David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which goes to the heart of what I was about to say in conclusion. One of the great dimensions of our soft power in the world, which I used to come across all the time as a British Foreign Minister, was the expectation that we would behave differently from others and that we would not fall to the standards of the Soviet Union or of other totalitarian states. We were paid more attention as a result of that. It was less true of America, but it was true none the less. This whole exercise—involving Shaker Aamer, Binyam Mohamed and a whole series of others—shows that we have dropped from those high standards. We have fallen from the grace in which public opinion held us.”
“The Home Secretary should be wary of taking advice from Labour Members on control orders, because under the last four years of their regime seven of the so-called “control order” subjects absconded, in some cases, as we know, to commit jihad abroad. However, will she revisit the issue of using intercept evidence in court, as the best protection of the British public is provided by being able to prosecute, convict and lock up the people who are a threat to the British public?”
“The guidance that I took in determining which Bill I would present to the House, given that I was No. 19 in the batting order, was the guidance of my old friend Eric Forth, whose ghost still haunts these proceedings. Eric believed that private Members’ Bills should be essentially uncontroversial. He thought that the private Members process existed not to put controversial Bills through, but to allow things that were fairly obvious to be done. That was my guidance in choosing this Bill in this form, and I will come back to that later.”
“I return to the Eric Forth principle. As I have said, Eric was a friend of mine. Indeed, I successfully nominated him for a knighthood, but he died before he could receive it. I took his views seriously and he believed in simplicity in these matters. The difficulty conjured up by the suggestion made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) is that a proposed law must be enforceable according to the terms of the law it seeks to amend. This Bill seeks to amend an Act about national health service commissioners, so if it referred to an ombudsman it would run into a problem of legal conflict. My hon. Friend makes a very good point, with which I agree—Eric Forth would have, too—but we had to compromise.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. In a perfect world, one would want to be able to tell every complainant to the health service ombudsman that they would get an answer within three months. However, in the case which initially led to such concerns the errors were manyfold in an area—it was sepsis, which I shall talk about on Third Reading—in which it took some time to develop an understanding of treatment and of the best approach. It is very difficult to know in advance how long it will take to resolve a problem, which may sometimes be medical as well as managerial, with a proper answer.”
“It is much better to leave good management to the service, but to put a public guarantee into law.”
“Eric Forth’s principle No. 4 is that laws should be minimalist: there should be the absolute minimum amount of law that there can possibly be to get the outcome one wants. In considering the Bill, I was concerned that we must not tell the ombudsman how to manage her business, as it were, particularly since the current ombudsman is doing an extremely good job of accelerating the process, dealing with more cases and dealing with them more quickly. I wondered for a while whether even this Bill was too much in terms of putting a force up behind it, but then I thought that there is not always the same ombudsman with the same energy level. The Bill will give a guarantee to the public and is therefore worth while. I was careful not to give instructions to do it in this way, that way or the other way.”
“If an ombudsman’s staff member has to provide a prediction of the likely time it will take to resolve a complaint, not only are they likely to be cautious and, as my hon. Friend said, tick “12 months”, but they might say, “Well, until 12 months comes up, maybe I shouldn’t issue the report at all, in case I discover something I didn’t think of before.” It could thus have exactly the opposite consequence to that which my right hon. Friend intends.”
“My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) has presaged Eric Forth’s principle No. 5, also known as the law of unintended consequences, for which reason I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) will treat his new clauses as probing rather than substantive. One of the risks has already been talked about—that of imposing more work on and therefore slowing down the process of the ombudsman—but there is another one that my right hon. Friend and I, having been in the House for some time, will be used to: where legislation sets prices, targets or whatever, the minimum can become the maximum and the maximum can become the minimum.”
“It is for them to deal with that; we are dealing with a simple problem here.”
“The Public Administration Committee is looking at this, the Department of Health is looking at it, the ombudsman’s office itself is looking at it, and the Cabinet Office is also looking at the issues raised by my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend. The Executive will be aiming to minimise the number of times complaints are turned down out of hand; to minimise the number of times people are told, “You’ve got the wrong department. Complain to somebody else”; and to minimise the constraints on the ombudsman’s office that might not permit it to intervene; and they will also be aiming to deal with the resource issue. It seems to me that we do not need to solve those problems. It is for the Executive to do so properly in Executive time, with debate going on across the Front-Bench teams.”
“Yes, there are laws of nature and there are laws of man, and in Eric Forth’s case, there are forces of nature which sometimes are the forces of man. It is a wonderful paradox, but given that it was my right hon. Friend who provoked me to conjure the five laws, I blame him, not myself. My right hon. Friend made a very thoughtful speech, and perhaps met Eric Forth’s sixth law, which is that all this has to be tested—that is the point of this House, and it was Eric Forth, more than anybody, who insisted that we did not just shovel through, sausage-like, a set of laws because the Administration or some pressure group wanted them, but that we tested them, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North has been doing that this morning. This reform is likely to be the first of a number picked up by the Executive, not by us.”
“A lot of confidence. I do not wish to pre-empt the Government’s forthcoming announcements, but neither do I want to push them into doing anything ill thought through. If the law of unintended consequences applies to anything, it applies to Government legislation—more than anything else. I am confident that this will happen, and in a way that will command support across the House. As my hon. Friend knows, it may be dangerous to make a prediction, but I think there will be agreement. Whatever happens in the general election, I believe these reforms are coming.”
“Following that point from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), I think there is a risk that the amendment would transform the role of the Public Administration Committee, which currently provides oversight and acts as the guardian of ombudsmen, turning it into a champion for more money. I think that would be quite dangerous. I do not want to see the Committee go from being a regulator, comptroller and holder-to-account to a champion for more money.”
“We must also remember that some of the issues that the ombudsman deals with not only require information from other Departments and other parts of Government, but sometimes involve contested arguments and may have legal liability associated with them, so we should not forget that there is a natural justice aspect to this. Finally, these issues are very often on the edge of science. The sepsis problem was one such issue, for which the medical profession is still seeking new solutions. We should be wary of going so far on this that we cause another set of problems. That is why I think the Bill as printed strikes the right balance.”
“There have been two problems with the operation of the ombudsman over the past few years: not meeting timetables and making mistakes. On a number of occasions the ombudsman has got things wrong, which has made things even more acutely painful for the people seeking help and support, because the ombudsman has had to go back and correct mistakes. Indeed, that happened on a number of occasions in the very case that is at the centre of this piece of legislation. Were we to go down this route, we might create a series of problems arising from the ombudsman making erroneous recommendations and proposals, which would of course lead to the issues being multiplied down the generations, rather than dealt with straightaway.”
“I started off being flattered by the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) that I had been in some way seduced into mitigating the Bill, but I think that I am far beyond the point at which seduction, either metaphorical or real, is an option. Perhaps that is why, when it comes to new clause 3, which I think is the most substantive amendment in the group, I am not as much of an expert as the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) appear to be on the subject of corsets. As I understand it, corsets constrict things at one point and let them out at another. The risk in new clause 3 is that it would put such constraints on the ombudsman that problems would be created elsewhere.”
“I presumed from the Bill that the ombudsman’s department would respond close to the 12-month point when it knew that it might go past it. Earlier, it is likely to have to adjust the timetable; later is not tolerable. I am uncertain whether it may lead to perverse or unintended consequences if we do exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has proposed. I will have to think about that. The Bill has to go through a Lords stage. I ask my hon. Friend not to press the amendment today, but I give him an undertaking that I will look at the matter closely and see if I can come up with a form of words that I can suggest as a change in the Lords; I will let him know if I am not able to do that.”
“I am not sure that the legal liability relates simply to the person bringing the complaint. It could relate to other people too, such as those contracting services. It also relates very much to reputation. Someone may, in effect, be asked to make a confession according to a timetable, which is not a good idea in a statute. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) in his critique of amendment 5. On amendment 4, I would leave that to practice guidelines, rather than putting it into law. It is dangerous, as I said earlier, to create lots of onerous responsibilities in law. The aim of the Bill is to exert pressure and give a degree of public guarantee, not to try to tell the ombudsman how to cross every t and dot every i. The one amendment with which I felt some sympathy but am still uncertain about is amendment 3.”
“My hon. Friend has made a minor slip. The ombudsman is not a Department; it oversees Departments, responding to and being overseen by a parliamentary Committee. At the end of the day, my hon. Friend may have a very good point about the timing of amendment 3. If he is right, the alternative would be for me to make it very plain to the ombudsman that that is what Parliament expects. It is certainly what I expect and what I intended in drafting the Bill. Rather than jeopardise the Bill, we should make sure, as is very easy to do, that the ombudsman understands that point, as does the parliamentary Committee overseeing it, which is our final recourse.”
“My hon. Friend is wrong about one thing: the ombudsman’s power rests on trust in the accuracy of the case that he or she makes. Equitable Life’s problems did not arise from that, but from the complexities of moral hazard and other such issues. A better example was the case of the state earnings-related pension scheme, in which the ombudsman, the Public Administration Committee and the Public Accounts Committee, under my chairmanship, was able to get the Government to pay out what turned out to be billions of pounds because of errors identified from accurate—though not, as it turned out, fast—investigation. The things we must not jeopardise are the accuracy and effectiveness of the ombudsman’s investigations.”
“I expect that in the new Parliament, there will be a complete review of the ombudsman service and the complaints mechanisms that feed into it. That will be an unalloyed good because too often, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, Departments are too slow, too unaccountable, too prone to excuses and not sufficiently committed to delivering the service our constituents want. The Bill intends to rectify that. The current ombudsman, Dame Julie Mellor, has done a very good job. The Bill intends to reinforce that and to ensure that it is continued in the generations to come.”
“It will give the organisation the power to meet what should be a self-evident aim. The Bill is straightforward, simple, not that minor and absolutely non-partisan. It has wide support across the health service, the ombudsman service and both sides of this House. The simple aim is to improve the effectiveness of the health service ombudsman, who is the final tier of the national health service complaints system and often the last port of call for distressed patients and families. The Bill achieves that goal primarily by requiring that when the health service ombudsman takes action, they do so with a view to concluding the investigation of complaints within 12 months. If that time scale is not met, they must explain why to the complainant. The Bill is a first step.”
“Friends are only too aware, Sam Morrish’s case is not a singular instance, but something that comes up time and again. The stringing out of complaints in the NHS only causes further distress to patients and their families. There is a danger that such delays will lead to the underlying problems remaining unaddressed and uncorrected. When things go wrong, it is vital that lessons are learned. By improving the ombudsman service, we will take a small step towards ensuring that they are. Although the ombudsman service is committed to changes that will require it to meet a timetable and, if it does not, to explain why, the future management of the service might not be as good as its current management. That is why the legislative backing is being provided. The Bill is just legislative backing; it is a guarantee.”
“The contents of the eventual report were commendable, but it took the ombudsman more than two years to investigate and report on the national health service’s handling of Sam’s case. During that time, a series of factual errors were made, which Mr and Mrs Morrish repeatedly had to correct; that must have been awfully painful, but we cannot address that aspect of the issue in this Bill. As a result, the Patients Association, which supported the Morrish family in their complaints, said that the ombudsman was not “fit for purpose”. The ombudsman apologised to the family personally: “We took too long to investigate this case and made errors in the draft report. I recognise the family’s experience of us has contributed to their distress”, which is to put it mildly. As my right hon. and hon.”
“His septic shock was misdiagnosed several times as he passed through the system. At each of the stages, what went wrong should have been corrected straight away, or as soon as possible thereafter. In the report on Sam’s death, the ombudsman highlighted the lack of action taken to save the lives of people suffering from sepsis. The key point is that the ombudsman’s investigation is not just to address the complaint, but to prevent such cases happening again. She stated that the case demonstrated that the failure to diagnose and treat sepsis rapidly can have tragic consequences. Crucially, she found that Sam failed to receive appropriate care and treatment, but that had he done so, he would have survived.”
“However, it is not only about that case; all of us have had constituents with cases involving such important and recurrent issues. It is worth recounting the Morrish case because it highlights those issues very well. In June 2014, the health service ombudsman published the report on an investigation into the care and treatment provided to Mr and Mrs Morrish’s son, who tragically died of septic shock on 23 December 2010, at the age of three, after a series of avoidable errors. In the three days before he died, his family dealt with the Cricketfield surgery, Devon Doctors Ltd, NHS Direct and the South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. We have talked about the involvement of different organisations—all those organisations were involved, and they all failed in their duty to young Sam.”
“I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. I am delighted that the Bill has reached this stage. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) may think it is minor, but I do not think it will be minor for the people whose lives it will affect, whose complaints are dealt with more quickly and who will get closure more briskly as a result. I want to take this opportunity to thank colleagues who have been supportive throughout the process, especially those who helped me to take the Bill through Committee. I thank colleagues who have helped me to meet some or all of Eric Forth’s six rules of good legislation, which is important and should particularly be borne in mind with private Members’ legislation. As other Members have said, the original raison d’être of the Bill was the Sam Morrish case.”
“The issue under discussion is the question of the collection of metadata—in other words, data on those from whom we have received calls. It matters particularly with regard to whistleblowers and the like. When my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) asked about that, he was told by the Cabinet Office in terms that metadata were not protected under the Wilson doctrine, so our constituents and whistleblowers are still at risk.”
“The same issue applies: just as journalists want to protect their sources, we need to protect our constituents—who may be complaining about the state—and whistleblowers. Given your responsibility for protecting our privileges, Mr Speaker, will you make inquiries of the Government to establish whether our communications are protected in this way, and whether, if they are not, they should be subject to judicial oversight?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I wish to make a request of you, in the context of your responsibility for protecting the privileges of Members. Yesterday, the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Anthony May, criticised the British police for intercepting journalistic communications in order to determine journalistic sources. As a direct result of that, No. 10 Downing street instructed the Home Office to change the arrangements so that in future the police would have to secure judicial approval before intercepting or collecting data on journalistic communications. A year ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) asked the Cabinet Office whether the Wilson doctrine applied to information collection of that kind in respect of Members of Parliament.”
“Since the announcement of the inquiry, three major foreign policy decisions would have greatly benefited from the lessons that arose from the Iraq war. In Libya we undertook a military intervention that was intended to prevent a massacre, quite properly. It was successful, but it was the precursor to protracted conflict and unrest following our nominal military victory. In Syria, the Government were blocked by this House from military intervention, an intervention that would have led us to be the military supporters of our now sworn enemies, ISIS. And now in Iraq the UK has become embroiled in the ongoing civil war that has raged since the invasion in 2003.”
“He said that these “lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.” Governments are often prompted by acts of terrorism into making mistakes. The United States rushed into extraordinary rendition, torture, illegal surveillance and Guantanamo Bay. We attempted to introduce 90-day detention without charge, which everyone now accepts was unnecessary and wrong. But the greatest and most dangerous errors are in foreign policy. As Lady Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5 stated, the invasion of Iraq “undoubtedly increased the threat” of terrorist attacks in Britain.”
“Initiated to protect the west from terrorism, it has in fact destroyed the integrity of the Iraqi state and triggered a persistent civil war that has created the conditions for perhaps the worst terrorist threat yet to the west—ISIL. It has done huge harm to the self-confidence and unity of the west, neutering our foreign policy. The war was, with hindsight, the greatest foreign policy failure of this generation, and I say that as someone who voted for it. So that is why the Chilcot inquiry was set up. The Iraq inquiry was announced in 2009 with broad and proper terms of reference. Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, made it clear that this was principally about learning lessons.”
“I beg to move, That this House regrets that the Iraq Inquiry has decided to defer publication of its report until after 7 May 2015; and calls on the Inquiry to publish a timetable for publication and an explanation of the causes of the delay by 12 February 2015. The second Iraq war led to the deaths of more than 4,800 allied soldiers, 179 of them British. The lowest estimate of Iraqi civilian fatalities is 134,000, but plausible estimates put that number four times higher. So let us be clear—at least 134,000 innocent people died. The war created 3.4 million refugees, half of whom fled the country. It cost the British taxpayer £9.6 billion and it cost the American taxpayer $1,100 billion. The war has done untold damage to the reputation of the west throughout the middle east, and indeed among Muslim populations both at home and abroad.”
“I will, but as the Government have, in my view improperly, made two statements on a Backbench Business day, I will have to limit the number of interventions I take.”
“Had the inquiry stuck to that timetable, the Government would have had the benefit in all the actions I have mentioned of any lessons that might have been learned from the final report. Six years on from the start, Sir John Chilcot has said that the report has taken “longer than any of us expected would be necessary”.”
“My hon. Friend makes a good point. I will refer in a moment to the Winograd commission, which produced an interim report before the final report. Either of those approaches would have been sensible and worth while, and are still possible. When decisions such as those that were made in Libya, Syria and Iraq are made without knowledge of all the facts, mistakes are made and sometimes people die as a result. So it is not hyperbole to say that the delay to the Iraq inquiry could cost lives because bad decisions could be made. When it was announced in 2009, the inquiry was expected to take one year, and that was thought by the then Leader of the Opposition to be too long.”
“The commission held its first session in September 2006, released a preliminary report within seven months and then published in January 2008, less than a year and a half after the inquiry was announced. Any argument for delay on the grounds of political sensitivity or national security would be far more pertinent in Israel, where the immediate threat to life is considerably greater than in any other country in the world.”
“If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not for the moment. That was perhaps the understatement of the decade. It has been claimed that it is not an unreasonable period of time for such an important inquiry, but the Franks report on the Falklands war took six months, and we should not forget that that war had a controversial start. There were controversial aspects to the continuing diplomatic negotiations. It was incredibly sensitive in diplomatic, national security, military and espionage terms, yet it took six months. The Winograd commission—the Israeli Government-appointed commission of inquiry into the war with Lebanon in 2006—is another relevant example.”
“No, and that is the case that I am going to explore. I will not do what the Father of the House did and go back to the Dardanelles, but even if we went back further than that we would not get to this level of delay.”
“Even the head of the inquiry secretariat, Margaret Aldred, was deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat and therefore responsible for providing Ministers with advice on defence and policy matters on Iraq, and she was nominated to the inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary of the day. All of that would matter less if the ridiculous restrictive protocols that Whitehall has imposed on the Chilcot inquiry were not there. Like Scott, Sir John Chilcot should be allowed to publish what he thinks is in the public interest, and not what Whitehall thinks is acceptable.”
“That does not say that the Minister is corrupt; it simply means that one can avoid the appearance of corruption and any chance of an improper decision, and it removes the risk of unconscious bias. It is a proper procedure. No such rule applies for civil servants. This inquiry process is littered with people who were central to the very decisions the inquiry is investigating. Sir Jeremy Heywood was principal private secretary to Tony Blair for the entire period, from the 9/11 atrocity through to the first stage of the Gulf war, yet he is Whitehall’s gatekeeper for what can and cannot be published.”
“Sir John stated in his letter that documents “vital to the public understanding of the inquiry's conclusions” were being suppressed by Whitehall. That is ridiculous. If that is the approach taken, nothing will be learned and there is little purpose in the inquiry. The inquiry protocols are symptomatic of a mindset that seems to assume that serving civil servants are the only proper guardians of the public interest. That leads me to a particular problem: if a Minister is asked to make a decision that affects him, his family, his property or even his constituency, he is required to withdraw—in the jargon, to recuse himself—from the decision and have somebody else make it.”
“Chilcot himself wrote in a letter to the Cabinet Secretary: “The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK's involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK's continuing involvement, is central to its considerations”. The negotiations between Chilcot and Jeremy Heywood concluded only in May last year, when it was announced that an agreement had been reached. The process was clearly frustrating for the inquiry: Sir John Chilcot queries why it was that “individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot”. He was of course referring to Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell’s respective diaries, which quoted such information.”
“By contrast, Sir John Chilcot, who is a past Northern Ireland Office permanent secretary, who chaired an incredibly sensitive inquiry into intercept evidence, and who is considered a responsible keeper of Government secrets, is tied up in protocols, subject to the whim of Whitehall. We know there have been long negotiations between the inquiry and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, and his predecessors over the disclosure of some material, most notably correspondence between ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush. There is no point whatsoever in the inquiry if it cannot publish the documents that show how the decision to go to war was arrived at.”
“Some of the delay is undoubtedly down to the conflict between the inquiry and Whitehall—Sir Jeremy Heywood and others—about what can and cannot be disclosed. What the inquiry can publish is wrapped up in a series of protocols that have criteria so broad that a veto on publication can virtually be applied at Whitehall’s discretion. Compare this with the Scott inquiry into the Iraqi supergun affair. It also covered issues of incredible sensitivity in terms of national security, international relations, intelligence agency involvement, judicial propriety and ministerial decision making. Sir Richard Scott was allowed to decide himself what he would release into the public domain, unfettered by Whitehall.”
“When the hon. Gentleman listens to what I intend to say shortly, he will realise that Sir Jeremy Heywood certainly does not want to rush the report, and there are some reasons for that of which I do not approve. I have been asked by a number of colleagues why I believe that the delay has occurred. The truth is that no one in this House knows, not even the Minister. There is not enough information in the public domain, which is why the motion requires an answer to that exact question from Sir John Chilcot. Nevertheless, there are some clues. For clarity, I should say that I do not believe, at this stage at least, that the witnesses are the cause of the delay, and I say that because I think that one of them will be speaking later.”
“Terrible mistakes were made but, fatally, we have so far failed to learn our proper lessons from them. Douglas Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary and in no way an anti-establishment figure, has branded the endless delays a “scandal”. He is right. It is a disgrace. It is an insult to those who died on our behalf in that war and a betrayal of the people they died to protect. That is why I ask the House to pass the motion today.”
“They are not to prevent impartial information from being put in the public domain—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear”]—so why delay a deliberately impartial report of vital interest to the nation just because the election is pending? It is nonsense. I say to those who are cheering that, frankly, it is not clear that there will be much political advantage anywhere. It was started by a Labour Government, but it was supported by the current Prime Minister, who spoke in favour of it even as late as 2006; the current Labour leader did not vote for it because he was not in the House. There is complete confusion about where there could be any advantage, but the public interest should trump any interest of party advantage and that is why publication should not be delayed by the election. The Iraq inquiry has been a missed opportunity.”