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2.45 pm
Mr. Andrew Mackay (Bracknell) (Con): I want to make two points, but before I do so I take up the last point made by the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor), the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, who rightly said that it is a great pity that the debate is not going on longer. Many of us called, first, for the debate to continue until 10 o'clock, or, secondly, for it to be a two-day debate. The Leader of the House ignored us, but I believe that today we are fully vindicated. I am very pleased that the right hon. Lady, an ex-Government Chief Whip and Chairman of the appropriate Committee, entirely agrees; her point was well made.
My first point, which I put to the Secretary of State for Defence—I should have liked to put it also to the Prime Minister—is that sometimes there are wrongs that are so serious that an apology is not sufficient, and a resignation or sacking is required. I refer specifically to what Lord Hutton said in paragraph 463 of his report, when he said that it was "wholly improper" for Mr. Tom Kelly to have said before the funeral that Dr. David Kelly, who had only just died, was a Walter Mitty figure. I need hardly say to the Secretary of State that that not only caused great hurt to Dr. Kelly's family and friends but was patently untrue, as was shown by all the tributes made to Dr. Kelly, perhaps most powerfully by the Prime Minister himself. I cannot understand how the Prime Minister can allow Mr. Tom Kelly to remain one of his most senior advisers in Downing street and to deal with the press.
Dr. Julian Lewis : Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Mackay: No, sadly, much as I would like to give way to my hon. Friend, who earlier made a very useful intervention on the Prime Minister on this very point, time is short.
As the House will be aware, I have had some interest in Northern Ireland, both as Tom King's Parliamentary Private Secretary when he was Secretary of State there in the 1980s and, in the last Parliament, as the shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I therefore have some recollection of how Mr. Tom Kelly arrived on the scene, and it was a bad, sad occasion. The then Secretary of State, Mo Mowlam, in collusion with Alastair Campbell, removed an excellent civil servant, Andy Wood. He had been a distinguished chief press officer in that Department for a long time, and he was hugely well regarded. You will recall, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that there was a purge of civil servants in the press departments of different Departments, with certain
Secretaries of State more willing than others to dance to Mr. Campbell's tune, and so from the BBC came Mr. Tom Kelly—
Mr. Foulkes : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to make a sustained personal attack on a civil servant who is unable to defend himself?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The right hon. Member for Bracknell (Mr. Mackay) is referring specifically to something in the Hutton report, which is before the House today. What he says about names is, then, a matter for his judgment.
Mr. Peter Mandelson (Hartlepool) (Lab): Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am sorry, but what the right hon. Member for Bracknell (Mr. Mackay) is talking about does not feature in the Hutton report at all; he is talking about a perfectly routine change of civil servants in the Northern Ireland Office some years ago, which bears absolutely no resemblance or relationship to anything in the Hutton report.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order for the Chair. The right hon. Member for Bracknell has to be responsible for what he says in the House, and that becomes a matter of debate. I am sure that he will measure his words.
Mr. Mackay: I am delighted by the point of order from the right hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson), who made my case extremely well. He will know that there was a purge of distinguished civil servants who were not prepared to dance to the tune of the chief press secretary, Alastair Campbell. Such was Mr. Kelly's devotion that he was then moved to Downing street to be Mr. Campbell's No. 2. I go back to the point that I made earlier, which is that Mr. Kelly's position should be considered.
Mr. Mandelson: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I think that it is a discourtesy to the House, as well as to you, that after you have guided the right hon. Gentleman he should persist in referring to matters that are not the subject of this debate.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: The right hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson) must not bring the Chair into the debate. As I understand it, nothing out of order has been said in the line of argument that the right hon. Member for Bracknell is taking on the report. I said that that was not out of order. I also said that I was sure that the right hon. Gentleman would measure his words.
Mr. Mackay: I now move on to my second point. Many of my right hon. and hon. Friends, and certainly Labour Members such as the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), whose intervention yesterday was, as so often on this subject, remarkable and correct, would have voted for action in Iraq and supported the Government whether or not there was evidence of weapons of mass destruction. As the hon. Lady said yesterday, there were other good reasons, not least genocide and the way in which Saddam Hussein's regime was destabilising the middle east, for the action to be taken.
It is absolutely clear, however, that a significant number of Members—some on this side of the House, but many more of them Labour Members—finally decided in that fateful vote at the end of the debate last May to vote with the Government only because of the evidence that had been given from the Dispatch Box about weapons of mass destruction. If that evidence had not been forthcoming, the Government would probably either have lost that vote or won it in a way that hopelessly split the parliamentary Labour party. That would inevitably have been a pressure on Ministers.
Peter Bradley (The Wrekin) (Lab): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Mackay: I cannot because I have only two minutes left.
I recall from my day as Government deputy Chief Whip the pressures when there was a rebellion and a tight vote. I am not for one moment suggesting to the Secretary of State for Defence that those pressures would have been succumbed to, but what is absolutely essential for this inquiry is that those conducting it satisfy themselves that at no point did Ministers in any way over-emphasise the evidence of weapons of mass destruction with the clear knowledge in the back of their mind that they would need to have that evidence to persuade so many of their right hon. and hon. Friends. That is a perfectly legitimate concern for the House, and it is essential that the inquiry reach a conclusion on that very specific point.
2.54 pm
Joyce Quin (Gateshead, East and Washington, West) (Lab): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate. I do so as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, but also as someone who did not support the Government in going to war in Iraq, and who would maintain that view today. However, let me say at the outset that my difficulty in supporting the Government at that time was not because I felt that they had behaved improperly over intelligence matters or exercised improper influence over the intelligence agencies, but because I disagreed with the political judgments that they took after receiving the intelligence, and because of other issues, not intelligence-related, which were part of the open and public political debate at the time.
I support what my right hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor) said about the Intelligence and Security Committee. She rightly refuted the claim that members of the ISC, because they are appointed by the Prime Minister, are there to do the Prime Minister's bidding. The fact that he appoints us is in any case, in my view, far more significant in theory than in practice, as in practice consultations take place between the parties and the Whips, and, furthermore, I believe that we take our duties as parliamentarians seriously and reject the idea that the job of a Committee member is to be a cipher for anyone, the Prime Minister included.
The ISC report contained criticisms of the Government, as well as recognising areas where they should definitely not be blamed. The Committee was able to agree the report unanimously, on the basis of the detailed investigations that it carried out, but the point
needs to be stressed that intelligence, and the conclusions drawn from it, are only one part of the overall situation, forming only a part of the basis on which a political judgment on whether to go to war is made.The other elements are familiar to all of us, yet, frustratingly, in all the furore over intelligence, get overlooked. Those include issues such as whether it was advisable to give the inspectors more time, given that they had begun to have successes, and issues such as achieving a wider and bigger coalition of countries willing to take action, or whether the importance of our alliance with the United States should take precedence, to which the Prime Minister and the Government obviously attached great priority.
Other issues include whether the United Nations should have had a wider and more direct role, and questions about the international legality of the proposed action. In my view, many of those wider issues militated against the Government going to war when they did, but other wider issues motivated people to take a different view—in particular, the flouting by Iraq over many years of United Nations resolutions, and its appalling treatment of its own citizens. One of the issues that made me hesitate at the time of the vote was the powerful testimony from my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), and the testimonies that she ensured were heard of the families of Saddam Hussein's victims.
To say that the decision to go to war was completely intelligence-driven is inaccurate, and I regret the fact that Ministers sometimes give that impression. To blame intelligence for the decision to go to war is entirely unwarranted.
Let me turn to the report of Lord Hutton and its aftermath. When Lord Hutton was appointed, the press were full of praise for his integrity and the respect in which he was held by colleagues throughout the judiciary and more widely. I do not believe that he has undergone a personality or character change in the past few months, so I find it depressing that he is now being portrayed in some sections of the press as a biased and even dishonourable Government stooge. After the initial stunned reaction by the press to the report, we have seen a media fightback over the weekend, seemingly fuelled by disappointed rage that the report did not lambast the Government, as had been so fervently hoped.
Some of the media coverage has been, frankly, vicious and shocking. I could give many examples, but to give just one, The Sunday Times ran the screaming headline "Campbell crows", continuing on the next page, "as widow grieves". That seems to me to be a completely unacceptable way of reporting anything. It is offensive both to Alastair Campbell, who was exonerated in the Hutton report, and to Dr. Kelly's widow and family, on whom it piles further distress and intrusion.
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