Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
RT HON
LORD HURD
OF WESTWELL
CH CBE, RT HON
LORD OWEN
CH, RT HON
SIR MENZIES
CAMPBELL CBE QC MP AND
ADAM PRICE
MP
3 APRIL 2008
Q1 Chairman: Let me call the Committee
to order and welcome our witnesses this morning. We are delighted
to have our colleague Adam Price, Lord Owen, Lord Hurd and Sir
Menzies Campbell. I am sure you have had it explained to you why
we particularly wanted to have this session and to invite you
along. The Committee has been interested for some time in the
whole business of inquiries and it produced I think perhaps the
first comprehensive report three years ago, called Government
by Inquiry, setting out the range of inquiries that governments
can hold and saying various things about them. As part of that,
it concluded that there was a gap where Parliament should be and
it recommended a device, which has been called in that report
a "Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry", which Parliament
could itself institute and we wanted to link this, if we could,
to some of the contemporary arguments about the case for an inquiry
into Iraq to see whether this proposition and this demand can
be reconciled in some way. Unless any of you particularly want
to say something by way of introduction, I think we would feel
quite inclined to try you out with some questions, if that would
be all right. Shall we do that? Can I ask this to start with,
and it goes to the core of the issue, really, I think. What on
earth can Parliament do when a government says that it does not
want to hold an inquiry, or at least does not want to hold one
at the moment, into something of public importance? Is there not
something rather odd about the fact that Parliament has to sit
around saying there ought to be an inquiry but then looking to
the Executive all the time to set it up?
Lord Owen: I agree, and I think
that you have got the power to do it, a resolution of both Houses,
set out by a select committee, with the powers that were needed,
and if you were clever you could overcome most of the sensible
objections that might come, you could ensure that everybody on
it was a privy counsellor, you could ensure that the chairmanship
was one that was beyond question, acceptable through your own
contacts to all the parties, you could design its terms of reference
and you could carry it through; and, if you wished, given the
controversy at the moment about when to set it up, you could also
set a date when they would report, and I would suggest that it
should be after the next election, so it should be June 2010 for
the report, and there is some merit actually. People will be more
honest and it will be more cohesive of Parliament's view as a
whole if it does not get dragged into the next election, and the
important thing is it should be available for the new government
and, if it is sensible, it will be a report that will genuinely
draw lessons for the future and, hopefully, draw lessons for a
future Prime Minister as to how to conduct and how not to make
mistakes. I feel strongly. I went back over the Suez crisis just
recently and I think if we had gone seriously, as Parliament,
into what went wrong with Suez, and particularly the handling
of it through Number 10 by Sir Anthony Eden, as he then was, I
think that we might have learned some lessons of value for the
handling of the Iraq war.
Q2 Chairman: There is a quotation
from Michael Foot about his pressure to get an inquiry into Suez,
where he says it was once the traditional practice of the House
that when a disaster occurred, especially a military disaster,
the House of Commons should set up an inquiry into the conduct
of the Executive, and over history you can look at the precedents
for this. Do we have to say, though, now that Parliament has become
so enfeebled that the ability to do this has gone and that we
have to sit around simply asking the Executive to do it?
Lord Hurd of Westwell: I come
to it from the angle of feeling very strongly that there should
be an early inquiry into the Iraq war rather than from the constitutional
point of view which, naturally, is top of your mind. We have got
a situation where the Government has been pressed by many of us
and has moved slowly to a position where, yes, there will be an
inquiry but not now, for reasons which you may not want to go
into but which I think are bogus. There should be maximum pressure
on them to do that, and what you are doing is, at the minimum,
a form of pressure. You see it as something more ambitious and
constitutional than that. I actually think that an inquiry set
up by government is probably the best way because I think then
the atmosphere would not be one of trying to force things out
of government, out of ministers, out of top civil servants, out
of chiefs of staff, it would be something which government itself
had acknowledged had to happen, and I think you might get a more
fruitful inquiry that way. But if they are not going to do it,
if they dig in, I think British troops will be in Iraq in small
numbers for a long time, and if they use that as a reason for
not having an inquiry, then I think that Parliament should move
and should set up, under your guidance, the best form of inquiry
it can. I would put it that way.
Adam Price: Can I say, Chairman,
I think the constitutional dimension of this debate is absolutely
critical, because the kind of foreign policy calamity that was
Iraq also laid bare the huge failings of our machinery of government
and our constitutional system, and they are many—politicisation
of the Civil Service, the concentration of power in the hands
of the Prime Minister side-lining of Cabinet—but also at
the core they are about, I think, an imbalance in the power between
the Executive and Parliament. There was this debate after Suez
as well, you are quite right, Crossland writing in the sixties
about the unbalanced constitution, and that was at a time when
maybe cabinet government was more liked than it is now; so I think
that this is absolutely critical to understanding why the mistake
was made and it would be a very, very important step in terms
of restoring some of the lost trust and credibility among the
public in Parliament in the political process for us to have a
parliamentary revolt, if you like, against the Executive on this
issue and for Parliament to decide that it wants to initiate its
own investigation.
Q3 Chairman: Can I bring Ming in
to pick that up and also what Douglas Hurd said. If the two Houses
of Parliament did decide by resolution that they wanted a parliamentary
commission, whatever we call it, into Iraq, there would be no
question, surely, but that the Government would have to say, "We
shall give it every co-operation", so that would not, in
fact, be a stumbling block, would it?
Sir Menzies Campbell: No. If the
vote had carried earlier this week on that topic, then it would
have been politically impossible for the Government to resist
establishing an inquiry. Precisely what the terms of reference
would be, because the motion which the House was invited to approve
did not actually contain terms of reference except in the broadest
general sense about the way in which the responsibilities of government
were discharged, but there would have been a political imperative
which the Government would have found impossible to resist, and
that is why when you said, "We just have to sit around",
I am not sure about that: because if opposition parties are willing
to use the limited time available to them to put an issue of this
kind in front of the House, then there is the opportunity to bring
some kind of pressure. Rather like Douglas Hurd, I am afraid I
bring quite a lot of baggage to this argument because I was wholly
opposed to the military action, and that has consistently been
my position for the last five years, so I am not sure I am an
entirely objective witness, but can I put this point to the Committee?
Throughout those long weary days on Lisbon, a constant refrain
for many of the Members of the House of Commons was that Parliament
was supreme and that we should not be ceding too many powers to
Brussels. If that supremacy really is constitutionally sustainable,
then one of the ways in which Parliament can assert it is by holding
the Executive to account in a much more systematic way, and a
mechanism for that would undoubtedly be an inquiry. I am less
concerned about the form of the inquiry. I think one can get caught
up in all sorts of discussions about when is a judicial inquiry
not a judicial inquiry. I think the principle of Parliament being
entitled to hold the Executive to account ought to be sufficiently
strong in our constitutional arrangements to allow Parliament
to create an inquiry of the kind that pretty well all of us have
agreed is necessary.
Q4 Chairman: When the Inquiry Act
was passed recently one of the effects (and this partly prompted
our interest in this) was that it took away any role in Parliament
under the original 1921 Act to set up these statutory parliamentary
inquiries; so Parliament was removed from the picture.
Sir Menzies Campbell: Worse than
that, Chairman, it gave ministers responsibilities or powers in
relation to the duration of the inquiry, who might attend it,
it allowed ministers to say, "It is time this inquiry came
to a conclusion." I think that is a reaction to Saville,
and there may be questions of management, but we should not allow
questions of management to intrude upon the principle of Parliament
being able to hold the Executive to account.
Q5 Chairman: Are we not stumped by
the fact that we now have intense party control, and although
in the great days of the nineteenth century we had these inquiries
because Parliament was a looser body, and you have mentioned opposition
parties putting motions down on this, but, of course, that is
guaranteed to produce solidity on the Government benches, more
or less, apart from this Committee, so that is the context now,
is it not, in which we try to move these things on?
Lord Hurd of Westwell: The tactical
truth is that if this initiative that you are starting really
gathered strength and it began to look as if, to use your phrase,
both Houses of Parliament were going to insist on this, the Government
would move in quickly and try and take charge. You would have
pushed them to the final decision to hold an inquiry and to start
it soon—maybe a report after the election—and then
there would be a discussion between the Executive and the Legislature
about terms of reference and how it worked, and that would be
a very satisfactory solution. They would move in under pressure
and try and organise an inquiry in a more traditional way, in
a Falklands type way.
Q6 Chairman: This is why we suggested
a mechanism involving the Liaison Committee here, which is a joint
committee of all the select committees, that would kind of trump
the channels—
Lord Hurd of Westwell: Fair enough.
Q7 Chairman: ---but we have made
little progress with that. Lord Owen.
Lord Owen: One of the problems
you face is one of the problems we faced with the Bingham Inquiry,
which I established to look at the oil companies, BP and Shell,
not keeping to the law over sanctions, supplying oil to, then,
Rhodesia. It became obvious that there was a constitutional problem
in that Bingham was given access to all the Foreign Office papers,
at my instructions, in which, part of them, were the Cabinet minutes
and the Cabinet discussions of a previous administration, the
Wilson administration in 1967-1968, which were crucial to their
deliberations. This was accidental. It happened to be on the files
of the Foreign Office, and they ought to have been, apparently,
under the precedent, returned to the Cabinet Office and held there.
There then proceeded to be a very heated debate inside the Cabinet
about how to proceed now that I had allowed these papers to go
to the Bingham Inquiry, and I had to go back to Bingham and try
and persuade him, which he was amenable to, that he could draw
on the findings but not quote from them, which he did. Then, when
it came back to the House of Commons, there was a whole question
of how to establish a new inquiry because the then Cabinet insisted
that they had no right to look at these past papers, and eventually
we proposed a commission which was then voted down by Parliament,
but you have to deal with this issue because it is crucial, what
went on in Cabinet and how government was conducted at Cabinet
level, and so that would have to be specifically put into any
terms of reference.
Q8 Mr Prentice: Is that why you want
the inquiry to meet in secret? You told us earlier that you would
report after the next general election in June 2010.
Lord Owen: I think that they should
be both given powers to meet in private and in secret. I am probably
the only person to have given evidence to the Franks Commission
on the Falklands, and there is no doubt, in my view, that at that
particular time—we were still hostile to Argentina—there
were a lot of things that I would not have been able to say if
it had been in public. It would have been possible to have had
part in public and part in private, but there will be intelligence
questions, and that is why we have covered that, as you know,
by the conventions with privy counsellors, but I think there is
a more important thing. I used, when I sat where you did, to be
very much keener on everything being public, and I have grown
to believe that actually, personally, you give better evidence
if you know that you have got two days to look back on what you
have said, and so you may have, without realising it, over-stepped
the mark on some intelligence thing which you have got a provision
to pull back over two days, three days. I mean, broadly speaking,
I am prepared to speak almost always on the record, but I think
there is sometimes a little bit of leeway. Anyhow, these are all
matters for you and others to discuss, but I think you would get
into a lot of Whitehall resistance if you said it had to be in
public at all times, and I also think you would not get at the
problems, so I think you have got to open up the possibility.
In this particular inquiry, but particularly since it would be
probably with troops still on the ground in Iraq, I think you
have got to be pretty open that quite a lot of it might be semi-private
in that you would be able to change your evidence if you had gone
over the mark and in two or three days the full transcript would
be published, maybe a week.
Q9 Julie Morgan: Do the others agree
with that view that some of it should be in private?
Sir Menzies Campbell: I think
discretion should rest with the Committee or the Commission of
Inquiry.
Lord Hurd of Westwell: I agree
with that.
Sir Menzies Campbell: If they
are sufficiently experienced, then they will know, when they have
come to a point of the kind that David Owen has described, that
it will be better to hear evidence in private and allow the opportunity
for subsequent revision.
Adam Price: Yes. Committees currently
have the option of hearing evidence in private, in camera,
so I think that should be afforded to any commissioner, whatever
is the most likely route to get us closer to the truth. One of
the difficulties, or one of the issues that a parliamentary inquiry
would have to face would be the Government's rules on access to
civil servants, and while the House has never taken a position
on this, the Government has its guidance which, although they
are often honoured more than breached, do state that civil servants
give evidence acting on the instruction of their ministers and,
therefore, they are not meant to answer questions in relation
to their own conduct. If we do not have a proper comprehensive
inquiry into Iraq, then we will have to ask questions about civil
servants' conduct as well, including their advice to ministers,
which again is meant to be a no-go area. Of course, we would also
be in the difficult area if there had been change of government.
We have another convention which says that if there is a change
of administration, then all the papers, the working papers, are
locked away and even the ministers of the in-coming government
cannot see them unless prior permission has been given. So, that
would be an issue, again, where Parliament would have to simply,
I think, assert its supremacy. There is no limit to Parliament's
right to call for persons and papers and ask for evidence under
oath. I think it would be important as well that any witnesses
would be given the same protection, not just the immunity from
prosecution which all witnesses of select committees currently
enjoy, but also, I think, the immunity from disciplinary proceedings
that was given by the Cabinet Secretary to civil servants giving
evidence in the Butler Inquiry. I think we would need the same
level of protection to all witnesses for any parliamentary inquiry
as well.
Q10 Mr Liddell-Grainger: All of you
have spoken of past inquiries, the Dardanelles, the Falklands
you have just mentioned, Mesopotamia and many others. There are
lots of precedents here where inquiries have taken place sometimes
during wars, all mainly at the instigation of the Prime Minister.
We have got Bloody Sunday on-going, which is a bit of a shambles,
for obvious reasons. Where do we take this? Everything is there
to actually create an inquiry, yet we cannot move on. Where do
we take this from here?
Lord Owen: Parliamentary procedure
is eminently flexible, and were there to be an all-party agreement,
official opposition can give time maybe—I think it has been
offered by William Hague—to the Labour people to put a motion
down, if they wish to, so there are lots of ways in which you
could overcome this; but as Douglas Hurd has said, I think the
reality is that once Parliament shows muscle, either through a
straight-out vote or a vote generated perhaps by your committee
on a resolution, government would start to co-operate and you
would probably end up with some form of inquiry. It is almost
inconceivable that an inquiry would work unless the Government
had confidence in the Chairman. I think we have got to get out
of this business that we cannot have an inquiry unless they are
a High Court judge—this is really ridiculous—and we
have seen some pretty awful reports from judges, and, frankly,
successive Lord Chancellors have not wanted judges to do it. In
the Bingham Inquiry, which I think was extraordinarily well conducted,
the then Lord Chancellor, Elwyn-Jones, was against having a judge,
and they would prefer judges kept out of these political things
and, by and large, they are well aware that they do not know enough
about the machinery of government.
Lord Hurd of Westwell: It should
not be a judge, but there is a further point. It is not just the
chairmanship. I think this has been a major disaster for the foreign
policy of this country and also actually for our Armed Services.
So, far from being hostile to an inquiry, my feeling is that they
would greatly welcome one for that reason, so that it could not
happen again, but that means that it is not an ordinary matter
of, as it were, legitimate party warfare. If you went ahead and
produced a plan, which all of us would support, I think you would
need to be clear not to fall into the Marconi trap. The reason
why parliamentary inquiries were discredited was because of the
Marconi Inquiry. At the end it was voted simply along party lines,
so this carried no conviction, and therefore to let purely party
considerations appear to dominate, whether it would be whipping
in support of a government or actually party antagonism to a government,
those things should not be allowed to dominate, and that affects
who you appoint as Chairman, who you have on. I am in favour of
privy counsellors. You can make privy counsellors for this purpose.
The position is extremely flexible. You can get people, and I
can think of two or three people, from outside Parliament, and
outside party, who would be very good members, and they could
be made privy counsellors for the purpose if that was needed to
get access to things. It is a very flexible system, but I hope
as you proceed you bear in mind this has to be removed, as it
were, from party favours of any kind, so far as that is possible.
Chairman: Going back to David Owen's
point, it is worth recording the fact that when we were talking
evidence on this two or three years ago it was the judges, in
fact it was Lord Woolf, in particular, who was Lord Chief Justice
at the time, who was emphatic that judges should not be brought
into these politically contentious kinds of inquiry. So we kind
of documented that, and I think that kind of makes the point.
Q11 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I follow
it down, because the picking of the chairman is the crucial part
to all this, and it has got to have, as you say, government approval.
Yet it is the Government, as we have seen in the Butler and the
other inquiries, who have picked it with a very narrow remit.
How do we get round the picking of the chairmen? What are your
thoughts on that?
Lord Owen: I think it is the usual
channels and, broadly speaking, that produces a better choice
than just the Prime Ministers on their own.
Q12 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Should it
be Parliament's final decision, the picking of the chairmen?
Lord Owen: Let us come back to
the only one I really know about, which is the Falklands Commission.
The decision to establish an inquiry was made during the war,
by Margaret Thatcher, quite early on and it was crucial, and it
was made very implicit to her that, if she did not concede this,
it would be very difficult to abandon the party political arguments
as to whether the war should have been prevented. From the moment
she agreed that there would be one set up after the war, the party
political criticism of the early part of the war was completely
stopped and everybody focused on one thing, which was having a
successful outcome, and I think that was very successful. Then,
after the war, it came to establish the inquiry and discussions
were conducted through the usual channels, and Lord Franks' name
came up and it was accepted. I cannot remember talking to different
people, but I think it was accepted by everybody as being a good
choice, and she did not choose a Conservative, and it was not
a lawyer, it was a distinguished civil servant. That met only
in private, and there were a lot of limitations about that commission,
and I personally think that there are some lessons from that,
but it was ideal in every other respect.
Adam Price: As a general principle,
I do not think you can allow the Government to choose the chairman
of an inquiry whose principal focus is to investigate the conduct
of the Government or the previous conduct of their policy. We
have a classic example from the United States with the 9/11 Commission,
which was set up as Bush's response to the congressional pressure
for a congressional inquiry. He appointed Philip Zelikow as the
head of the 9/11 Commission and it subsequently emerged that Zelikow
had written the 31-page Bush doctrine on pre-emptive attack, and
then Zelikow, who was the head of the Commission, had to give
evidence to his own commission and was recused from actually being
part of some aspects of the inquiry because Bush had put his own
man at the head of the inquiry. That was an extreme example but
I think it sheds light on the basic principle that, if an inquiry
is looking at the conduct of government, including government
ministers, some of whom are still in Cabinet, then you cannot
allow the chair of that inquiry, the membership and the remit,
to be decided by the Executive.
Sir Menzies Campbell: You have
to put it down in a resolution in the House of Commons, which
says "nominate Mr X, Y, Z to be the chair and the following
to be members", and then that resolution has to carry through
the House. If the House is dissatisfied, it can turn it back.
Q13 Mr Prentice: In 2003 you originally
called for a judicial inquiry. Given what you have just heard,
have you changed your mind on that?
Sir Menzies Campbell: I am not
as opposed to judges as some of my colleagues. Saville, I think,
is an aberration, and I think there are management questions about
Saville.
Q14 Mr Prentice: Have you changed
your mind—that is the question?
Sir Menzies Campbell: I am a lawyer;
I take a while to answer your question! The Billy Wright Inquiry
is proceeding, I understand, under the chairmanship of my erstwhile
colleague now Lord McLean, and I am told that is moving expeditiously,
quickly and has drawn its management, as it were, from the failures
of Saville. So, I think judges in certain circumstances are entirely
right, particularly if it comes to the weighing up of contradictory
evidence where you have questions of credibility, because that,
after all, is what their primary function is. Having looked again,
the word "judicial" is not a term of art here, it is
a general description.
Q15 Mr Prentice: I understand that,
but you did not call for a judicial inquiry into any old thing.
You called for a judicial inquiry into Iraq, and there are political
considerations.
Sir Menzies Campbell: I think
I fell into the trap.
Q16 Mr Prentice: Can I just finish
the point. Tony said just a few moments ago that when Lord Woolf
was before us way back in 2005, he said that for issues perhaps
like Iraq, where there are political considerations, it is not
really always clever to have a judge chairing the inquiry. My
question quite simply is, in view of everything you have heard,
are you still pressing for a judge?
Sir Menzies Campbell: No, with
the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that, if the issues are
as political as the issues surrounding the decision to take military
action against Iraq, then I think the interposition of a judge
is inappropriate.
Q17 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can we follow
that along then. We had the Butler and the Hutton Inquiries, two
very different men, two very different briefs. They were seen
as a safe pair of hands, they were under a lot of criticism because
they were appointed by the Prime Minister to get the answer he
wanted, and all the rest of it. Do you see any of that as being
a problem? Could an inquiry have been better, could it have been
broader? What are we all feeling, because they, both of them,
came in front of this Committee and I think at the time we felt
there were a lot of things that could have been done, and should
have been done, but were not. Were they the right men to conduct
those two inquiries?
Lord Hurd of Westwell: I think
they were the right men. I think the terms of reference were narrow.
What we are talking about is something much broader which focuses,
in particular, I would think, on something which has simply not
been properly examined at all this side of the Atlantic, although
it has been thoroughly examined the other side, namely the totally
false assumptions on which the planning of a major exercise proceeded
or the absence of valid assumptions. That is a huge issue. It
encompasses to some extent, of course, the things which at any
rate the Butler Report covered and, as Butler himself said, there
may be more to come on that than was available to him, particularly
from across the Atlantic, but this is a huge enterprise and, therefore,
I think, not to be completely compared to the earlier ones as
if it is a re-run of them; it is not; it is something much bigger.
Lord Owen: I gave evidence to
the Butler Inquiry. I think it should not be a civil servant who
is chairman of the inquiry, and I think it particularly should
not be previous secretaries of the Cabinet. I give you an example
of where I think the Butler Inquiry got off to a very bad start.
The day that I appeared before them in order, potentially, to
give evidence, it was announced that Sir John Scarlett was going
to become the head of MI6, and they started it as if it was obvious
that I would give evidence to them, and I said, "Look, before
we go any further, I have not yet decided whether I am going to
give evidence to you because I need an assurance that this committee
is not going to be inhibited in their inquiry by the fact that
one of the most substantial issues has been pre-empted by the
Prime Minister by appointing Sir John Scarlett already to the
head." I must say, I think that Lord Butler was not aware
of how serious this was, and I said had to say, "I think
you should discuss it first", because I already had a press
statement ready that, if they did not give me a satisfactory answer
to this, I was not going to give evidence. I think that we do
need to realise that a parliamentarian would have no problem with
this at all, they would have sensed immediately that this was
a serious problem. Their whole authority was being challenged
by the Prime Minister while the inquiry was under way. They did
recess and discuss it, and they came back with an answer which
was just about satisfactory as far as I was concerned, but it
was never really clear as to how much the chairman had been consulted—he
had been notified, but how much he had given a nod and a wink
that this would be acceptable—and I think that a parliamentarian
would have told the Prime Minister it is not acceptable to be
establishing an inquiry on the intelligence and have the most
important aspect of it, the conduct of the JIC[1],
in effect, pre-empted during their whole inquiry. This goes on
behind the scenes but people should know that an important issue
like that was able to be done, and it demonstrates that, unless
there is a very strong resolve of particularly the chairman, you
can have it manipulated by the Prime Minister actually while it
is being set up.
Sir Menzies Campbell: I must say
how strongly I agree with what David Owen has just said. There
is also some anecdotal evidence now emerging in various sets of
memoirs for that period that at least one member of the Butler
Committee fought long and hard against others in relation to conclusions
which they might have reached which might have been thought to
be critical of the Government, so one cannot, I think, look at
Butler as if it were a perfect illustration of an inquiry into
a sensitive area. I think there is no doubt, in the minds of some
at least, that some of the opinions being expressed there had
a very strong political bias.
Q18 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you agree
with that, Adam?
Adam Price: Yes. The key problem
with Butler was the narrowness of its remit, focusing on the competence
of the intelligence services, et cetera, but then it was used
by the Executive to exonerate the administration. Exactly the
same thing happened in the United States in the Silverman-Robb
Commission, set up by the Bush administration, and that actually
was the catalyst, if you recall, for the decision to set up the
Butler Inquiry. We were pushing in Parliament for that inquiry;
indeed I think there was a motion by the Liberal Democrats and
discussion on the floor of the House. The Government were resisting
that. Suddenly Bush decides to set up his own commission and,
hey presto, we have an exact equivalent here and a very narrow
remit. Yet on both sides of the Atlantic they did exonerate, by
and large, the intelligence community, but that exoneration was
actually used by the members of the Executive and the Butler Inquiry
was not set up to do that. We need an inquiry which looks at the
conduct of policy and policy makers. We have not had that to date.
Chairman: It is interesting that when
Lord Butler himself gave evidence to us in our inquiry on inquiries
we discussed these matters with him and the fact that he led a
privy councillor inquiry, but he thought it could equally well,
and probably better, have been a parliamentary inquiry because,
in effect, all the privy counsellors, I think apart from one,
were Members of Parliament anyway, so the status and legitimacy
of this enterprise would have been much greater if rooted in Parliament,
something also which Richard Scott said to us about his Scott
Report as well, and so there is a sort of history to these arguments.
Q19 Paul Flynn: The main point that
this Committee's report came out with and also looking at the
inquiries that had taken place, was that we needed to have inquiries
that were initiated by the power of Parliament rather than by
the property of the Executive. Looking back, Lord Owen mentioned
the Suez crisis, and if anything is comparable to Iraq it is Suez,
it brought many people onto the street and it was unpopular at
the time in many ways and unpopular in retrospect. Do you see
merit in the committee's proposal and, if you look back at, say,
the Suez Inquiry and the others, if there would have been a superior
inquiry into that time that was based on this rather than the
political power of the Executive at the time?
Lord Owen: You have to look at
the political timing of Suez. It was 1957, just after the 1955
election, so the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan faced a
problem which is somewhat analogous to the situation of the now
Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Firstly, if you set up an inquiry
how much is that objected to by your predecessor, how much are
you seen to be undermining him? In this particular case, MacMillan
had been a very controversial participant in aspects of the Suez
crisis. Did he want to have to reveal his particular hand—first
in last out, according to Harold Wilson's summary of MacMillan's
position? The Prime Minister of the day had a real dilemma about
setting up an inquiry, and I think to some extent those problems
are there for Gordon Brown, which, again, is an argument for taking
it out of the Prime Minister's hands and giving it into Parliament's
hands, and maybe he might not be too unhappy about that, to be
frank about it. Then, you also come to the question: it would
have been difficult to postpone that until the next election,
so it was bound to come out in the time of the Conservative Government,
and by then Suez, which had started off as bi-partisan—Hugh
Gaitskell broadly supported military action—but by the time,
of course, the debacle had occurred and the clandestine nature
of it, became very, very partisan, so an inquiry established by
a Prime Minister would have been to establish an inquiry that
was likely to report before the next election and be embarrassing
for him and, by and large, politicians do not do that.
1 Joint Intelligence Committee Back
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