosure is surely overwhelming. As long as critical pieces of legal advice remain shrouded in secrecy, doubts and suspicions will linger and fester. If I were the Prime Minister, I would bite the bullet and publish in full.
 
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