Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Finkelstein Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Finkelstein (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, for his speech; it was a privilege to listen to it. Earlier this month, I showed the great Beatles historian, Mark Lewisohn, around the House of Lords. He hopes to finish his biography of the Fab Four by 2028—by which time he will have spent almost a quarter of a century on it. Next week, the great Lyndon Baines Johnson historian, Robert Caro, will be here. His first volume on Johnson was published in 1982 and he still has not finished. Proper history—proper accounts of history—take a long time.

Sir John Chilcot has been asked to conduct a proper inquiry into one of the most controversial and complex events of modern times. It is not just, or even at all, a trial of Tony Blair. It is about, of course, how and why we went in, but also everything between 2001 and 2009. We may reflect on whether the terms of reference were correct, but, given the terms of reference, we have to understand that proper history and proper accounts of history take time.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning social psychologist, says that it is a special cognitive illusion that, this time, things will be different and that our book will be quicker to write than everyone else’s. The Hillsborough inquiry, on a single afternoon, took from 2009 to 2012 to publish. The Saville inquiry took 11 years for the events of a single day. I calculate that if Sir John Chilcot proceeded at the same pace as the Saville inquiry, his inquiry should take 32,000 years—he is actually going quite quickly.

I am a journalist, and there is a trade-off between depth and speed, completeness and deadline. It is one of my central jobs to judge that correctly, so I wish to make two points. First, if Sir John is choosing depth over deadline, I believe that he is making the correct choice. If the House is anxious for an interim report on the Iraq war, I can give it one: it did not go as well as we had hoped. But he is supposed to try to do better. That is the only point of having the inquiry—we have already had so many books, articles, speeches and other inquiries. We have asked Sir John Chilcot to produce an inquiry which provides us with depth and authority, and such things take time.

Secondly, even if Sir John had made the wrong trade-off, the trade-off is his to make: it is an independent inquiry. Hurrying him is an infringement of his independence, and it is being done basically only as an insurance against him reaching inconvenient conclusions. A lot of my colleagues in the press believe that if they can discredit him in advance it will be a useful insurance policy in case he does not agree with what they already think about the Iraq war.

I supported the Iraq war, and that is why I want as much as anyone to hear what was right and what went wrong. It is extremely important to me to learn those lessons. But I do not want to learn the lessons that I already know from all the things that have been published; I want to learn the lessons from the deep inquiry that we have been engaged in. Of course we are all impatient for the outcome of anything we have invested time and energy in and wish to hear the results of, but we need to behave less like children in a car saying, “Are we nearly there yet?” and more like people who have asked for a big inquiry to tell us some very important things—which we are all going to hear, as we all realise, soon enough.