This Is Deadly Serious

Peter Oborne writes:

It is 13 years since Sir John Scarlett, the then head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, published his infamous dossier asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair used this document, which proved to be a fabrication, to justify his calamitous decision to take Britain to war in Iraq. 

I fear history is repeating itself. 

When David Cameron made the case for bombing Syria, he told MPs there were 70,000 ‘moderate’ fighters on the ground, ready to join the battle against ISIS. 

He told the Commons he had been permitted to use this information by the current chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. 

It has since been established that the ‘70,000’ figure was as much a fantasy as Scarlett’s WMD. Cameron quietly acknowledged this while giving evidence to a parliamentary committee this week, when he appeared to admit the ‘moderate’ fighters include ‘relatively hard-line’ Islamists. 

This is deadly serious — for it seems the PM misled the Commons. 

The Ministerial Code states clearly that any Government minister who misleads MPs must return at the earliest opportunity and apologise and if not ‘will be expected to offer their resignation’.