MR JOHN Major rejected Opposition demands for cabinet resignations last night, after publication of the Scott Report on the "Arms for Iraq" affair.
With the Chief Secretary Mr William Waldegrave, and the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, in the firing line, a senior spokesman insisted "There is no question about any change to the Prime Minister's team."
Following a three year investigation, the report clears ministers of the key charges of supplying arms to President Saddam Hussein and of conspiring to send innocent men to jail in the Matrix Churchill case. The report stops short of accusing ministers of deliberately lying to parliament about the change in arms sales policy after the end of the Iran/Iraq war.
But Labour was keeping up the pressure as Tory MPs weighed a series of damning criticisms levelled against ministers, of whom only Mr Waldegrave remains in government, involved in a 1988 decision to relax government guidelines on arms sales in a policy "tilt" toward Iraq without telling parliament. And while Sir Nicholas was cleared of any wrong doing, he was criticised for his handling of the controversial issue of Public Interest Immunity certificates the so called gagging orders in the Matrix Churchill case. With hindsight, the report concludes that prosecution of three company directors accused of selling machine tools to Iraq in breach of government guidelines should not have gone ahead.
Sir Nicholas was criticised for failing adequately to explain to the prosecution the reservations with which Mr Michael Heseltine, then President of the Board of Trade, had signed the PII which could have presented disclosure of documents crucial to the defence in the Matrix Churchill case. On that issue Sir Richard Scott said he "cannot accept that Sir Nicholas was not personally at fault." However, allegations of a conspiracy by ministers were not "well founded".
The report says the decision to change policy by three ministers was "deliberate" and the "inevitable result" of their agreement not to publicise the change for fear of public reaction.