Frederick Forsyth Speaking at The War Memorial in Sedgefield, April 30th 2005
The people of county Durham are known as people of great courage. The war banners of the Durham Light Infantry attest to that. You are known as a people of honour, or fierce loyalty. One of those loyalties, almost dyed into the bloodstream of a new-born baby in these parts, is a loyalty to the British Labour Party. It goes back a long way, and is almost unshakeable. But I believe there are times when we must bow to a greater loyalty, and that's the loyalty to country, loyalty to honour and self-respect. And this is such an occasion, because the people of this constituency on Thursday morning will go into a booth where they will be for a few seconds completely alone. No-one will be watching. No-one will be checking. No-one will know what they are doing, thinking or saying.
At that moment I ask all voters in this constituency to pause for a moment, and even though I normally vote Conservative, I ask them to disregard every single name, and every party on the list in front of them bar two: I ask them to consider the one they normally vote for, and I ask them to consider the name Keys. I ask them to remember that one man is a public-school popinjay who is no more Labour than the lamp-post I see before me - a man who lies, cheats - who goes to any lengths to have his way. A man on whose conscience, if he had one, ought to be the blood of 85 fine young soldiers. The other man is the grief-stricken father of one of those soldiers.
Reg Keys is a decent man, he's a truthful man and an honourable man. He is much more worthy to represent the people of this constituency than the one who presumes that they're bought and paid-for anyway and therefore do not need even to be visited.
So, come that moment, I as a southerner, but also as a Brit - as a man who loves this country, as a man who once with nervousness and great pride, temporarily wore its uniform - I ask you: think of Tom Keys in his grave. I ask you to think what he would say. What he would say I think is clear: give your votes to my Dad. Send my Dad down to the palace by the Thames.
I concur with that. If you send Reg Keys there he will represent you well, and more, he will give you your honour back.
Men and women of Sedgefield, you do not know me, nor I you. I was born and raised in the County of Kent and this is the County of Durham, the land of the prince-bishops, a long way North. But I believe that we share something that is bigger and better than mileage: we are the people of England, the people of Britain: this is our country. 65 years ago, when our fathers and grandfathers went to fight, no-one asked whether there was a difference between the men of Kent and the men of Devon and the men of Durham, because it was understood there was no difference. Let it be today.
I came North this morning with two purposes: one, to pay tribute to the sons of Sedgefield commemorated behind me, who went out to fight two great wars to protect this land. They went because they were asked to go: they were not pressed men. I salute their courage, I salute their patriotism and the price they paid. They were told, and rightly so, that they were going out because this country was under threat and that was no lie. The insatiable appetite of the Kaiser's Imperial Germany in 1914 was a threat, and the monstrosity of Nazism across the channel in 1940 was an even greater threat. They were not lied to, they were not betrayed.
Now I want you to cast your thoughts to 85 other soldiers. They are not listed on the monument behind me now - they are not listed yet on any monument in this country. Their names are not carved on timber or stone - they are written only in the hearts of the families they left behind when they marched off so proudly to do what they thought was the duty of defending their country. And those same families that went down to RAF Lyneham to see the bodies of their loved ones brought back in coffins covered in the Union Jack. I cannot remember all their names but one will do: Tom Keys, 20 years old, private soldier, Royal Military Police, murdered in some God-forsaken brick-built ruined Iraqi police station, miles from anywhere.
I believe there's a difference between those 85 men and the ones behind me. The 85 men who went out to Iraq were lied to. Tom Keys should not be dead. He should be alive. He should feel the summer sun on his face. He should have a pint of beer on one hand and a girl on his arm. He will never know any of those things because he was sent to fight in a war as he was told was to protect the country he loved.
Now a word if I may to journalists. Despite the fact I've written novels I regard myself still as a journalist. We journalists have a job to do, and that job is to discover if we can, and then explain to our readers, our listeners and our viewers the answers to the six interrogatives: what happened? Where did it happen? When did it happen? Who did it? How did it happen? And the sixth one, and the most important of them all, is: Why did it happen?
I want to ask and then answer one simple question: why did Tom Keys have to die? The easy answer is because he was sent to fight in Iraq, but that only begs another 'Why?'. Why did we invade Iraq? You are being told we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein is a very bad man. That's a Johnny-come-lately explanation: it wasn't the one used two years ago, and it is therefore a lie. We did not invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a very bad man. We knew that already. We knew that in the Kuwait war, and we knew that when he bombed Hallabja with gas bombs. We knew that when he used massed machine guns against the Marsh Arabs. We knew how foul he was but we did not invade him for that reason.
You are being told that we invaded because he was in breach of United Nations resolutions - another Johnny-come-lately reason, another one added only in the last few days, to explain something that happened over two years ago. Another lie. We knew perfectly well he'd been in breach of sixteen UN resolutions, but we had not invaded him. And the third reason you are being offered is that it was so nice to give the people of Iraq democratic elections. That too was not the reason that led our soldiers to invade Iraq. The people of Burma, and North Korea, and Zimbabwe would like democratic elections, but we are not going to invade all their countries, or we'd be invading half the world. So why again did we invade Iraq?
The answer was because one man - and it was at the time one man, the sitting MP for this constituency - decided, in secret conclave with the American President, that the American president intended to invade and would not be persuaded from that ambition, and that he, the British premier, would send British troops in to assist the Americans, come what may.
At that point he ran into a difficulty. The American president is the Head of State, and the head of government, and the Commander in Chief of the Army. The British Prime Minister is not the Head of State - he's the head of government - and he is not the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He therefore needed the sanction of Parliament in order to do what he'd already made up his mind to do. He knew that none of the reasons that are now being quoted would suffice, he knew he needed something more imperative. So, he invented it. He decided, and he told us all, over and over again, that Saddam Hussein had in his power a huge, up-and-running industry for the production of weapons of mass destruction: hideous weapons based on nerve agents and poisonous gas and highly-communicable fast acting contagious diseases. He told us that Saddam's scientists had conquered the technical difficulties of converting laboratory work into usable nose-cones and shell payloads for rockets. He told us that the command structures in Iraq were so sophisticated that these weapons could be launched in forty five minutes after the go-signal was given. And he told us that the launch mechanisms were so powerful they could carry these terrible weapons many thousands of kilometres across the world. Because of this, he told us, this tin-pot dictator was a threat to the region and to the globe and of course to us.
There was only one institution in our society that could have conceivably confirmed that, and that's the Secret Intelligence Service. Time and again, he tried to get the Secret Intelligence Service to endorse his own farrago. Time and again, to their credit, they refused. So finally, seeking justification, seeking a method of frightening the British parliament to giving him the sanction he wanted, he went down to the house by the Thames and he made it up.
He made it up, and he made it up so persuasively that, although most members of that house going in that morning believed they would veto the case for war, a few hours later they changed their minds and approved it. And that is why Tom Keys had to die. He did not - I'm sorry, I'm sorry for his father - he did not die because his country was genuinely under threat. He died so that a man could have a standing ovation in Washington, and his place in history - which he will have, though it won't be quite what he thought.
And now finally, if I may, my feelings to the people of Sedgefield. You have a reputation - you may not know it - the people of county Durham are known as people of great courage. The war banners of the Durham Light Infantry attest to that. You are known as a people of honour, or fierce loyalty. One of those loyalties, almost dyed into the bloodstream of a new-born baby in these parts, is a loyalty to the British Labour Party. It goes back a long way, and is almost unshakeable. But I believe there are times when must bow to a greater loyalty, and that's the loyalty to country, loyalty to honour and self-respect. And this is such an occasion, because the people of this constituency on Thursday morning will go into a booth where they will be for a few seconds completely alone. No-one will be watching. No-one will be checking. No-one will know what they are doing, thinking or saying.
At that moment I ask all voters in this constituency to pause for a moment, and even though I normally vote Conservative, I ask them to disregard every single name, and every party on the list in front of them bar two: I ask them to consider the one they normally vote for, and I ask them to consider the name Keys. I ask them to remember that one man is a public-school popinjay who is no more Labour than the lamp-post I see before me - a man who lies, cheats - who goes to any lengths to have his way. A man on whose conscience, if he had one, ought to be the blood of 86 fine young soldiers. The other man is the grief-stricken father of one of those soldiers.
Reg Keys is a decent man, he's a truthful man and an honourable man. He is much more worthy to represent the people of this constituency than the one who presumes that they're bought and paid-for anyway and therefore do not need even to be visited.
So, come that moment, I as a southerner, but also as a Brit - as a man who loves this country, as a man who once with nervousness and great pride, temporarily wore its uniform - I ask you: think of Tom Keys in his grave. I ask you to think what he would say. What he would say I think is clear: give your votes to my Dad. Send my Dad down to the palace by the Thames.
I concur with that. If you send him there he will represent you well, and more, he will give you your honour back.
ENDS
Contact
Jane Mayes
07748 640
- ©Reg Keys, 2005 -
