Dead men cannot tell tales, and Dr David Kelly is not here to answer what I believe were several unwarranted interpretations of events surrounding him given by the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway).
In the words of Lord Hurd, the circumstance we now find ourselves in is a scandal, and one compounded by the acres of empty green Benches all around us today. There are some 30 Members of the House present. There are some seven members of the Labour party which took us into the war, and most of those were resolute opponents of the war, and another is in the dock in the inquiry. I will come to him later.
The Schleswig-Holstein question took a long time, but that is because nobody knew the answer. Everybody knows the answer to the question of why Sir John Chilcot has come forward—a week before our debate, when he knew that it was on the Order Paper—to tell us that this inquiry will not report before the general election. Everybody knows the answer to that, however much flannel is pulled around it. It is to avoid the fact that the report can only highlight the iron-clad consensus that existed at that time between the two Front Benches: the then Prime Minister and his acolytes, only one of whom has the courage to be here today, and the then Leader of the Opposition, who is not here today but whose principal role in these matters was to egg the Prime Minister on to war, bigger and faster, as those of us who were here well remember—bitterly remember.
I declare an interest. I am the maker of the film “The Killing of Tony Blair”, which will be out soon, and will no doubt hugely benefit from the postponement of the Chilcot report. In the absence of Chilcot, we will have to be the report. But I have many other interests, of a non-pecuniary nature, in this. Like some of my friends who were not so gullible as the highly expensively educated right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), we did not look into the Bambi eyes of the then—[Interruption.] I am talking about his university education; I probably helped to pay for it.