Briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Gun Crime, Iraq, Sultan of Brunei, Israel/Palestinian Conference and Northern Ireland.
Gun Crime
Asked if the Prime Minister had decided to become involved personally to tackle the explosion in gun crime, the PMOS said that David Blunkett would be chairing a meeting with all the agencies involved tomorrow and that was where the immediate focus lay. Today’s crime figures showing the increase in gun crime were clearly of great concern. However, people should not automatically presume that gun crime made up a large proportion of the overall crime figures. They did not. Moreover, it should be noted that overall crime was falling. Asked if the Prime Minister would be chairing any meetings to discuss the problem, the PMOS said not as far as he was aware. However, the Prime Minister would remain closely involved with Ministers on this issue, as you would expect.
Asked why the Home Secretary had not made himself available for interview today, the PMOS said that that was a matter for the Home Office. He pointed out that John Denham had done several interviews during the course of the day.
Asked for a reaction to comments made by a Birmingham coroner today regarding the ethnic community there, the PMOS declined to respond directly. However, we would encourage anyone with any information to come forward and co-operate with the police. Asked why Downing Street was now getting involved in criminal cases when it had been careful not to do so in the past, the PMOS said we were not getting involved. We were simply asking people to come forward. There was nothing wrong with that. Quite the reverse.
Iraq
Asked about Hans Blix’s comment that there was no ’smoking gun’ and his stated intention today to interview more experts, the PMOS pointed out that Dr Blix had also said there were many questions left unanswered by Saddam Hussein’s declaration. Dr Blix’s remarks had been made on his way into his meeting with members of the UN Security Council and we should therefore wait for a full readout from Sir Jeremy Greenstock - the UK’s Ambassador to the UN. As he had underlined this morning, this process needed to be given time and space to deliver. That said, no one should be under any illusion that Saddam Hussein would be disarmed one way or the other.
Asked if would agree that we appeared to be moving away from the prospect of war with Iraq, the PMOS said that we had consistently advocated going down the UN route. That route was a real option, not a facade as some people had initially suggested. Consequently, we needed to take all the appropriate measures in terms of ensuring that the inspections team had all the resources, staff, time and space it needed to do its job properly. We understood why this process was frustrating for the media and why they were keen to jump ahead to the next stage. However, he was a boring civil servant and must therefore repeat the boring incantation that we had to let the process continue at its own pace. As we had said from the outset, it would take time.
Questioned as to whether Hans Blix now had all the intelligence and information he needed, the PMOS said that we never commented on intelligence matters. That said, Dr Blix had indicated that he was receiving all the intelligence he thought was necessary. Asked if we believed the inspectors to be trustworthy and ‘leakproof’, the PMOS said that we every had confidence in Dr Blix to do his job. Asked if we were now trusting him because he was going to say what we wanted him to say, the PMOS said no, but it was a fact that this process was always going to unveil problems and Dr Blix had said repeatedly that there were difficulties with the declaration.
Asked if we would be happy to put in place another deadline after 27 January and continue to do so indefinitely, the PMOS pointed out that it was not a deadline. We had always maintained that it was a point in time at which Dr Blix and his team would provide feedback on their work in Iraq. This had been set out in Resolution 1441. As Colin Powell had said in today’s Washington Post, it was time to take stock of the situation. However, it was not necessarily a D-day for decision-making. The inspectors would need time and space to carry out their work, but we were not going soft. We had every confidence in Dr Blix and his team.
Asked again about today’s Telegraph story alleging that we had asked for military action in Iraq to be delayed, the PMOS said that as he had underlined this morning, the story was completely wrong - not least because no decision had been taken to launch a military campaign.
Sultan of Brunei
Asked about the Prime Minister’s meeting with the Sultan of Brunei today, the PMOS said that it had been a good and constructive meeting.
Israel/Palestinian Conference
Asked which British representatives would attend the meeting on Palestinian reform, the PMOS said that since we had only received a definitive response from Israel this morning, we wanted to take a bit longer over the exact form the conference would take. Asked if we accepted Israel’s response today to be their final word on the matter, the PMOS said that Prime Minister Sharon had said that he wanted to meet personally with the British Ambassador to Israel in the next few days, although we also accepted that he was focussing his attention on the impending elections. However, his office had indicated to us this morning that there would be no change of mind.
Northern Ireland
Asked what the Prime Minister would discuss with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in their meeting this afternoon, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister had had a good meeting with Mark Durkan earlier today in which the Prime Minister had set out our aims and had talked about acts of completion. The PMOS said he thought that the Prime Minister would use his meeting with Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness to stress the need for an end to paramilitary activity on both sides and to move forward and try to reinstate the institutions in the limited time they had before the Assembly elections in Northern Ireland. Asked if the Prime Minister was 100% confident that the May elections would go ahead, the PMOS said there was no reason to presume they wouldn’t.
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