Gordon Brown’s bid for a secret inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war has backfired spectacularly, with the Chilcot inquiry threatening to return Iraq to the headlines before the general election. But this is not the first time that Brown has sought to sweep the issue under the carpet.
Today I can reveal that Brown misrepresented an earlier promise to “learn the lessons” of Iraq. A Labour member of the Commons foreign affairs committee (FAC) has compared this to the spin scandal that took Britain to war.
It was during a visit to the country in June 2007, just before he became prime minister, that Brown first sought to take the sting out of the Iraq issue. He announced that he had asked cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to make two major changes to the way that intelligence is used.
Brown said he had instructed O’Donnell to separate intelligence analysis from the political process, and to ensure that any intelligence published in future was “properly verified and validated”. The announcement was spun as a criticism of the spin in Tony Blair’s September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.
A few days later, in a set-piece television interview with the BBC, Brown repeated these promises. He said he would put “rigorous procedures” in place to ensure “that where public information is provided it has gone through an authoritative process and it is free of political influence”.
In reality, Brown’s promise to separate intelligence analysis from politics actually returned government structures to the situation that had existed at the time of the dossier, where the chairman of the joint intelligence committee was nominally separate from the political process. And his claim to have asked O’Donnell to ensure the validity of published intelligence was as much of a pipedream as the dossier itself.
In response to my freedom of information and other enquiries, the Cabinet Office has told me it has no written record of Brown’s request to O’Donnell. It says the request was made orally to O’Donnell’s private secretary.
But the Cabinet Office has twice given accounts of the request that differ from Brown’s version. In each account, Brown is only said to have asked O’Donnell to ensure that intelligence analysis is separated from politics — making no reference to the future publication of intelligence. Although it has refused to publish O’Donnell’s recommendations, the Cabinet Office has admitted that they did not include any recommendations relating to the future publication of intelligence.