MPs launch impeachment bid against Blair

Tony Blair yesterday became the first Prime Minister in nearly 200 years to face a formal attempt at impeachment.

A group of MPs tabled a little-used motion to trigger an investigation into claims he was guilty of "gross misconduct" in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Celebrities critical of the war joined 23 MPs to call for Mr Blair's impeachment as a motion calling for a special committee to investigate his claims in the months before the invasion.

Authors Frederick Forsyth and Iain Banks, actors Susan Wooldridge, Andy de la Tour and Corin Redgrave and composer Brian Eno came to the House of Commons to show their support, along with Reg and Sally Keys, whose soldier son Thomas, 20, died in Iraq last year.

Campaigners hope to secure a historic Commons debate on impeachment, an event which would be a major parliamentary occasion and put Mr Blair's claims about Saddam Hussein's weaponry and the threat he posed under scrutiny once more.

Signatories to the motion include Boris Johnson, the Spectator Editor and former Conservative frontbencher, Tory former ministers Douglas Hogg and John Gummer, Plaid Cymru parliamentary leader Elfyn Llwyd, Paul Marsden, who defected from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, and Respect MP George Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party for his comments on Iraq.

But no Labour backbenchers have signed the motion, fuelling scepticism among observers despite claims by campaigners that several Labour MPs have privately expressed their support.

But yesterday Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party and one of the motion's signatories, said he was hopeful the Speaker of the Commons, Michael Martin, would grant a debate on impeachment.

"This is no gimmick. No Speaker in history has turned down a motion on impeachment for debate. My estimation is that, given there are 23 names on the order paper, it will depend entirely on the breadth and substance of support. The Speaker is an extremely fair man and I have got every confidence in his ability to judge that."

One source said: "If we had said in August that we would have an impeachment motion on the order paper, people would have laughed. It's there now and has been ruled to be in order. Whatever the Speaker decides, it will be constitutionally important."

Another backer of the impeachment motion, Roger Gale, Conservative MP for Thanet North, said: "I doubt there's a single person here that doesn't accept that Parliament was misled, that the House was told there were weapons of mass destruction when there were not and that the UK was 45 minutes from doom when it was not.

"What the committee must establish is whether the Prime Minister knew those things were false when he told the House of Commons."

Mr Forsyth appealed to Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, to back the impeachment effort.

He said: "When Blair swore to the nation that he had seen classified reports proving Saddam was armed to the teeth, he could not have been telling the truth.

"The only people who could have prepared and delivered such a document were the Secret Intelligence Service, and they did not."

Mr Banks said the impeachment motion was "a chance for Parliament to begin righting the great wrong done to it, the country and the cause of international peace by the unjust and illegal war instigated by George Bush and supported by Tony Blair".

- INDEPENDENT