Jack Straw: I did not lie to MPs over rendition

There were 92 responses to the blog I put up on Tuesday asking readers what questions they would like Jack Straw to answer. One of them was from someone posting as ninjawarrior, who thought I was wasting my time. "This is yesterday's man; absolutely nothing to say to us now as we move forward," he/she said. But it turned out that Straw, who was home secretary, foreign secretary, leader of the Commons, justice secretary and at one stage a candidate with an outside chance of replacing Gordon Brown as prime minister, had rather a lot to say. Here are the highlights:

He said that Ed Miliband had quashed doubts that he could not take decisions and that he would be a flop at PMQs. "There was a worry which I had about how brisk a decision maker [Miliband] was, and he's been very brisk and decisive, and whether he could hack prime minister's questions, and he's done both," Straw said.

He rejected Geoff Hoon's claim that he (Straw) knew about the January 2010 coup against Gordon Brown in advance and that he was planning to tell Brown to resign.

He warned that Labour would "lose the British electorate" if it did not have an effective criminal justice policy.

He denied lying to MPs about Britain's involvement in the rendition of terrorism suspects.

He said that General Augusto Pinochet was probably "deceiving the doctors" before his return to Chile in 2000. The former Chilean dictator was detained in the UK because the Spanish wanted to prosecute him for human rights abuses but he was sent home after Straw accepted evidence that his medical condition meant that he was unfit to stand trial.

He said that he considered introducing minimum six-month jail sentences when he was justice secretary. But he dropped the idea because it would increase the size of the jail population.

He rejected George Bush's claim that the waterboarding of terrorism suspects saved Britain from terrorist attack.

He said he did not know whether or not Bush would be at risk of arrest because of his war record if he were to visit London.

For 13 years Straw was a senior cabinet minister. Now, after 30 years on the Labour frontbench, he is on the backbenches again, and starting to plan his memoirs. We met in his basement office in the House of Commons, where the modest coffee table featured a copy of the New Statesman, a law journal and a book from the Commons library about Arthur Balfour and Israel. As a hardline home secretary, Straw was a controversial figure even before he became foreign secretary and found himself defending the Iraq war. Many of the comments about him on our blog were venomous; Straw's remarks about the Guardian and its readers didn't always radiate undiluted affection either. The memoirs issue turned out to be a bit of a problem. At several points I found him unduly reserved, because he is clearly hoping to save something up for the serialisation when the great tome finally appears. But Straw has had such wide-ranging career that we weren't short of things to talk about. Here's how it went.

Ed Miliband

Q: On the blog someone [Armstrongx15 at 10.12am] posted a comment saying Ed Miliband's performance has been "lamentable" since he became Labour leader. How would you describe it?

A: I did not vote for Ed. I was supporting his brother, and then I voted for Andy Burnham as a second preference. I have a lot of time for Ed, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the excellence of his performance. There was a worry which I had about how brisk a decision-maker he was, and he's been very brisk and decisive, and whether he could hack prime minister's questions, and he's done both, as well as many other things.

Labour's crime policy

Q: Were you "pleasantly surprised" by Miliband's conference speech when he said: "When Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high reoffending rates, I'm not going to say he's soft on crime"? [This was a point raised by JonCo at 10.49am on the blog.]

A: If you're asking me about the specific point about short sentences, I don't mind looking at them. If there were some answer to short sentences, I think it would have been tried. So I'm very happy to look at them because I think most people who look at them then come to the conclusion that you have to have provision for short sentences. Ninety six per cent of those who receive a sentence for six months or less have already got one conviction, often for scores of offences, and 75% of them have got seven or more sets of convictions. The dilemma the courts face is what do you do with these people who refuse to take the opportunities to go straight in the community. And that, I would have thought, is even a dilemma for Guardian readers, who are victims, or potential victims, of these people.

One of the paradoxes is that the longer you keep people locked up, the more likely you are to be able to divert them from crime and from drugs. One of the things I looked at is whether to have a minimum six-month sentence. But the results from the research people in the [Ministry of Justice] was that if you had that, far from reducing the prison population, it would increase it.

Q: I mentioned that line from the Miliband speech because it did seem to be aimed at you. I found a cutting from an article you wrote for the Daily Mail earlier in the summer that actually included the caption: "Jack Straw accuses the Tories of going soft on crime." Do you think Ed is going to come around to your view eventually?

A: I don't think Ed has said much more about it. Sadiq Khan, who has taken over from me as shadow justice secretary and who is someone for whom I've got huge regard, has been pursuing the issue in the same way I would have done. I'm very much in favour of looking at every possible alternative to incarceration. But what fires my beliefs about criminal justice policy is looking at it through the eyes of the victim. And we were extraordinarily successful for victims, both in terms of reducing the number of victims to the lowest level since the British crime survey began, and also in providing more support for victims. Crime is much, much less of an issue in my area, and many others. The Guardian has a particular kind of agenda for this which I have always found extraordinary, but that's their business. You will correctly lose the British electorate, as we did in the 1980s and early 1990s, if you do not have an effective criminal justice policy which of course is fair to defendants but which, above all, has public safety as its key imperative.

Allegations about plotting against Gordon Brown

Q: Let's talk about Labour before the election. In February, after Andrew Rawnsley published his book about Labour, End of the Party, a story based on its contents appeared saying that you had been "plotting" to get rid of Gordon Brown. Was there ever a point during Brown's premiership when you wanted him to go, either voluntarily or involuntarily?

A: There were self-evidently difficulties, particularly after the conference in 2007 and really running right through the summer of 2008 until the collapse of the banks. There was a very acute situation after the Crewe byelection, and particularly after the Glasgow East byelction, which was at the end of July 2008. Of course I was involved in all sorts of discussions with colleagues about what we did about the situation. My considered view, however, was that, notwithstanding the difficulties, which were palpable at the time, they would be worse if there were a change of leader. That was the difficulty. There was no magic wand available, not least because my judgment was that whilst the British public was perfectly tolerant of one change of prime minister between elections, they were likely to be less tolerant of two changes.

Q: But what about January 2010? Rawnsley revisited this in the paperback edition of his book (which includes new material) and he wrote about the January attempt by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt to get rid of Brown. Hoon is quoted on the record in the book as saying: "Harriet [Harman] knew exactly what we were going to do, as did Jack Straw and several others ... I had it, on absolutely categorical authority, that Jack was going to do the business [ie tell Brown to resign]." Is that true?

A: It's untrue. It's simply incorrect. I had no idea that he and Patricia Hewitt was going to do that.

Q: So how did Hoon get it into his head? Rawnsely writes that Hoon "had communicated with Straw via two Labour MPs who were exceptionally close to the justice secretary".

A: I had no conversation with Geoff over that period. I had no idea what he was doing. The night before, at around the 10 o'clock vote, I saw Geoff at the back of the [Speaker's] chair and asked him how his preparation for giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry was going and I had a conversation with him about that. And he said not a word to me about this. I then heard a rumour, without any names attached to it, that something was going to happen on the Wednesday, which frankly I dismissed as a rumour.

Allegations about British collusion in the torture of terrorist suspects

Q: In 2005 you told the Commons foreign affairs committee: "There is simply no truth in claims that the UK has been involved in rendition." Yet when the high court ordered papers relating to this to be released this summer, it emerged that you sent a telegram to the British ambassador in Washington saying: "We accept that the transfer of UK nationals held by US forces in Afghanistan to the US base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counterterrorism objective by ensuring that they are securely held." This was an issue that a lot of people who posted questions on the blog referred to. One of the most direct came from someone called Steve (at 12.40) who said: "Jack, I saw you in parliament on TV answering questions and claiming that you knew nothing about the rendition of people by the Americans out of the UK during the Iraq war and it looked to me like you were telling lies. Am I right?"

A: No. Come off it. That's an absurd claim.

Q: In that case how can you square what you told the foreign affairs committee with what these documents appear to show?

A: What I was being asked by the FAC is whether we had, the UK had, been involved in the unlawful rendition of suspects in circumstances where the UK could have controlled that. For example, either through the UK homeland or through UK bases, like Diego Garcia. Officials at my request had during 2005 gone on the most extraordinarily thorough examination of all the records that they could find to pin down whether there had been any unlawful rendition in which we had participated. And I gave the results of that, as I recall, at the end of 2005. And the answer was there had been two cases pre-9/11, when I was home secretary – and I'm sorry I can't remember the details – and there were two cases when I was foreign secretary where I had refused the request. That might suggest that we took our responsibilities, that I took them, seriously. And then later on when David [Miliband] gave a statement [when Miliband was foreign secretary] it turned out that there had indeed been one rendition through Diego Garcia about which the Americans had not informed us at the time, because permission would have been refused. But that's it.

That's a very different thing from saying – in advance of what we knew of what subsequently transpired at Guantánamo Bay – that the Americans had to do something with these suspects, which they did, and just acknowledging that that might be the least worst alternative in a situation of great difficulty for everybody. That was the background to that. That's not endorsing unlawful rendition.

Q: But what do you say to the allegation that you, or the government, were complicit? There was a good version of this question on the blog from someone who posted as Forthestate [at 11.55am] who said: "Did you advise our services that if they were not directly involved in torture, despite knowledge of it, they were not complicit, and are you therefore not ultimately responsible for a clear violation of our obligations under international law?"

A: Whoever asked that question has already made up their mind, I suggest. I stand by all the statements I have made about this and of course I'm very happy to give evidence to the Gibson inquiry [which the government has set up to investigate claims that British agents colluded in the torture of terror suspects]. Let us see what they come up with. This has been the subject already of very substantial examination and there has never been the remotest suggestion that statements I made to the House of Commons were inaccurate or wrong, and they weren't.

Q: When you look back over that period, do you think there were things the government could have done better in terms of the way detainees were treated?

A: This is the great luxury of being a journalist. I'm about to write about this, and I offered some reflections in my lengthy memorandum about Iraq about this [submitted to the Iraq inquiry]. If decision-makers had hindsight, decisions would be perfect. We did not have hindsight. We made the best decisions we could, applying ourselves, amongst many other considerations, to the rule of law and to British principles.

Iraq war

Q: I don't want to ask a lot about Iraq because you've covered that at length in your evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. But I want to raise something you told Chris Mullin. In the latest edition of his diaries, Decline and Fall, Mullin says you told him in 2006: "The one thing I learned from Iraq was that once the process starts rolling it's very difficult to stop." Looking back at the Iraq war, was there any point where you would like to have stopped the process, or moved it in a different direction?

A: The first thing I say about Iraq is that I share responsibility for the decision. Let's be clear about that. I'm a grown up. I was British foreign secretary. And, as I said to the Chilcot inquiry, both in writing and in evidence, I was aware that if I had, particularly later on, in February or March [2003], had said that I opposed military action, that almost certainly would have aborted UK participation and would have led to a great government crisis. And I didn't do that, so any other remarks I make should be against that background.

Q: But this quote suggests that you have in mind a fork in the road, where things could have turned out differently?

A: I didn't want us to be involved in military action at all. Like my close friend Colin Powell, my view was that we had embarked upon active diplomacy backed by the threat of military action. That was the frame we were working in. Plenty of people have acknowledged that is sometimes the only way diplomacy does work, including Kofi Annan. And it was working for a period because after four years' forced absence Saddam let the inspectors back. My hope and intention was that the inspections would work, that Saddam would give full access, which he failed to do, and that having given full access, the inspectors would either find the WMD or they would say, as the Kay report did later, that they had been given complete access and they had not been able to.

Q: But is there any point where you can look back and say: "We should have stopped the process then"?

A: There are reflections which I will make when I write in more detail, so I'm afraid Guardian readers will have to wait for that. What I said to Chris was certainly true; it was not that it was unstoppable. But there was, certainly from the turn of 2003, very strong pressure. It could have been resolved peacefully if Saddam had complied with the requirements of [UN security council resolution] 1441. It could have been resolved if he had complied with the tests that were set down and offered in the draft second resolution. But it was not so, and there we are.

George Bush

Q: When George Bush published his memoirs, he said waterboarding saved Britain from terrorist attack. Do you think he was right?

A: No. I wrote a long book review for the Times commenting on this. [In the review (paywall), Straw wrote: "Where Bush is at his least convincing is in his truly ghastly apologia for the use of 'waterboarding' as an interrogation technique. In interviews this week he has justified this technique by claiming that he was advised it was 'legal'. That, however, can hardly absolve him of moral responsibility, since in his book he says that two techniques recommended to him by the CIA 'went too far, even if they were legal', so he rejected them. The damage to America's reputation from this and other cavalier disregards for its own principles far outweighed any claimed benefits, not least because all this has acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the terrorists."]

Q: John Prescott said this about George Bush to the New Statesman last year: "Bush is crap; you know it, I know it, the party knows it." Do you agree?

A: No, it's not a view I hold. Self-evidently, I would not have voted for George Bush, and he left office as the least popular of any president since Gallup began its polling 70 years before. I think the verdict on Bush is very mixed. But one of the great paradoxes about Bush is how different he was in private and how in private he was engaged, focused, articulate, in very sharp contrast to his public image.

Q: If Bush came to the UK now, would he be likely to face arrest?

A: I have no idea, is the answer. As a former head of state, he's in a different position from former members of government. That was partly the argument in [the] Pinochet [case]. He wouldn't, as a result of the decision in Pinochet 1 and 2 [two House of Lords judgments in the case of the former Chilean dictator] as of right have state immunity. Somebody may try and have an arrest warrant pursued against him. But I doubt whether it would succeed.

Q: Do you think he would be advised to risk it?

A: It's not for me to give him free legal advice. He needs to go to better lawyers than me.

Augusto Pinochet

Q: Let's move on to Pinochet. Before the rescue of the miners, the last miracle associated with Chile was the recovery of Augusto Pinochet. When you were home secretary you sent him back ...

A: More to the point, I had him locked up for 16 months.

Q: You did, and then you had medical advice saying he was not fit to stand trial.

A: Yes, but one of the things that people forget, except in Chile, is that the key decision I made was to decide that there was a very good case in law for his extradition and, to a lot of people's surprise, I then confirmed that, notwithstanding the very restrictive judgment in Pinochet 2 by the law lords. Had he stayed here, he would have gone to Spain [to face trial] but for at the time what amounted for overwhelming medical advice.

Q: On the subject of which, Dimitri, who posted a question on the blog (at 2.35pm), pointed out that as soon as Pinochet arrived in Chile, he "bounded out of his wheelchair". It did look as though he staged a remarkable recovery.

A: I thought he had probably got close to deceiving the doctors. But, just to explain to Dimitri, the original medical evidence about his condition was put in on behalf of the Chilean embassy. What I then did was require some very experienced forensic practitioners whose normal role is to go to court to say that this man who says he's unfit to plead is not unfit to plead – they were tough forensic practitioners, four of them altogether – to examine him. They examined him at some length and all came back with a very clear view. So, faced with that, there was then a very clear choice about whether I left it to the court. But it was perfectly clear that the court, faced with that evidence, would have said what on earth was I doing in not releasing him. So that's what I did.

The net result of the decision by Judge [Baltasar] Garzón in Spain to seek his extradition, and my decision to give what was called "an authority to proceed" and to have him detained for 16 months – which had never happened in my experience ever before for a head of state – was to completely change the face of Chilean politics. So it had a happy ending. The Chileans then came to terms with a profound change of view about Pinochet that they had been able to undertake in the 16 months that he was away.

A: So Pinochet "came close to deceiving the doctors" ...

Q: I thought he had, because he made a remarkable recovery on the plane. I had had this worry all the way through that this would be another Saunders case [a reference to Earnest Saunders, the convicted fraudster who was released early from jail on the grounds that he was suffering from Alzheimer's but who then subsequently recovered]. But I also had to apply myself to what these very tough forensic medics had said. So that's what I did.

Constitutional reform

Q: Back to domestic issues. You've said you are in favour of the alternative vote electoral system. Are you going to campaign in favour of the alternative vote?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you want the party to campaign in favour of AV?

A: I don't think it's possible to get the party to. In practice, the feeling in the party at every level is divided on AV. It was a fairly Herculean effort to get the parliamentary party to agree that, whatever their views on the merits of AV, they were signed up to having a referendum on it.

Q: On constitutional reform generally, Labour went into the election in 1997 talking about electoral reform and House of Lords reform and after 13 years it never happened. Now Nick Clegg is pushing it through. Is that a source of regret or embarrassment?

A: I have one regret, which is that it probably would have been a good idea to have a referendum on the Jenkins proposals [on electoral reform]. But for those who want to change the voting system, it would have put the clock back, not forward.

Q: Why do you say that?

A: Because AV Plus [the system recommended in the Jenkins report] would have been completely trounced. There was virtually no support for it in the Conservative party, tiny support for it in the parliamentary Labour party. It was a proposal that was not going to fly. But, although it would have been a lot of money ... I think that in retrospect it would have been sensible.

On Lords reform, I'm glad that Nick has taken this forward. As I know, it is very difficult to reform the Lords. We got the reform made in 1999 to remove most, but not all, of the hereditaries and that has made the Lords much more effective and assertive. The thing I was able to achieve, and I'm proud of this, is to get the House of Commons to come to a clear vote in favour of reform and that was in March 2007. They had never done that before. In 2003 the Commons voted against every single alternative. In 2007 they decisively voted in favour of either 100 or 80% elected and against all other alternatives. So, that's progress.

You've got to proceed on an all-party basis. My criticism of [Clegg's] constitutional programme is in respect of the partisan measures [reducing the size of the House of Commons, which will disadvantage Labour]. The fundamental argument is that, in the absence of a written constitution with special majorities for changing the constitution – and I'm not arguing that should happen – it is incumbent upon the government of the day not to use constitutional change as a partisan weapon and only to proceed by consensus. It's fine to initiate, but then essential to achieve a consensus, which I did on every issue, apart from the voting system for the European parliament [PR, using closed lists], which has never gained any kind of legitimacy, which in a sense makes the case.

Writing his memoirs

Q: You've said that you are going to write your memoirs. What stage are you at?

A: It's active, but early, is the best way of saying where I've got.

Q: Are you going to write a candid memoir, that breaks confidences, or a "proper" one, that respects confidences but that might be a bit dull?

A: I am not somebody who is in favour of gratuitously breaking confidences, or implicit trust, which was one of my major concerns about Christopher Meyer's book [about Meyer's time as British ambassador in Washington]. Trivial though it was, if at any stage any of the people who were in his residence – or the British residence, not his – had known that he was going to make use of what he gained from a highly privileged position in the way that he did, then I certainly would have invited him to find another occupation. You cannot run a diplomatic service on that basis.

Q: But it's not just officials who do this. Politicians are publishing memoirs that are more and more candid. Does this create a problem for people like you who want to write a book that maybe 30 years would have had a market ...

A: Well, we'll see whether it has a market. I think that there is a huge amount you can say without the breathless stuff about what happened behind the curtains ... What hopefully will be of interest, although that depends on the acuity of the author, will be reflections from the inside, but with a level of detachment and analysis about how Labour governed, and why we did, and what was right and what was wrong about it. There is a huge amount you can say that hopefully is new.

Q: Will you give us a flavour of it?

A: No thanks.

Q: I'll put the question in a different way. On the blog, els76uk (at 1.39pm) asked what three things you regret doing or saying.

A: You'll have to wait. There are more than three. But, with apologies to Guardian readers, I'm not going elicit them just now.