New Statesman & Society leader, 4 March 1994
According to all the best placed sources in the corridors of Westminster, the government is preparing to make a sacrifice of Sir Nicholas Lyell, the attorney-general, if the report of the Scott inquiry into British arms sales to Iraq, due in the summer, criticises ministers' handling of public interest immunity certificates in the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial.
He should, of course, go – and there is no need to wait until the summer. Lyell was the person who orchestrated the government's attempts to prevent the Matrix Churchill trial seeing documents that proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the company's exports of machine tools to the Iraqi military-industrial complex were fully encouraged by the government. He drew up the public interest immunity certificates, signed by ministers, which were presented to the trial judge claiming that disclosure of the documents would damage the public interest. If Mr Justice Smedley had not overturned the PII certificates, three innocent men would have gone to prison.
As became clear this week following Trade and Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine's evidence to Scott, the issuing of the PII certificates was by no means the mere technical legal obligation that Lyell has consistently claimed it was. Heseltine told Scott that he had disagreed with the argument that the documents should not be disclosed: Lyell's response had been to argue that ministers had a legal duty to sign PII certificates in all cases involving certain sorts of information. After a lot of wrangling, Heseltine eventually signed a watered-down PII certificate on the understanding that his worries would be communicated to the trial judge. They were not.
In public, Lyell subsequently kept up the line that ministers were "required by law to claim PII" with "certain classes of documents" – a position given full support by Prime Minister John Major. "Claiming public interest immunity is an obligation, not a privilege," Major told Scott when he appeared before the inquiry earlier this year.
Yet, according to Heseltine on Monday, a few days after the collapse of the Matrix Churchill trial, Lyell informed him, apropos another case, that ministers did not after all have to sign PII certificates in every circumstance. If Heseltine is telling the truth – and in this case there is no reason to doubt that he is – Lyell has been exposed as a liar who was prepared to abuse all the power and authority that goes with his position to expedite a cover-up that would have resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of three people. If that is not cause for resignation, and resignation now, the Tories have sunk even deeper into the moral mire than even NSS thought possible.
But it would be wrong if Lyell were the only minister to lose his job over arms-to-Iraq. On the PII question, the defence of Heseltine and the other three ministers who signed Matrix Churchill certificates – the then home secretary Kenneth Clarke, Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and the then junior Foreign Office minister Tristan Garel-Jones – is essentially that offered by war criminals the world over: they were only following orders (albeit in Heseltine's case – we now discover, conveniently for his prospects of political advancement – unwillingly). The story simply will not wash.
Even if the ministers were under a legal obligation to sign the certificates – which is extremely doubtful – they all had the option of resigning instead of signing, on the grounds that non-disclosure of the documents would send the Matrix Churchill executives to jail. The fact that this does not seem to have crossed any of their minds – even the whin-geing Heseltine's – is inexcusable, and the three of the four who are still serving as ministers deserve to be hounded out of office.
But the casualty list should not stop there. The PII certificates question is only one of the issues raised by the Scott inquiry – and is by no means the most substantive. Lyell, Heseltine, Clarke, Rifkind and Garel-Jones are guilty of having engineered, or carried out, a massive cover-up: others are guilty of having constructed, implemented and acquiesced in the policy that they tried to keep from public view.
Put simply, following the Iran-Iraq war, the government secretly adopted a policy of maximising exports to Iraq – even though it knew that many of the exports were of equipment essential to Iraq's rearmament programme, and even though it knew all about the viciousness of Saddam's regime and his expansionist ideology. The policy was more than just a disastrous misreading of Saddam's intentions: it raises fundamental questions about the making of British foreign policy and about the competence and honesty of the politicians responsible for it.
Of course, many of the key players are peripheral to politics these days: Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, Alan Clark. But others are not. The foreign secretaries who presided over the latter part of Britain's "arm Iraq" policy – for that is what it was – were John Major and Douglas Kurd: their underlings included William Waldegrave. All deserve the chop for their roles: in a decent polity, Scott would not hesitate to recommend in his report a mass resignation from the cabinet.
