MPs pursue Blair impeachment

by JAMES CHAPMAN, Daily Mail

Last updated at 16:00 26 August 2004


Welsh and Scottish nationalist MPs today launched an attempt to force Tony Blair from office by reviving the ancient sanction of impeachment.

Plaid Cymru's Adam Price said they were adopting a parliamentary procedure last used more than 150 years ago because the Prime Minister had refused to resign, despite misleading the country over the war with Iraq.

However supporters of Mr Blair dismissed the attempt as a "political stunt" with no chance of success.

In order to succeed, supporters of impeachment would have to overturn Labour's massive Commons majority.

At a Westminster press conference, Mr Price said that so far just three Tory MPs - Boris Johnson, Edward Garnier and Nigel Evans - had said they would back the move along with the nine Scottish and Welsh nationalists.

Awaiting backing

However he said MPs from other parties - including some Labour MPs - had indicated privately that they were considering whether to support an impeachment motion.

Mr Price admitted that they were not even guaranteed a Commons vote, although parliamentary precedent dictated that Speaker Michael Martin should grant them a debate.

"The precedent is absolutely clear that if one MP has expressed a desire to speak an impeachment motion there has to be a debate. It would be unprecedented for there not to be a debate on an

impeachment motion," he said.

He said that they had now instructed counsel from Matrix Chambers - where the Prime Minister's wife Cherie Blair practices as a QC - to draw up a motion of impeachment which will be published next month.

Mr Price backed his claims with a 99-page report by two academics which, he said, provided "compelling evidence of deliberate repeated distortion, seriously misleading statements and culpable negligence" by Mr Blair.

"We are guided by that most ancient of parliamentary doctrines: the principle of ministerial accountability, that those who lead us cannot mislead us and remain in office," he said in the forward to the document.

"It is simply unprecedented for a minister to refuse to resign in the face of such compelling evidence."

The report is entitled A Case to Answer: A first report on the potential impeachment of the Prime Minister for High Crimes and Misdemeanours in relation to the invasion of Iraq.

It was drawn up for Mr Price by Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Newham College, Cambridge, and Dan Plesch, an honorary fellow of Birkbeck College, University of London.

Blair's 'misconduct'

It includes an analysis of Mr Blair's alleged "misconduct" in the run-up to the war, based in part on the findings of the Butler Inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and sets out the arguments for the use of the impeachment procedure.

It claims that Mr Blair exaggerated the condition of Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons "well beyond the assessments of the intelligence services or the United Nations inspectors".

It also argues that there is "strong evidence" that Mr Blair assured President George Bush that he would support an invasion in 2002, knowing that the US had already decided to oust Saddam regardless of any progress on Iraq's WMD.

Mr Price said that they intended to distribute copies to all MPs to give them the chance to decide whether to support the case for impeachment.

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