In an interview with The Times a Cabinet minister calls on Mr Blair to honour mani-festo pledges on bitterly contested constitutional reforms that Downing Street has sought to shelve.
At the same time, the controversy over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction shows no sign of abating, with President Bush all but admitting last night that the intelligence used to underpin the case for war may have been flawed. He said that he wanted to know the facts about Iraq’s WMD capabilities.
Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, said that the US needed to “go back and compare what we thought we would find with what we found”. She said: “I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground.”
The US Administration is under pressure because of the resignation of David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, who has said that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMD before the war.
Mr Bush’s comments last night were another blow to Mr Blair, who has consistently maintained that British intelligence on Iraq will eventually be proved right. As The Times disclosed yesterday, the Government is already facing a parliamentary inquiry into the accuracy of such information, including that published in the September 2002 dossier.
Peter Hain, the Leader of the Commons, used an interview with The Times today to pile on the pressure on domestic issues by reviving proposals for a democratically elected House of Lords. He said that the Government should be seen to “keep its promises”, adding: “There is a trust issue for the Government and a trust deficit for politics as a whole.”
His comments came at the end of a week in which the Prime Minister narrowly survived a mass Labour revolt on tuition fees, before being vindicated by Lord Hutton over the Kelly affair.
Mr Blair has since sought to draw a line under both issues by making conciliatory gestures towards the BBC, as well as telling backbench rebels that he had learnt his lesson on the need for better consult-ation in policymaking.
A new Populus opinion poll for The Times shows, however, that one in seven voters say they have lost trust in Mr Blair “fairly recently because of Iraq, the death of David Kelly and the issues at the heart of the Hutton inquiry”.
The poll, undertaken after the publication of the Hutton report, shows that the erosion of trust has been largest among women and the key group of swing or floating voters, who may change their minds before the next election. Mr Blair continues, however, to command the trust of nearly half the public.
In his interview, Mr Hain said that the Government, as well as the media and the Opposition, should accept blame for a “corrosive cynicism” in political culture. “We, as a political class, are in a serious predicament. Unless we solve the problem together, it is a problem for democracy.”
The Leader of the Commons has irritated Downing Street before with unauthorised comments on sensitive issues such as tax and Europe that have marked him out as a Cabinet maverick.
His call today for a third stage of Lords reform will dismay some senior government figures who want to avoid any potentially divisive issues after the battle on tuition fees.
Labour MPs are split on the future of the House of Lords and Mr Hain himself was among those deeply disappointed last year when proposals for directly elected peers were scrapped. This followed the intervention of Downing Street and government whips, who ensured that none of the options for reform secured a Commons majority.
Pro-reform MPs fear that the Governemnt is now re-inforcing the status quo by pushing a Bill through Parliament in this session that would scrap the remaining hereditary peers, leaving the House of Lords as a wholly appointed chamber. Critics say that this contradicts Labour’s manifesto pledge at the last election to create a more democratic Upper House.
Mr Hain said: “There is a lot of interest in the third stage of reform among backbenchers and members of the Government. I don’t think anyone will be satisfied just passing this Bill as we are taking it through now. We need a long-term commitment.
“If we cannot find agreement we are back where we were a year ago. But I think there is a head of steam on this which will enable us to move foward.”
Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the Lord Chancellor, is serious about seeking ideas for the next stage of reform, said Mr Hain, who also pointed out that the question has been left open-ended in Labour’s Big Conversation on the next manifesto. “What I favour is the secondary mandate. The same votes cast in general elections would go into a regional pool, each providing maybe 50 peers to a chamber of 600.”
Mr Hain favours all peers being directly elected under a system of proportional representation at the same time as MPs, even though he concedes that this would probably ensure that no party had a majority in the House of Lords and bring an end to the tradition of crossbenchers.
He gives warning that the current make-up of the Upper House, where Labour has barely a quarter of the votes, is unsustainable.
BUSH QUOTES
‘I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts’
‘One thing is for certain — one thing we do know from Mr Kay’s testimony, as well as from the years of intelligence that we had gathered, is that Saddam Hussein was a danger. He was a growing danger’
