News Brief

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has accepted that parts of the official inquiry into the war in Iraq could be held in public. The concession marks a re-thinking of his original plan, announced on Monday, which proposed that the inquiry would be held entirely in private.

His spokesperson said today that the privacy of the inquiry was “never an issue of theology” for ministers. He also indicated that the Prime Minister had told the inquiry's chair, John Chilcot, that certain types of sessions could be held in public if he chose.

The news follows three days of criticism of the inquiry's secret nature. The Conservative Party suggested that only some of the sessions should be held in private, while other parties called for all, or nearly all, of it to be public.

The pressure grew on the government today when similar views were expressed by Robin Butler, who chaired an earlier inquiry into aspects of the war.

Speaking in the House of Lords, he said “I reluctantly conclude that the form of the inquiry proposed by the government has been dictated more by the government's political interest than the national interest and it cannot achieve the purpose of purging mistrust.”

His comments follow the expression of similar views by General Michael Jackson, who led the army during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Richard Scott, who chaired the arms-to-Iraq inquiry in 1992-96.

Despite today's partial concession, many are worried that the bulk of the inquiry could still be held in secret. The shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague called for “a proper U-turn”, while the Liberal Democrats' Ed Davey said “clearly it's not going to go far enough”.

The government is expected to face continued pressure on the issue in the coming days.

The discipline of theology involves thinking rationally about God and belief. But since former PM Harold Wilson first misused the term in the 1960s, it has sometimes been used in wider public discourse to denote a matter of unaccountable ideology or abstruse argument.