Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 319)
THURSDAY 19 JANUARY 2006
SIR JEREMY
GREENSTOCK GCMG
Q300 Grant Shapps: Never?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: The possibility
is never.
Chairman: In that case, the fridge may
not be the right place for it!
Grant Shapps: It will go off.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Indeed.
Q301 Grant Shapps: To continue your
metaphor, by saying it is in the fridge and not the freezer, you
are saying there is no thawing time required, you can bring this
out and publish it very quickly. Does that mean you have actually
completed the book?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I had completed
the book in July. The original publication date was the beginning
of September, so by the middle of July the publishers would have
had to have a final text to have copies on the bookstands by the
end of August. We can go into the uninteresting detail of why
I stopped at that precise moment, but you have to either proceed
or cut at the point when the publishers had to go to press. If
I return to the book, I would have to update it; it was set at
a particular time with events in Iraq having reached a certain
point, and there is a certain amount of comment at the end about
what the whole saga of Iraq means which would have to be updated,
so some fresh writing would be necessary.
Q302 Grant Shapps: You now have a
book which is complete, though will need a bit of updating, sitting
in your fridge at home, and presumably you are going through some
kind of internal conflict as to whether this should ever be put
in the public domain at all. On the one hand you appeared to be
about to say to me, "Actually I could publish this very quickly,
which is why it is in the fridge and not the freezer", but
on the other hand you are telling me it may never be published.
Is this because of an internal conflict for you or just because
you genuinely do not know or because you fear political pressure?
Why?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I just
have not decided. Having been through the intensive business of
getting these words on the page, revising them endlessly with
my publisher on the one hand, with the Foreign Office on the other,
pulling in different directions, it is all quite an intensive
experience. When you stop that, the whole thing goes off the boil
in your mind. I am sorry about all these culinary metaphors. It
remains off the boil. I do not know whether I can regenerate the
energy to return to it.
Q303 Grant Shapps: Does this feel
like an unfinished project to you?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: No. It
feels like something I have been through and finished and it would
be a considerable effort to return to it. This is perhaps a clearer
answer about where it stands at the moment. It would need a lot
of energy to return to, but having spent the time on it that I
have, it would be a pity to waste it altogether, and the bulk
of what is there is usable.
Q304 Grant Shapps: Have you read
DC Confidential?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Yes, I
have.
Q305 Grant Shapps: If you were to
rate your text alongside, is this more or less sensational? Are
you somewhat aggrieved that Sir Christopher Meyer managed to slip
his book out and you have been stopped? How does it make you feel?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I am not
thinking in terms of comparisons.
Q306 Grant Shapps: You are the only
man who has read both, are you not, so you are the only person
we can ask?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Together
with a few people who have been through my text. After all, quite
a lot of the Foreign Office has read both, and the Cabinet Office.
Q307 Grant Shapps: Though not the
Foreign Secretary.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: He may
have done by now, I do not know. He may not have read DC Confidential.
Chairman: I think he has.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: The two
books are different. I am dealing with a much narrower and deeper
area. I am talking about a saga of foreign policy as it evolved—a
foreign policy story, if you like—whereas Christopher is
representing an experience over a number of years. I am not going
to offer any adjectives about it or comparisons, they are different
books.
Q308 Grant Shapps: Are you saying
yours is a more serious, in-depth book?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I have
not said that. I think Christopher has made a lot of serious points
and has been very enlightening about what it is like to be ambassador
in the United States, but I am seeking to explain a narrower and
deeper range of events.
Q309 Grant Shapps: So the Foreign
Office objection to your book is more based on the serious nature
of the content than, as I think we suspect with Sir Christopher
Meyer's, it was the tittle-tattle which made his unpalatable to
the current administration?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I have
not entered into the realm of value judgments of people in public
officer and their performance. I am though trying to explain why
things happened, how things happened, what happened to some extent
in the background, while not revealing confidences and secrets
which may not be revealed. So a very careful judgment has to be
made about how you can explain things when you cannot say everything
that does explain them. It was necessary in my view to have a
discussion, almost a negotiation, with the Foreign Office about
where those rather fine lines were to be drawn, and I think I
sensed in the Foreign Office a dichotomy of feeling, that they
actually saw the point of having an explanation of this kind of
how a very controversial piece of foreign policy was enacted,
yet on the other hand they did not want facts to emerge which
might affect the continuing diplomacy on Iraq. Where was the balance?
Would Iraq policy from the UK interest point of view benefit from
the deeper explanation or be damaged by the revelation of certain
things that happened which have not yet come into the public domain?
Q310 Grant Shapps: I am interested
in whether you think the Radcliffe rules et cetera and the Foreign
Office rules have in your case worked or not worked when it comes
to publishing your memoirs?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: In my case
I think so far they have worked. I have no argument with them.
In re-reading Radcliffe, it seems to me to remain an eminently
sensible report, and before you ask me the follow-up question,
Mr Shapps, or anybody else, I think it did not work in the case
of Christopher Meyer. That is my view.
Q311 Julie Morgan: You have touched
on this already but you said earlier in your evidence that you
thought Iraq was different, and I wonder if you could explain
why you thought Iraq was different and why this would justify
writing your book?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Iraq is
an issue above all in this decade, or these few years which we
are considering as an issue in which the foreign policy of the
United Kingdom, the interests of the United Kingdom, have been
very intimately engaged, which connects with most other areas
of foreign policy: with politics in the Middle East and particularly
the Gulf Region; with relationships with the United States, with
the role of the superpower; with the role and capacities of the
United Nations and what the United Nations can and cannot achieve
in the area of international peace and security; with particular
relationships that the United Kingdom has with others; with oil;
with weapons of mass destruction and proliferation; all sorts
of issues in a very complex way, which has changed the character,
evolved the character, of almost all these issues. The interrelationship
between those different things and the way in which we continue
to look at them and act on them is an extremely important part
of British foreign policy and British interests. It seemed to
me what I had read up to the point I started writing on Iraq did
not bring out some of the underlying truths of what had happened,
and the distortions in what was being said, particularly in the
media, were capable of distorting also the lines through to those
other areas. So I felt there was a public interest in having the
deeper explanation of what happened, so that the debate on all
these things could be better informed.
Q312 Julie Morgan: So your own contribution
to that debate, which you would like to have made, you saw as
actually influencing events which were still evolving?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: That was
not the reason that I wrote.
Q313 Julie Morgan: But that would
have been the effect?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: What I
was not trying to do was to write a comprehensive treatise on
the whole business, a whole history if you like, of the whole
thing. I really wanted to set down some of my experience on Iraq
so that others, particularly historians at some stage but also
people commenting contemporaneously, would have a better understanding
of those bits on which I could say some things and make some comments.
I was not writing in order to change anything or to influence
policy.
Q314 Julie Morgan: But do you not
think that if you had written, if it had been published, it would
have influenced our view of what happened in Iraq, which is still
an on-going saga?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Only marginally.
Come on, it is just one civil servant in a huge team in a whole
international arena. It would have been interesting for a short
period of time and then people would have moved on. Look at the
books which have come out in the United States with very considerable
explanation, revelation, of what went on, the latest of which
is Ambassador Paul Bremer's own account of his stewardship in
Baghdad. Each of those books on their own probably would not have
affected people's attitudes towards the policy decisions which
were taken and the performance of the leaders who took them, if
taken singly. Cumulatively, as we get from those books a deeper
understanding of all the things which happened, people's minds
do change about what happened and about the sense of the decisions
which were taken. So I was writing as a contribution to a whole
series of comments on the Iraq war. But I was aware that there
were probably very few, if not no other, senior British government
servants writing on that issue and therefore I would need to be
careful about my position in that respect.
Q315 Julie Morgan: I suppose because
your proposed publication produced such a sharp response from
the Foreign Secretary in particular, it is easy for us to imagine
there were things in your book which would change our view of
events more than you are saying at the moment. What you are saying
is what you were going to write you do not think would have made
that much difference to our overall view of the conflict but would
have added to the understanding of contemporary historians?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I do not
know, you will have to ask the Foreign Secretary why he reacted
as he did. I think the news of Meyer and Greenstock hit him in
the same week and he rather lumped them together and thought the
dam was breaking, so I think there were particularities in his
reaction. You would have to ask him.
Q316 Julie Morgan: So you do not
think there was anything in what you were proposing to publish
which would have caused major problems if it had been published?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: For whom?
For the Government?
Q317 Julie Morgan: For the Government,
yes.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: No, I do
not. I really do not think it would have caused major problems
for the Government. I think in net terms it would have been the
converse.
Q318 Julie Morgan: I noticed you
said earlier in your evidence it was more favourable to the Government
than not.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Mistakes
were made over Iraq and part of the whole point in writing about
it is, in the public interest, the lessons to be learned from
the true story rather than from assumed facts or distortions of
the facts. We also have not mentioned, and we maybe will get on
to it in further discussion, I think there is a value in some
transparency about these things to the public interest. To answer
your question, I believe that in explaining why decisions were
taken rationally it would have been more difficult for careless
accusations to be made against the Government of irrational decision
making.
Q319 Julie Morgan: So do you think
finally that the Foreign Secretary did overreact to your book?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I am not
describing his reaction in any particular way. He had his point
of view and that point of view had to be respected.
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