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Mr. Michael Ancram (Devizes) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) on probably the shortest speech that he will make in the House for a long time.
This has been a most interesting debate, which has partly been about the situation in Iraq but also, crucially, about the Butler report and the information that it disclosed, for which the Government in general and the Prime Minister in particular must answer and be held to account. We have heard many fine speeches. I will not have time to deal with them all, but I should like to mention a few.
I shall start, if I may, with the typically humorous but percipient contribution by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), who rightly described the whole saga as a monumental PR failure and asked whether, in the end, the intelligence mattered to the Government. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will answer that question.
As I expected, several different views have been expressed, as in the debate on 18 March. Once again, I listened to them with great respect. We have conducted our debates accepting that we have differences of opinion, and we have dealt with those differences in an exemplary way.
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I listened to my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), whose position is not new. He has always made a powerful moral argument, and did so again today. I listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (Sir Teddy Taylor)—he, too, has always held to his position. I listened to the Father of the House, who has been consistent in the position that he has taken, as has the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle).
The hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Singh) made some important observations about the impact that this has had on Muslim opinion, not only in this country but abroad. It is important that we consider his comments very carefully and take action to address the situation that he identified.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) asked—it has been asked before—whether there was a deal between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister to back a war against Iraq and if that was why the intelligence ultimately matched the policy instead of the policy being made on the basis of the intelligence. The right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) made the same point.
I repeat those points because they go to the heart of the confidence that we have in the way that the system has operated. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will give us unequivocal answers.
I turn to the situation in Iraq. I welcome the handover of power to the Interim Government. Given yet another spate of car bombings, they are having to operate in a very grim situation. Their task is not easy, and my party and I wish them well.
Although we inevitably view the security situation with concern, I want to join the Prime Minister and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) in once again paying tribute to the magnificent work that is being carried out by our armed forces. Their dedication and professionalism remains a matter of great pride.
It is worth recalling why they are serving their country in this way. They went out there to deal with a United Nations-recognised threat to international peace and security. As a result of coalition action, Saddam Hussein and the international threat that he posed are gone. That is why we supported the war and were right to do so. I still believe that, as I said in the debate on 18 March last year, had we not gone to war then, we would have had to do so in future when it might have been much more dangerous and difficult. After the war, our servicemen and women remained there to help to give Iraq the chance of democracy, freedom and prosperity. That could make it a force for stability and good within the region as a whole. Completion of that objective may still be some way off, but we do Iraq no favours by talking only about the bad side and never about the good.
The first good news is that Saddam Hussein has gone. As the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) reminded us, the people of Iraq are delighted by that. I have always taken the view that regime change was not a reason to go to war. I have always doubted the legality of regime change, but I believe that we can all rejoice in the fact that the people of Iraq are now free from that reign of terror.
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Other things are improving on the ground in Iraq. The health budget is now US$948 million, compared with US$16 million under Saddam Hussein in 2002. In education, 2,500 schools have been rehabilitated and 32,000 teachers and education workers have been trained. In terms of the utilities, which were a matter of such concern when I was in Iraq last autumn, there is still much work to be done. However, water quality has been improved for 1.6 million people, and electricity generation is at last improving. Progress towards our post-war objective is therefore real and welcome, but there is still a long way to go.
Too much of the current instability is caused by unemployment. There is not enough investment, there are not enough jobs and, in too many cases, having no wages leads people to believe that they have little or nothing to lose through unrest. The Government must accept a good degree of blame for this situation. Before the war, I pressed them for assurances that a comprehensive plan for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Iraq was ready to be put in hand. I was assured that there was such a plan. I also asked for assurances that the Government had made adequate provision for the swift delivery of humanitarian aid and, again, I was assured that they had. It was only after the successful military action that we discovered, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) reminded us, that those assurances were not worth the breath that they were given with, because there were no comprehensive post-war plans in place.
Only now are many of the things that should have been happening then beginning to happen. I believe that, in time, Iraq will come good. Unlike the leader of the Liberal Democrats, I think that we have a duty to stay there and to help the Iraqi people until it does. It would be a sign of good faith to those people if the Government at least acknowledged their failure to plan and acknowledged the time that has been lost. Perhaps that is too much to expect, however, from a Government and a Prime Minister who have never acknowledged their failures in the run-up to the war and in its aftermath.
The Prime Minister has been in denial again today. This is not some party political game. This is about a decision to go to war; it is about grave issues. These are matters in which confidence in the Prime Minister, and in what he tells Parliament and the country, is central. Yet, once again, he brushes aside the issues of trust and confidence—issues that even Alastair Campbell, in his notorious diaries, described as "huge stuff". Once again, the Prime Minister seems to assume that, because we supported—and continue to support—the war, he should somehow be beyond our criticism. Let me tell him: he is not.
The fact that the war was justified does not mean that the manipulation or enhancement of intelligence is beyond reproach; it is not. Even if I did not need the Prime Minister's rhetoric to persuade me of the justification for war, I still have the right to believe that his interpretation of the intelligence was accurate. At moments of national or international crisis, the Prime Minister is the conduit to the public and to Parliament on matters of intelligence. Great care must be taken to ensure that what the public are given is the unvarnished
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truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Butler report clearly demonstrates that, in relation to WMD, those standards were not met. As my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) pointed out, the emphatic picture of their current and threatening existence that the Prime Minister painted at the time quite simply ignored the caveats, warnings and qualifications on the quality of the intelligence on which his assertions were based.
We have asked the Prime Minister why he failed to disclose those crucial caveats and why he did not temper his certainty as a result of them. We have received no answer. Let me remind him again of the speech that he made on 24 September 2002, when he said that the intelligence
"concludes that Iraq has"—
"chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them".—[Official Report, 24 September 2002; Vol. 390, c. 3.]
When I asked the Foreign Secretary in the debate on the Intelligence and Security Committee on 8 July whether, in the light of that statement by the Prime Minister, the intelligence had shown that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction at that stage, the Foreign Secretary replied that
"the analysis of that question is the focus of the Butler inquiry, which will be subject to full parliamentary consideration."—[Official Report, 8 July 2003; Vol. 423, c. 1099.]
Yet another clear and informative answer from the Foreign Secretary. This debate is the only parliamentary consideration that has been made available and, so far, we have not had an answer. The Foreign Secretary owes the House one.
The JIC report talks about capability. It does not talk about the existence of the weapons themselves. That is a crucial difference. We know from Butler that the intelligence was flawed; in his own words, it was "sporadic", "patchy" and "limited". We now know that it could not have supported the statements of the Prime Minister that the current existence of the WMD was "beyond doubt". The Prime Minister is a lawyer, and he knows that the words "beyond doubt" have a particular significance. He used them then, he has used them again today, and he used them in an interview that he gave to Sky more than a year ago. We now know that the judgments in the dossier of 24 September 2002 were not "beyond doubt". Butler said that they
"went to . . . the outer limits of the intelligence available."
We already knew that the second "dodgy" dossier of 3 February 2003, which the Prime Minister told the House was "further intelligence", simply could not justify that description. There may be explanations for these discrepancies. If so, we have not been given them. As a result, we are left with the conclusion that there was a conscious attempt to enhance the intelligence in order to minimise dissent in the House and the country.
For democracies, war must always be a serious option. It should never be a matter for spin, but tonight we are left with the conclusion that in this case it was. It has been argued that the decision to go to war was taken with our support, that the war is over and that none of this really matters any more. I totally disagree. What is at issue is not only the judgment of the Prime Minister but his credibility, and that is crucial. This is a matter of
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trust, and once that trust is breached, it is gone. The next time the Prime Minister purports to advise the House and the country on matters arising from intelligence, on what basis can we be confident that the intelligence has not once again been enhanced? As a number of my colleagues have already pointed out, that is a situation that this country cannot afford.
That is why the questions posed to the Prime Minister today have been of such importance. So what answers have we had? What has happened to the WMD? We did not hear anything about that today. I remind the Prime Minister that, in his interview for Sky on 31 May last year, he said:
"I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated . . . What we are going to do is assemble that evidence"—
again, he knows the importance of the word "evidence"—
"and present it properly to people . . . I have no doubt whatever that the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will be there."
Well, a year and a half later, where is that evidence of which he was so certain? Why did he ignore the caveats? He has admitted today that they existed; why did he not qualify his language as a result of them? Butler criticised the way in which the Downing street team worked. The Prime Minister told us that he accepted the findings of Butler, yet we have heard nothing today about changes being made in that regard.
Of course, we have still to hear from the Foreign Secretary, who may yet provide us with the answers to some of these questions. Indeed, one strange feature of the run-up to the war was the difference of tone struck by the Foreign Secretary throughout, in relation to weapons of mass destruction, compared with the categorical assertions of the Prime Minister. The Foreign Secretary was always careful to found the case for war on the United Nations resolutions and Hans Blix's reports, rather than on direct assertions of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps he took the caveats more seriously. Perhaps he could explain to the House what he knew at that time.
I would like the Foreign Secretary to explain something else as well. We have heard today about the intelligence that was withdrawn, which we read about in the Butler report. The Foreign Secretary knew about that intelligence as long ago as last September. Is it not the case that the head of MI6 informed him of the withdrawal of that intelligence on 8 September 2003? If so, will the Foreign Secretary explain to the House why the Prime Minister was not told about it? If it was important enough for the Foreign Secretary to know about, I would have expected him to tell the Prime Minister. Perhaps he will tell us why he did not.
Butler shows what a sorry mess the run-up to the war was. Many misjudgments were made at many levels. Some people have paid for those misjudgments with their jobs, among them the chairman and director-general of the BBC. Butler speaks of "collective blame" at Government level, yet no one here pays the price—indeed, one person gets promotion. In the end, the responsibility rests with the Prime Minister—not just theoretically or semantically, but in a very real way. The buck stops with him. Today he has failed to restore his credibility, and it is unlikely that he will be trusted in the
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future, when that trust may be crucial. That is the reality that he must face up to; that is the dangerous vacuum that he should urgently be seeking to mend.
7.39 pm
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