Iraq

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 1:44 pm on 16 July 2003.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Menzies Campbell Menzies Campbell Shadow Secretary of State (Foreign Affairs) 1:44, 16 July 2003

I agreed with the Foreign Secretary in some of his criticisms about the form of inquiry that would be appropriate, and I shall deal with that subject shortly.

I caution the Government, and the House, about campaigns against the BBC. I suspect that a shoot-out between the BBC and politicians about which is the more reliable is unlikely to be resolved in our favour.

Dr. Kelly has fallen on his sword but his emergence, blinking into the sunlight, like the chorus of prisoners in "Fidelio", underlines the fact that he did not believe in the 45-minutes claim—members of the Foreign Affairs Committee who heard him yesterday will doubtless correct me if I am wrong about that. He made it clear, and the Committee accepted it, that whatever sort of contact he constituted for Mr. Gilligan, he was not his source for the broadcast on 29 May. I had the impression—perhaps a rather naive and superficial impression—that the reason why Dr. Kelly was put up by the Ministry of Defence was to undermine Mr. Gilligan. The Committee is seeing Mr. Gilligan later this week. If we are to make a judgment about Dr. Kelly's intervention in these matters so far, he seems, if anything, to have buttressed and supported the Gilligan view, rather than undermined it.

These questions certainly will not go away. That is why I believe that the case for an independent inquiry is irresistible—a point that I made to the Foreign Secretary yesterday. I do not think that he challenged me when I suggested that if he were sitting on this side of the House rather than on the Treasury Bench in a debate of this kind, he would be putting many of the same arguments that we are putting today.

Let me deal with some of the points that the Foreign Secretary has raised this afternoon. First, the Scott inquiry was not the first investigation of the issue of arms to Iraq. The Select Committee on Trade and Industry carried out an investigation right at the end of the 1987 to 1992 Parliament. It did so under the sanction of the fact that that Parliament was coming to an end and that an election was inevitable. It also did so in the face of great obstacles and considerable hindrance. At least one Minister who appeared before the Committee declined to answer questions on his role in the matter, although when he eventually had to face Mr. Geoffrey Robertson, QC, in the witness box, he was rather more forthcoming. There was also a Member of Parliament who declined to give evidence to the Committee when it was engaged on what came to be known as the Iraqi supergun inquiry, and there were certainly officials whose evidence to the inquiry was later proved to be, shall we say, neither whole nor complete.