Contribution to “Off The Fence”
The news generated by the publication of the Butler Report, of which for the past five months I have been a member, varies from “a whitewash” to “an excellent piece of work”. A whitewash is most certainly was not, but people must judge its value when they have fully studied it and appreciated the lessons which we have pointed out need to be learned.
The Government have accepted all the conclusions and recommendations: and they say they are setting a course of action in train to put right the deficiencies in the intelligence chain which we have identified. The Intelligence and Security Committee, of which I am also a member, will be monitoring this in the coming months and we will report on the progress made by the Government.
What we did not try to judge was whether or not the decision to go to war was right or wrong. We were not asked to do that and in any case could not have done so. We all had our views as to whether the Government’s judgement was right: and most voted accordingly. But it was a political judgement taken by the Prime Minister of the day and his judgement comes not in any report but in the verdict of the electorate in whose behalf he took that decision.
But the whole series of events does call into question judgement, competence and the way in which the present Prime Minister runs his office and his Cabinet. The machinery of government, like the constitution, has been radically changed since 1997. We have exposed some of the flaws that have arisen partly as a result of such changes.
But what has now been made clear in no less than four reports is that no one did anything dishonest, deceitful or malicious. As is almost always the case, it was cock-up rather than conspiracy.
The one comment with which I profoundly disagree is from those in the media who said it all went wrong but no one is to blame. We picked out the failings of several people: the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; all the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee who agreed to the publication of the document without the various warnings and caveats which were in their own assessment; the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, whose chain of reporting turned out to have serious flaws: and the author of the Foreword to the dossier, the Prime Minister himself. But we concluded that no one person should take all the blame – that it was a collective failure. Nevertheless, when there is a collective failure of the whole machine, this has inevitably to be laid at the door of the person who has responsibility for running that machine.
