Chilcot inquiry should not publish in general election runup, says minister
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Version 0 of 1. The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war should not report in the three months before the general election, a government minister has said, raising fears its publication could now have to wait until the next parliament. Lord Wallace, a Cabinet Office spokesman in the Lords, said it would be "highly undesirable" for the report to come out after the end of January until the election in May, amid fears it could "get too caught up in the pre-election atmosphere". The £9m Chilcot inquiry, set up in 2009, is expected to be highly critical of decisions taken by Tony Blair and his advisers in the runup to the 2003 war. Publication has been delayed owing to wrangling over how much of secret cabinet discussions and conversations between Blair and the then US president, George W Bush, will be allowed to made public. Wallace said David Cameron still wanted the report to be published this year and hoped the process of putting criticism to people mentioned in the report would take a matter of weeks rather than months. But lengthy negotiations are still going on between Sir John Chilcot and the government over exactly which extracts of the Blair-Bush correspondence can be made public and how much will only be published in "gist" form. A second round of letters notifying people who the report criticises – known as the Maxwellisation process – have not yet been sent. The Guardian reported last week that the Chilcot inquiry was unlikely to report before 2015, leaving just a month when it could be published before running into general election campaigning. Lord Owen, a former foreign secretary, has now written to the chairman of the Electoral Commission asking for a view on the publication of the report in the pre-election period, warning it would be "very ill advised for it to go beyond January or the middle of February". In the event that it is not published this year, "it would be better, after we have waited all this time, to wait until after the general election", Owen said. He also called for a parliamentary inquiry by the Commons administration committee into the "intolerable delays" and the role of Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, in deciding what government documents are released. "The present cabinet secretary has been parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron. He has been almost constantly involved, both in government and outside government, in the party-political battle. This is not ideal," Owen said. Two Labour peers, Lord Desai and Lady Morgan, called on the government to consider delaying the report until the next parliament, if it is not published within the next six months. Speaking in the Lords, Wallace said: "We want to publish as soon as we can, and before we descend into the election campaign … The government are well aware that it is highly undesirable that publication should run into the election campaign. I stated clearly that I share the views of the noble lord, Lord Owen, on what that means as regards publication. That is part of the context in which we are operating." He also rejected claims that Chilcot had been pressured into accepting redacted evidence by Heywood. "It is ungenerous to say that Sir John Chilcot could have been bullied by the cabinet secretary. He and his team have been remarkably robust on this," he said. |