More on that protocol
by Chris Ames
The BBC is also covering Nick Clegg’s attack on Brown over the “suffocation” of the Inquiry by the government’s restrictions on publishing documents. You can watch the video.
Brown is completely wrong to say it is just about national security and international relations. Has he read the document that Clegg waved at him? Neither is it for Inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot to decide, as Brown claimed.
Clegg is right on this, but wrong on one thing. The protocol doesn’t just restrict what can be published in the report but what can be published – and referred to – as the Inquiry goes along. Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon picked up on this.
I mentioned yesterday that the Chilcot inquiry didn’t appear to be coughing up many documents compared with Lord Hutton’s inquiry.
The first day we were given a map and a list of UN resolutions. Nick Clegg brought this up in Prime Minister’s Questions and said the government had effectively stopped the inquiry from publishing the documents referred to in evidence.
You can see here the government document that Nick Clegg has laid his hands on (see section seven).
Most of the damage done to the government in the Hutton inquiry came not from the cross-examination, certainly not from Lord Hutton’s own conclusions, but from the documents, memos, emails, draft diaries, government papers, that poured out every day.
The whole experience gave Whitehall the heeby-jeebies and was NOT replicated by the Butler inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, on which Sir John Chilcot sat.