Iraq

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:04 pm on 16 July 2003.

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Photo of Patrick Cormack Patrick Cormack Conservative, South Staffordshire 3:04, 16 July 2003

I do not know whether weapons of mass destruction will be found. I believe that they probably will be, but I agree very much with David Cairns when he talked about being most influenced by the Command Paper that tabulated all the United Nations resolutions. On this occasion, if perhaps on no other, the hon. Gentleman and I are very much on the same side.

I am bound to say that when the House, very ill advisedly in my view, changed its hours, I hoped that there might be the compensating advantage that short debates early in the afternoon would at least be attended by the protagonists. Yet it is perhaps less than an hour before the winding-up speeches and there is no Foreign Secretary and no shadow Foreign Secretary. Mr. Campbell has, to his credit, returned to the Chamber, but where is Donald Anderson, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, whose report is central to the debate? He made his speech and off he went.

I have a great regard for the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but his place is above all in the Chamber while this matter is being debated. I am particularly sorry that he is not here because I want to talk a little bit about the Foreign Affairs Committee. I had the privilege of serving on it until a few weeks ago. I voted with the Government and against setting up a judicial inquiry when we last debated this issue. I made it plain that I was unhappy about the fact that the Foreign Affairs Committee had decided to embark on this road and I said then, and I have said since, that I believe that the Intelligence and Security Committee is the right Committee to investigate the matter. I still hold to that view.

The report, published after prodigious labour and a great deal of burning of midnight oil, has not taken us very much further forward, save to indicate that the one degree of unanimity appears to be that the members of the Foreign Affairs Committee do not believe that the House was deliberately misled. That at least is good, but I argued on the Foreign Affairs Committee that we should not have this inquiry. I did not leave the Foreign Affairs Committee specifically because of that. I do not want to mislead the House myself. I had already informed my hon. Friend the deputy Chief Whip and the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee that, for various reasons that they fully understood, I would not remain on the Committee beyond the end of the summer. I came to that conclusion very reluctantly.

When we came to discuss this issue, I argued—Mr. Pope knows this very well, as he is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee—very forcefully that we should not have the inquiry. I asked for my dissent to be minuted, and it was. When I then discovered that I could not, for very good reason, attend two crucial sittings, I felt that I should not put myself or my colleagues in the position where I would probably write a minority report not having heard all the evidence. No one should put his name to that report, for or against, without hearing every last bit of evidence.

So I brought forward my withdrawal and the House discharged me from the Committee, and my hon. Friend Richard Ottaway was appointed in my stead. I wish him happy years on the Committee, but he has not been able to begin on a very good note because one of the great defining characteristics of Select Committees is that they try to examine issues without being over-influenced by party prejudice. The Select Committee reports that have most effect in the House—I speak as someone who has been a Member for a very long time and been involved in a number of such reports—are those that are unanimous or near unanimous.

The Committee has done what I prophesied would happen if it embarked on the inquiry: it has divided more or less on party lines. On one or two occasions, Andrew Mackinlay voted with my right hon. and hon. Friends, but the Committee has divided more or less on party lines, and I believe that that is a very great pity indeed. It will undermine the effectiveness of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and it will take a long while to recover from that.