(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Morris of Aberavon
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the reasons for the delay in the completion of the Chilcot Inquiry.
Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the reasons for the delay in the completion of the Chilcot report. I will confine myself to some specific questions. Despite repeated requests over the years, I have never commented on the legality of the Iraq war. My duties as Attorney-General during the Kosovo war were difficult enough and many law officers have decisions to make concerning international law which are not easy. My only comments were in my recently published memoirs in which I said:
“The equivocation of the French before the Iraq war is not an argument for the failure to try for a further sustained effort”,
in the Security Council. I added:
“Or was the die already cast? The Chilcot inquiry may tell us”.
My interest in public inquiries goes back a long time. Cabinet Office records show that my name was suggested for the Franks inquiry into the Falklands War. In the event, more experienced colleagues were chosen. The Franks inquiry took six and a half months in all. The Chilcot inquiry was set up in June 2009. Its final public hearings were in February 2011 and we were told that it would deliver its report as soon as possible. In 2009, Mr Gordon Brown told Parliament:
“No British document … will be beyond the scope of the inquiry”,
and that the final report,
“will be able to disclose all but the most sensitive information—that is, all information except that which is essential to our national security”.
As a former Attorney-General, I fully understand those considerations. It is how they are interpreted that matters and whether the correct judgment is made in balancing. Mr Brown added:
“I have accepted the Cabinet Secretary’s advice that the Franks inquiry is the best precedent”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/09; col. 23.]
In the difficulties about publishing Chilcot, has there been any departure from that precedent?
At that time, Mr Cameron made a number of challenges. He said that the Franks committee reported in just six months and suggested that, because of the longer period for Chilcot, people would conclude that the inquiry had been fixed to tide the Government over until after the election. A year seemed too long for Mr Cameron in 2009. Unless progress is made, it will be more than four and a half years in the case of Chilcot.
On 7 November, the Daily Telegraph reported:
“The Cabinet Office is resisting requests to make public ‘more than 130 records of conversations’ between either Mr Brown or Tony Blair … and Mr Bush … There is also a wrangle about making public ‘25 Notes from Mr Blair to President Bush’ and some ‘200 Cabinet-level discussions’”.
First, who is responsible for the delay? Secondly, what precisely are the reasons for it?
Public inquiries are set up to deal with public disquiet, to establish facts and to learn lessons. Not to publish is to undermine the whole object. Delay is unjust and justice to the public is denied. In January, in a Written Answer, Francis Maude said that,
“the completion of its report is a matter for the Inquiry Committee”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/14; col. 1W.]
Later in the month, he said:
“The Iraq Inquiry has been provided with all of the documents it has requested”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/1/14; col. 32W.]
Your Lordships may consider, from the very tight drafting of both answers, that they are less than frank.
In December, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, said that the Prime Minister had been updated by Sir John Chilcot, who had,
“reported that continuing discussions over certain classified documents had caused a delay to the Maxwellisation process, and hence publication of the report”.—[Official Report, 12/12/13; col. WA 139.]
That was much more transparent. Maxwellisation is the name for the way the common law has developed of providing a person who is criticised in a report with an opportunity to comment. It is nothing more than fairness. If you cannot resolve what should be in the contents of a report, both the inquiry and the criticised are in an intolerable situation. Following freedom of information requests, the Information Commissioner ruled in favour of disclosing the minutes of two Cabinet meetings in 2003 prior to and concerning military action in Iraq. The Cabinet Office—would you believe it?—had curiously argued that the public interest in favour of disclosure diminished with the passage of time. That is risible. It is the original long-grass argument.
The commissioner considered that there was a presumption running through the Freedom of Information Act that openness in itself is to be regarded as something which is in the public interest. The commissioner concluded that, in line with recent legal authority, material which,
“can provide a better understanding of how the decision to go to war was made is subject to an exceptionally strong public interest in disclosure”.
The Library has failed to find any record of an appeal and I am particularly grateful for its help.
On 31 July 2012, the commissioner said that he was disappointed that a ministerial veto, as allowed by the Freedom of Information Act, had been used to override his recent decision on the two Cabinet meetings to which I have referred. Why was the route of a ministerial veto followed rather than an appeal to the court as in the recent case of Plowden—or were the Government, in whatever manifestation, afraid of another adverse finding? Perhaps I may remind the House of the background statement of the policy of the Freedom of Information Act. It states:
“The Government considers that the veto should only be used in exceptional circumstances and only following a collective decision of the Cabinet”.
Has that policy been changed by this Government? Was the Cabinet consulted? If not, who took the decision? Was it the Prime Minister or the Cabinet Secretary?
I surmise that each and every word of Prime Minister Brown’s statement announcing the Chilcot inquiry had the blessing of the then Cabinet Secretary—if indeed he did not draft it. The crucial question is: how much wider is the veto now being used than the actual words used by Mr Brown, to which I have already referred, that restrictions in publication would be limited to that which was essential to national security?
A blanket refusal to disclose Cabinet discussions, especially having regard to the commissioner’s carefully considered and balanced ruling of the need to publish, seems miles wider than Mr Brown’s promise to Parliament. Will the noble Lord give a categorical answer to my question: Has Mr Brown’s promise to Parliament been breached, either in form or in spirit? Parliament was deceived at the time of Suez. It would be most unsatisfactory if any similar allegation over Iraq were not cleared up in this independent inquiry, which Mr Brown promised,
“will receive the full co-operation of the Government”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/09; col. 23.]
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to follow my noble and learned friend and to adopt many of his questions. First, I shall reflect on the precise question in the Motion and then consider whether the inquiry is likely to be judged worth while.
Perhaps the first question can be answered briefly. It is largely contained in Sir John Chilcot’s letters to the Prime Minister of 15 July and 14 November last year. Apparently, only in June last year did the inquiry request that certain documents should be published to give evidential backing to its conclusions. I make two observations on that. First, why was the request made so late in the day? Secondly, surely it was unrealistic of the inquiry to believe that Cabinet Office documents and confidential exchanges between heads of state could be published. By sticking to such a principle, the inquiry ensured further delay for a process that began in June 2009 and was expected by some at the time to last but for a year. The Guardian of 29 December last claimed that a compromise agreement had been reached between Sir John and the Cabinet Secretary that extracts could be published in a redacted form. I pose this question to the Minister: is that so? Was not such a deal in effect inevitable from the start?
Many doubts remain as to whether the length and expense of the inquiry have been worth while. My noble and learned friend referred to the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. However long and expensive that inquiry was, it had the merit of having a cathartic effect on divisions within Ulster. Perhaps the Chilcot inquiry was necessary because of pressures at the time, but many key questions have already been answered. Certainly, every conceivable question was asked of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time. For some the motive was a sort of personal vendetta against Tony Blair—let us remember “Blair liar” and “Blair war criminal”—but they are likely to be disappointed.
I personally had the privilege of an important vantage point. Between 1997 and 2005 I chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee of the other place. I gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry and I visited key figures in the Washington establishment at least twice a year over the period between 1998 and 2005. I had one-to-one meetings with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Sir Richard Dearlove. As a result, I am wholly convinced that Tony Blair acted with total integrity and relayed to Parliament and the public the advice that both he and, indeed, I too had received. There may be criticisms that he did not ask sufficiently searching questions of the intelligence services about their sources. Certainly the US Administration relied excessively on exiles and partisan sources such as Mr Chalabi and the Iraqi taxi driver, Mr Rafid al-Janabi. There was much suspicion that the US Administration was seeking revenge on Iraq for 9/11.
The Prime Minister at the time may be criticised for being insufficiently independent of the United States and having a rather starry-eyed view of President Bush and the special relationship, but again, for example, at Crawford in March 2002 he told the President that he would support military action not come what may, but provided,
“that certain conditions were met”.
He did ensure that the United States took the UN path until thwarted by Monsieur de Villepin and contrary to the neo-cons’ view in Washington. Equally, he avoided the isolation of the US, and in my judgment both of those were the objectives. The inquiry is unlikely to find a smoking gun and it has said in terms that it will not apportion blame.
What about the breaches of international law to which my noble and learned friend alluded? Even if in retrospect we recognise that there was greater weight against intervention among those international lawyers who opposed the intervention, there were respected lawyers on both sides of the argument for pre-emption. The inquiry would be well advised, in spite of its excellent legal adviser, not to seek to give a definitive view in this very uncertain field of international law. What about the role of the security services? Surely that was adequately covered in the Butler report. What about the role of the military? It has had its lessons learnt reviews. There were some concerns about the quality of military equipment, but surely the general, correct view is that it was executed superbly by our Armed Forces.
The follow-up to the Iraq intervention is that there has been much public revulsion against all intervention. There was the Chicago speech by Tony Blair in, I think, 1998. There were successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, but following Iraq and Afghanistan, as we have seen in Libya with no boots on the ground and as we have seen in the parliamentary view on intervention in Damascus, there is now a very strong public and parliamentary tide against intervention.
What about the likely conclusion about governance? Was there too much armchair government? Was there a presidential-style Government with the Cabinet sidelined? That may be so, but the memoirs of Robin Cook, no great admirer of the former Prime Minister, suggest otherwise. What about the insights into transatlantic relations? It was the clear strategic priority of the Prime Minister not to keep the United States isolated; that was very much a major factor for him. There was a great deal of evidence of that in the US inquiries. I had a certain personal experience of the somewhat naive views of the neo-cons in Washington when on several occasions I met Mr Richard Perle, whom Denis Healey called the “Prince of Darkness”. He relayed to me his view that come the liberation, while perhaps the bells would not ring in Iraq, there would certainly be great rejoicing and that the ripples of democracy would flow out from Iraq over the whole of the Middle East. That was a view which was in part accepted by the President, and the neo-cons were then very much in a dominant position in Washington.
What about the post-conflict planning? Is the inquiry likely to tell us anything useful about that? The truth is, of course, that we in the UK played a very secondary role in the conflict and certainly a secondary one in the post-conflict planning. I saw that when I went to the green zone in Baghdad and was in the office being occupied by Sir Jeremy Greenstock. I saw the role of Mr Paul Bremer and his large component on the other side. There were two contrasting blueprints for the post conflict. The State Department had Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, who told me that there was more combat experience on his floor in the State Department than on the relevant floor of the Department of Defense. In that department were Mr Donald Rumsfeld and Mr Paul Wolfowitz. They were at the top of the department and said that the Iraqi army was dissolved. As we know, the Chilcot inquiry was unable to interview key people in the US Administration, so it has been given only a partial view of the key players in the post-intervention scene in the United States.
In conclusion, I fear that this long-awaited and long-expected inquiry, long delayed for good or bad reasons, may well prove to be no more than an historic document mainly of interest to students of government. Possibly, after an initial flurry of interest in the press and among the public, the waters will close over it and it will have as little ultimate impact as the Franks committee report on the Falklands, referred to by my noble and learned friend. At least that had a totally UK national perspective. Many expectations have been raised, but it may well be that many expectations will be dashed.
Lord Alderdice (LD)
My Lords, I suppose that if one were to ask many members of the public for their memory of the political story of Iraq, they would probably say, “Well, in the United Kingdom, the governing Labour Party and the Official Opposition, the Conservative Party, supported the invasion, and the Liberal Democrats insisted on a UN resolution, which they did not get and they opposed the war as a result”. On that kind of narrative, one might well expect that I would be standing here wanting to find out the legal background—what really happened in past—in order to produce some kind of simplistic blame. It seems to me that that would be an extremely foolish thing to do.
First of all, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, said—and we must be grateful to him for securing this debate—it is a lot more complicated than that. Almost exactly 11 years ago to the week, on 15 February 2003, between 1 million and 2 million people came out to protest. They were not all Liberal Democrats or anything like it. There were Conservatives like Ken Clarke. There were Labour people, including Robin Cook, Tony Benn and many others, who had their reservations. Indeed, within the community as a whole, there was a great debate about this question. It was not simple, and I have no doubt that when Sir John Chilcot’s report finally is published it will be a thoughtful, complex and detailed report. I got to know him very well when he was at the Northern Ireland Office and I always admired his acuity of perception and his integrity of conduct, and the same could be said of his distinguished colleagues.
From my point of view, the purpose of this inquiry is something quite different. It is to try to understand how we got ourselves into such a difficulty in order that we can look to the future with better understanding of how to deal with the problems. I will give one example. At the time of the first Gulf War, which was permitted by UN Security Council Resolution 678, there was a great debate as to how far it might be prosecuted. Noble Lords will well recall a lot of discussion as to whether it should actually be prosecuted right through to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam or whether Resolution 678 did not permit it. I had a great argument with my old friend and colleague, now the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, on exactly this issue. It was my view that, with this particular guy in these circumstances, you needed to go the whole way to Baghdad and get rid of him. It seemed to me that to do anything other was not just a poor reading of Machiavelli but a poor judgment of the psychology of the person one was dealing with and the politics of the region. Paddy said, “No, no, no. That is not possible under UNSC Resolution 678. We cannot do that. We can just remove him from Kuwait”. Well, it is a bit ironic that so many years later it was UNSC Resolution 678 which was prayed in aid actually without a further activating resolution. If I was so hawkish—as I would have been deemed then—in the first Gulf War—why would I have spoken in your Lordships’ House in 2003 saying, “This is not the time to go ahead with it”? It is because situations change. I will come back to that because I believe it is the importance of the urgency of the Chilcot report.
The situation was that in the first Gulf War we had a huge coalition, there had been a clear breach, it obviously required military intervention, and it would have been possible to prosecute it through to the end. In the intermediate years, the Clinton Administration and others had tried to find negotiated ways of moving things forward. Indeed, as I said in your Lordships’ House on the occasion of that debate, there was a suspicion that the weapons inspectors were being put in place simply to try to produce a justification to return to Resolution 678. It seemed to me that it was not going to end well. It was not going to resolve the problems of the region and stabilise Iraq.
How does that relate to the situation now? Noble Lords will recall that Parliament, in debates in the other place and here, made an extraordinary decision that set the Prime Minister and the Government back on their heels on the question of Syria. It was a watershed decision, in my view, in that a Prime Minister and a Government had decided that they wanted to undertake a military intervention, and Parliament, with the overwhelming backing of the people, said, “No. That is not a direction in which we want to go”. It seems to me that this puts up for serious exploration our whole approach to military intervention as to when and how it should be undertaken. Should it always be with military force or are there other ways in which we should intervene? Should we ever be doing it on our own? Should it always require a UN Security Council resolution?
These are very serious questions, but not for the past—of course they are interesting for the past, and, as the noble and learned Lord said, perhaps for some students of history in the future. They are important questions for us in the present and over the next few years, not to apportion blame but to see if mistakes and misjudgments were made, and I think everybody is clear that there were, and to try to prepare ourselves—but not to deal with the last war. One of the mistakes often made by military commanders and politicians is that they prepare themselves better to fight the last war over again. Our job ought to be to become clearer about the changing dynamics of the Middle East and of other regions in order to better make judgments about how we, as a country, play our role in that complicated region and elsewhere in a time when military strength is no longer any guarantee of military success. That is why I believe that we need the report with some urgency. The situation in the Middle East and in other places is developing very quickly. We are uncertain how to proceed and we need to understand whether and how mistakes were made so that we can find a different way of working.
I have no doubt that one problem is civil servants being wary about what things should be redacted and what things should not. I was reading just yesterday a letter by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FCO’s deputy legal adviser who resigned; her resignation letter was published some time later. The redaction made at the time by the Foreign Office and later released through the press is quite interesting. I read the redaction and I read what was originally published, and I could not understand why on earth they had bothered to take out what they did, because it did not tell us anything that we did not know. I was not the least bit surprised because my own experience with many security and Civil Service documents is that when there is a great dust-up about what to release and what not to release, more often than not, although not all the time, when you read what is redacted, the fact that it was kept out—and it was clear that it was kept out—actually produced more suspicion that there was something really serious there. When you read it afterwards, you say, “What on earth was all the fuss about?”.
However, perhaps it is not that. Perhaps it is that our friends in the United States are very nervous about some of the conversations between the two Prime Ministers, Mr Brown and Mr Blair, and the President. I am a friend of the United States and I think we have an extremely important relationship, but good friends sometimes disagree honestly. Indeed, we are not good friends if all we ever have to say is that we support the United States. I hear this all the time with the Middle East peace process. What is the British Government’s policy? It is to listen to what the American policy is and agree with it. That is no help to our friends. We need to engage in a proper public debate about these issues and then be supportive.
Therefore, I appeal to my noble friend the Minister to help us understand why there is such a delay and to appreciate on behalf of the Government that early publication is not a matter of the past but an urgent requirement for the present and the future.
Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)
My Lords, the House is deeply indebted to my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, for initiating this debate.
Of course, it is a very great pity that, whenever the Chilcot inquiry reports, it will be more than 11 years since the military operations occurred in Iraq, but that is not the issue before the House tonight. We are not considering whether Prime Minister Blair involved this kingdom in an illegal war or whether he is as pure as the driven snow as far as that matter is concerned. We are not concerned in any way with the issue of weapons of mass destruction or what was genuinely or not genuinely believed in that regard. We are concerned only with seeking to ask the question: why has the Chilcot inquiry been held up in the way that it has?
The truth is that the Chilcot inquiry has run into a massive roadblock. As described by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, this is the release—not to the members of the Chilcot inquiry because they have seen them already but to the public if the opportunity arises—of three groups of documents: 25 notes passed between Prime Minister Blair and the President of the United States; 200 Cabinet or Cabinet-style discussions relating to the relevant matters; and 130 conversations between either Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Brown and the President of the United States. That is the issue.
The relevance of those documents is not that they have been seen by the Chilcot inquiry but that the Chilcot inquiry wants to use them for a very specific and very significant purpose: the so-called Maxwellisation principle, which was established in relation to the inquiry following the death of Sir Robert Maxwell. In other words, a body such as the Chilcot inquiry wants to be able to say, “We have examined all the evidence. We have come to the conclusion that there is a prima facie case against A, B, C and D—the finger of blame appears to point to them as persons who ought to be criticised. But we are not going to do that without giving them the opportunity of replying to that situation and calling evidence if they wish”. That seems an unimpeachable principle of fairness.
However, the Chilcot inquiry goes one step beyond that and says, “It is not enough that we should be able to do that. We should be able to show to the public, if our conclusions remain the same, why we regard those persons as blameworthy; in other words, that they should be condemned not out of the generality of our conclusions but out of the specific evidence that is contained in these particular pieces of documentary evidence. Unless Maxwellisation is made public and those documents are produced and published at the time the report is published, Chilcot will not be regarded as having full validity”. I absolutely say amen to that.
Who is holding up this disclosure, which, in my submission, is utterly essential to the fairness of this inquiry? It is apparently the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. He is saying, “I am opposing this on grounds of sound precedent, a precedent laid by my predecessor” —the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell—“that is, the law of the Medes and Persians”. I would challenge that completely and make the following submissions. First, it does not matter what the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, or any other civil servant in the past 1,000 years has said. It can make no difference whatever. It is not a matter for a civil servant to decide.
Secondly, it is a matter for the Government, as the sovereign and ultimate legal authority, to decide, and nobody else. The Prime Minister, making a statement on this matter last year, said that Government were responsible for disclosure. It does not matter what pressures there might be from the United States or the Civil Service. The Government are legally and morally responsible.
Thirdly, a long, long time ago when I was a law student—it almost seems like 1,000 years ago—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, and I were in the same department at Aberystwyth and we were taught sound principles of equity. One of the principles of equity was: no man shall be a judge in his own suit. In other words, there are certain people who should not adjudicate in this matter. Who would be the last person who should ever be allowed to adjudicate on the question of whether or not these documents should be made public? Clearly, that is either Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Brown. Who would be the next? You might say someone who was the alter ego of one of the two persons. Who was the alter ego of Prime Minister Blair? It was Sir Jeremy Heywood—one of the main protagonists in this confused, complicated and altogether very strange story.
I am not saying for a moment that Sir Jeremy is other than a fair, honourable and thoroughly decent man, but there is a principle of law which says that justice must be done and must be manifestly seen to be done. Unless the Government intervene here, as it is their moral and legal responsibility to do, this matter will fester and I think it will contaminate and poison the whole body politic. The confidence that people have in parliamentary democracy, already injured, will be further demeaned.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I suppose I ought to declare an interest in this debate in that I worked at No. 10 at the time of the Iraq war. Indeed, I sat opposite some of the foreign affairs private secretaries whose minutes are now to be found on the Chilcot inquiry website. I saw some of it pretty much at first hand, although I was not directly involved with Iraq. It was not a very easy period, I can tell your Lordships.
I do not think it is right for our debate tonight to get into the substance of the issues that the Chilcot inquiry is addressing. It has been an extremely good debate and the speeches, as usual for the House of Lords, have been of exceptionally high quality, and I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, who obviously put an awful lot of thought into what he had to say in opening the debate.
I will confine my remarks from these Benches to the question of delay and the view the Government take of that delay and of the questions relating to the disclosure that are at the heart of that delay. It is important to be clear: as I understand it, it is not that written evidence has been withheld from the inquiry; the inquiry has seen all the relevant papers. The issue at stake is how much of that evidence it can actually quote in its final report. So the question is: does the committee base its conclusions on the public taking it on trust that it has read the material and this is what it concludes, or is it able to quote from the documents?
Everyone will agree that the Chilcot process has been very thorough. If you look at that website, you will see that far more government papers are available than for any precedent that I can recall. The comparison with Suez, where no one was told about the secret deal that was done with the French and the Israelis, is very striking.
However, there are questions about the extent of disclosure. I want to see the Iraq question and as many of these issues as possible put to rest, but even then there are three areas in which questions of disclosure raise awkward issues. These are questions not just for civil servants, but for any responsible Government of any party acting in the national interest.
I think one of these questions has already been sorted out: the question about dealing with the use of intelligence, and the worries as to whether disclosure of anything to do with intelligence compromises sources. I should like the Government to confirm what I think to be the position: that in the case of Iraq those questions were sorted out in the Butler inquiry in 2004, and that there are no new intelligence issues arising in the case of Chilcot. These issues relate to national security. From our Benches, as my party leader said only yesterday, we support greater scrutiny of the way in which intelligence operates. There are obvious limits as well.
The second issue concerns relations with our allies. The committee wants to quote from private correspondence between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. If we see ourselves as America’s closest ally there is a real question, not just of the past but for the future, as to the obligation that places on us to protect confidences in that relationship. On that point I am sure a lot of people would say, “Damn the Americans”. I do not take that view. If we are serious about our alliances—and the same would be true of our close partners in Europe in other situations—we do have obligations to our allies and partners. How do the Government see that question? Time makes a great difference, but we are talking about something that happened a little over 10 years ago. What view do the Government take of what is a reasonable time to disclose things that affect our closest allies?
Thirdly, there is the issue about freedom of information and what are called Cabinet-level discussions. Whatever decisions the Government make on disclosure as far as the Chilcot inquiry is concerned could have long-term implications for freedom of information more generally. This is a serious issue. My party introduced freedom of information in 1998. We are proud of that achievement, but there were always boundaries that had to be set. I have always thought of freedom of information, in simplistic terms, as meaning that expert advice should be open but confidential discussion should remain confidential. How do the Government see this question about disclosure of discussions right at the centre of government on the basis of papers provided? Much of the content is now available on the website, but how do the Government see this question of disclosure of Cabinet-level decisions? This will have an impact on all future Governments. This is not just about dealing with the Iraq issue. This is about whether disclosure is going to affect the relationship between Ministers and civil servants for decades ahead. We have to get that right.
Lord Elystan-Morgan
Two points arise. First, if it be the case that information of a confidential nature between states is always to be kept in the background, that is an end to any question of transparency. Does the noble Lord accept first of all that many of the thousands of documents that have been disclosed to Chilcot on the basis that they are declassified and therefore open to publication come into that particular area that he mentions?
The other matter is that it appears—if the responsible press is to be believed—that Mr Brown, in so far as his position as Prime Minister or as Chancellor is concerned during the period from 2001 to 2009 that is covered by the inquiry, says that he has no objection to the disclosure of any of the three groups of documents that have been referred to.
Lord Liddle
I am arguing here that these are very difficult decisions and that we have to have a clear view for the future. I am not looking to the past; I am wondering what the impact of this will be on future relations between Ministers and between Ministers and civil servants. I would simply be grateful if the Minister was able to give us an answer.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for that extremely constructive and helpful speech, which took a number of themes which I, too, wish to cover.
Perhaps I, like others, should admit that I am not entirely a neutral observer in this. I was my party’s defence spokesman at the time, and I was involved in the development of what was then Liberal Democrat opposition to the war. Part of my reason for being so was that I had been a relatively frequent visitor to Washington both before and after 9/11. I met there people whom I had known when I was a graduate student in the United States in the early 1960s and who had become some of the leading neo-conservatives within the Administration. It was because of what I knew of some of their underlying assumptions and of my participation in two National Intelligence Council-sponsored conferences in Washington, one in the autumn of 2001 and one in the summer of 2002, that I concluded that the Bush Administration were determined to go to war with Iraq against the advice of some of their own intelligence analysts who knew the Middle East well.
Having said that, I should say that this is a very different inquiry from the Franks inquiry. It starts with the examination of the Government’s Iraq policy papers in 2000, before 9/11, and concludes with the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq 10 years later. It therefore covers a much longer period than the short period of the Franks report and deals with a coalition war in which we were only a secondary contender. Franks was concluded in six months, but evidence was taken in private; the report covered only the period before the conflict; it did not publish many of the documents. I again declare an interest: I was one of those who reviewed it very critically on publication because it seemed to me that it had distorted the actual situation. The intelligence community had indeed got it right. The only mistake that it had made was in thinking that the Argentinians would not be unwise enough to try to invade the Falklands before the winter; it thought that it would do it six months later.
I also looked back at the Dardanelles inquiry, and reference has been made to the situation after Suez. What we now have with the Chilcot inquiry is a very much more thorough examination in which we are talking about several thousand documents—I must correct the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan: they have not been declassified by being released to the Chilcot inquiry. This is an inquiry by privy counsellors; they have access to everything that they wish to see, including intelligence documents et cetera. The question at stake is not access; it is publication.
I am informed that, when we see the eventual publication, a great deal will be published that it has not been the custom of British Governments to publish before. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, when you get into the question of how far you publish Cabinet minutes that appeared less than 20 or 30 years ago, clearly, whatever happens, you will be seen to have been setting a number of precedents. Another question is how far you publish documents which relate to conversations with some of our closest allies, whether or not you have their permission. There are here some very large issues of national policy and national interest which we all have to consider.
Lord Elystan-Morgan
I quote here from the Prime Minister’s letter of 5 November in reply to the letter of the day before from Sir John Chilcot. He states:
“I am aware of the scale of the task declassification has presented to a number of Government departments, and it is good to have the acknowledgement of the work that has been done by the Cabinet Office and other departments to deal with the disclosure requests, involving several thousand documents, including many hundreds since the summer”.
That seems to me to say—I may be wrong and I apologise if I am—that thousands of documents have been declassified, but I will be corrected.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I would distinguish between access and publication. The delay is very much about working through thousands of documents, many of them very lengthy, and deciding how much can safely be declassified for publication—how much therefore can be published, how much some documents should be redacted in part and whether there are documents which it would be safer not to publish at all. That has taken a good deal longer than was hoped, but it is now well under way and is what we are currently considering.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
Is it true that the request by the inquiry was only made last June?
Lord Anderson of Swansea
The request to publish the documents set out in the letters.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am not informed on that matter. I know that, last July, they hoped to be able to start the process of Maxwellisation within a few months. That has been delayed because what happens in a Maxwellisation process—here again I have to correct the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan—is that those who are mentioned in the report will be allowed to see in full those elements of the report which carry their evidence and will be published. So they will not see more; they will see what will be published.
This is not, incidentally, a court of law. In no sense is this a legal inquiry. It is not a matter, if I may quote the noble Lord, of people against whom there is a case; it is a matter of those who may see themselves as being criticised in the report being given time ahead of publication to prepare their response to the criticisms. So, if I may say so to the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, this is not a roadblock. It is, however, an obstacle course, and that takes a good deal of time and discussion among different government departments, which I regret has taken longer than we hoped. I very much hope that it will be concluded soon. The Maxwellisation letters will then be able to go out and we will proceed at the normal stately but sure pace of government publications to a publication of the final report.
I also raise the role of the Cabinet Secretary because I know that he has been criticised quite substantially in the press. The Cabinet Secretary is entitled to see all the papers of previous Governments. In the final resort, as we all know, the Cabinet Secretary only advises and the Prime Minister can always override, but I am old-fashioned about civil servants. Senior civil servants are servants of the Crown as well as of the Government, and they advise in their perception of the long-term national interest. That is what the Cabinet Secretary is doing and I regret that there has been some rather partisan criticism in the press about his role, criticism which I think is unjustified.
The question was also raised as to whether the Butler report covered intelligence, so that we do not need to take it again. The Butler report covered intelligence leading up to the war. This inquiry, which takes us several years past the war, may well need to address one or two other questions. I should perhaps also mention the Gibson inquiry, which, as noble Lords will know, provided an interim report last December on some of the issues of rendition and alleged ill treatment of British nationals and others. A picture of various different dimensions will come into that.
This does, therefore, take a good deal of time to complete. It has not been helped, sadly, by the illness of one of the five members of the Chilcot inquiry, but the other four are well under way and I stress again that Gordon Brown’s promise at the beginning that:
“No British document and no British witness will be beyond the scope of the inquiry”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/09; col. 23.],
has been carried out for the inquiry. The question that therefore remains, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, rightly points out, is how much of this it is wise to publish. That is what has caused the delay and it is what we are currently working through.
So there are questions about how fast we can work towards this conclusion and there are, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said, questions for the future. I disagree with those who have suggested that the report, when it comes out, will be simply a historical document gathering dust. I think that it will raise precisely the sorts of questions which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has suggested. What should be the conditions for future intervention? How much information should be shared with Parliament and with opposition parties in order to carry Parliament and the public with the Government? How should we handle the coalition aspects of interventions, given that it is highly unlikely that Britain will be involved in any serious military operations abroad in the future which are not in coalitions with others? There, I think, is where the debates will focus.
The Government are well aware of the sensitivity of these issues. I return to the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. What is a reasonable time before we disclose conversations with our closest allies and what precedents do we set if we start to publish Cabinet minutes of the previous Government, when others give their advice in Cabinet and elsewhere on the basis of full confidentiality? These are serious questions with which the Government are currently struggling.
I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, for raising this question. I assure the House that a large number of officials are working through those issues. The Chilcot inquiry and its four active members are still at work, and we very much hope to publish the final report within the foreseeable future. I will be pushing for that future to be as foreseeable as it can be.