A government minister yesterday gave the clearest signal yet that there will be an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Britain's participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister, told peers: "The time may come and, I suspect, definitively will come where such an inquiry is necessary. We ... have not yet reached that point. We still come back to the issue of not if there is an inquiry but when." Malloch-Brown, a former senior UN official and opponent of the invasion, said there needed to be "distance and perspective" to allow an inquiry to offer a "non-partisan source of analysis and advice for the future" that would "stand the test of time".
The minister was responding to demands for an inquiry by Lord Owen, former Labour foreign secretary and supporter of the invasion, who told peers: "We cannot just go on ignoring what has been done. It is not just the politicians. The senior diplomats in the Foreign Office have to be held to account. The senior generals and the senior armed services have to be held to account". He continued: "In my profession [medicine], there is a tradition that when you make a mistake you have a postmortem and a case conference where you examine where you have made mistakes."
The government has indicated that it would agree to an inquiry but only once most of the British troops have left Iraq, probably next year.