Over the past 15 months, the arguments presented by the Prime Minister for going to war in Iraq, and the evidence he adduced, have been examined four times — by two Commons committees, and by Lords Hutton and Butler of Brockwell. All found fault with intelligence-gathering, the assembly of information, and public presentation. Lord Butler was sharply critical of the “reduced scope for collective political judgment” that he ascribed to the style of government preferred by Tony Blair, in which the Cabinet looms less large than informal consultation with an inner clique of political advisers, and civil servants are held at a distance.
None of these reports found the Prime Minister guilty of misleading Parliament or country, or of wilfully distorting intelligence findings — the essence of Andrew Gilligan’s BBC report, which was investigated and severely criticised by Lord Hutton. Fault was found with Mr Blair, as with several other ministers, on a number of counts, but not for outright mendacity or even for bad faith.
With opinion on Iraq sharply divided, however, these reports and their supporting evidence contained ammunition for all. Opponents and supporters of the war naturally gave more weight to the parts that strengthened their case. Lord Butler’s report, in particular, has now been industriously mined for its most damning excerpts by two anti-war academics, who were commissioned by Adam Price, a Plaid Cymru MP, to draw up a dossier entitled: A Case to Answer.
Mr Price, who apparently got the idea after watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, intends next month to call for the impeachment of the Prime Minister. He has the support of ten other MPs, from his own party, the Scottish Nationalists, and the Tories in the maverick person of Boris Johnson, MP and Editor of The Spectator.
Impeachment, to most people, is an American practice, but it originated in England, dating back to the 14th century. The history of this little-used procedure, whereby the House of Commons takes a prosecution to the House of Lords for judgment, is closely entwined with Parliament’s assertion of its right to hold the executive to account.
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In principle anyone may be impeached, for any crime whatsoever, but historically it has been used against the highest officials in the land, for treason and other “high crimes and misdemeanours beyond the reach of the law, or which no other authority in the state will prosecute”. In medieval times, impeachment was directed against corruption and maladministration; under the Stuarts, to stop the King subverting the common law; and in the 18th and early 19th centuries, notoriously in the seven-year trial that acquitted Warren Hastings but left him a broken man, once more for corruption. With the doctrine of Cabinet responsibility, impeachment, disdained by Bagehot as an “ancient and coarse” sanction, fell into disuse. An 1848 attempt to impeach Palmerston died in the House of Commons.
So, without doubt, will this indictment, if presented — not just because of the large majority the Prime Minister commands, but also because the charge that he misled Parliament has already been exhaustively examined and dismissed. It is true, as Lord Butler implied, that ministers have become reluctant to accept responsibility for mistakes, let alone resign. Mr Price’s frustration in the waning authority of Parliament is widely shared. But a call for impeachment could backfire, reinforcing the perception that political gamesmanship takes precedence over the business of governing. Mr Blair’s standing on Iraq will be tested soon enough, in a general election. The impeachers will not achieve his fall. They should disdain to use Parliament, yet again, to rehearse the anti-war case when the priority must surely be to ensure that, out of war, Iraq gains peace.