Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2015-01-29
Topic: Mixed Topics
Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru, Centre-left to left): The hon. Gentleman is right. He and I agree, as I believe does the right hon. Member for Blackburn, that it should have been a judge-led inquiry. It might have had two lay assessors, but it definitely should have had a counsel to the inquiry, who would have directed the line of questioning forensically and would not have been batted away by the simple answers that were given, often in artistic and heroic terms, by some individuals, the right hon. Member for Blackburn excepted The inquiry did not go into any real depth. Being a Privy Counsellor does not make one a forensic analyst. I am a Privy Counsellor and I happen to be a lawyer, so I am able to ask the odd question, but the fact that someone is a Privy Counsellor does not take them any further on from Joe Public on the Clapham omnibus. It was quite ridiculous. Those are some of my misgivings. As I said, I have a particular interest in the transcripts of conversations between the former Prime Minister and the former American President. In 2008, confidential documents were dispatched to my office from an unknown source. The documents showed that discussions had been held between the leaders of the two countries in 2001 and 2002 relating to removing Saddam using military force. Mr Blair had committed us to war even then, before seeing any proof of weapons of mass destruction My colleague, Adam Price, and I were visited by two very senior Metropolitan police officers—I believe they were from SO13—and questioned about the documents. The fact that they visited us made me believe that the documents were genuine. They were marked "Top Secret". I believe that one was an American transcript and the other a British transcript. To this day, I have no knowledge of where they came from. I thought that the proper course of action was to say to the police, "I do know where the documents are, but I am not going to make them public until we have an inquiry. When that inquiry is set up, I shall take them to the inquiry personally so that it can look at them." I therefore decided to hand the documents over to the Chilcot inquiry when it was set up. I have doubts that they ever saw the light of day, but I do not know what has happened. After submitting the documents, nine months went by before I received any response. When one came, it simply informed me that I would not be called to give evidence. That is fine, but I have since found out that the way in which the gatekeeper to the inquiry, Ms Margaret Aldred—the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) referred to her a few moments ago—was appointed as the inquiry’s secretary did not follow the procedures in the civil service code. The Cabinet Office refuses to disclose any paper trail relating to that appointment, if indeed there is one. Ms Aldred was appointed on the nod by Sir John Chilcot —the same Sir John Chilcot, by the way, who criticised Tony Blair’s Government as a "sofa Government". A good example of sofa government is when someone rings their pal to say, "Come and be a secretary to my inquiry." Margaret Aldred’s appointment showed a glaring conflict of interest, since she had regularly chaired the Iraq senior officials group, which co-ordinated across Government. Ms Aldred met US officials in October 2008 to discuss Iraq, and she even flew to Washington for discussions with her counterparts in the three weeks before the inquiry was announced. It was Ms Aldred’s section of the Cabinet Office that drew up the plans for regime change, and it was the Cabinet Office—the Joint Intelligence Committee and its staff—that produced the so-called dodgy Iraq dossier What I would like to know is the following. Why has the inquiry stopped publishing documents on its website? It did so for the first year, then it stopped. What is the total number of individuals who have been granted a right to reply to the accusations against them, when were they contacted by the inquiry, and what time scale have they been given to respond? Why has the inquiry been allowed to be so cowed by the establishment I am afraid that those and many other questions have not yet been answered. I sincerely hope that they are in the near future, because otherwise it will be an affront to democracy, an insult to Parliament and, more importantly, a gross offence to people who have lost loved ones out in Iraq and to the people of Iraq themselves. Democracy demands that something is done urgently, otherwise this Parliament will be the laughing stock of the world.