ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS 

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s time now to take a look through the papers and the insurgency in Iraq dominates the headlines today.  Here to discuss that and all the day’s other stories are the Conservative MP, Penny Mordaunt, the Lib Dem MP and former leader of the Lib Dems of course, Sir Menzies Campbell and Jim Waterson, the deputy editor of Buzzfeed.  Thank you all very much for coming in and Sir Menzies, you’ve started off with this issue of Iraq and the terrible situation there and an article inside the Mail on Sunday by Sir Christopher Meyer, the former Ambassador to Washington.  

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: Indeed and there is a piquancy in that because of course Christopher Meyer was there, he had to follow the instructions of this political masters but it’s now emerged that from time to time he was excluded from some of the most important meetings and what he says, it’s in the headline, ‘No Mr Blair, your naïve war was a trigger for this savage violence”.  You’ve just had an interview with Tony Blair in which he says the opposite but I think it’s very interesting that someone who had to implement the policy is so root and branch opposed to what Mr Blair is now offering. 

DM: But just looking at the points which he refutes from Tony Blair, Tony Blair saying more or less right, whether you remove Saddam or not would have made no difference to the situation now because Saddam would have been swept away in an Arab Spring, there would have been a brutal conflict there, we might have reached the situation we’re in now.  What does Sir Christopher say?

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: Well he says that the root of all this is the fact that we went in there and disturbed the circumstances.  It is quite true that there was nothing good to be said about Saddam Hussein and a lot of people still argue that in the fullness of time then the opposition might well have been powerful enough in order to deal with them.  Remember too, we were following a policy in those days of containment and deterrents, making life very difficult for Saddam Hussein and his regime and there is no reason that I have ever seen put forward as to why we would shouldn’t have continued that other than – and I think Mr Blair actually admitted it to you today – that the purpose was regime change.  Well that’s not what he was telling us back in 2003 and in particular what Clare Short was being told when she was a member of the Cabinet. 

DM: Okay, your party opposed it of course but Penny Mordaunt, your party supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, does that look in your book now like it was a tremendous mistake?

PENNY MORDAUNT: Well speaking to some of my colleagues who were in at the time, they very much regret voting for it.  I think that one of the made at the time, leaving aside the issues about whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not, was about destabilising the region and I think today we have got to learn from that and the two questions that we have to be able to answer whatever we’re going to do about this is, what is in our own national interest and we need to explain that very carefully to the general public and secondly …

DM: But it is in our national interests now to get involved isn’t it?  I mean the warning that Mr Blair gives, and we can all see it there, with these ISIS groupings, there are Britons involved in Syria and Iraq and they are going to come back home.   

PENNY MORDAUNT: The second thing is what is the end game, what are we looking to achieve and I think in both Iraq One and Iraq Two and in Afghanistan we haven’t actually answered those two questions and that’s a fundamental failing that we have to rectify now.

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: Can I just agree with that in this sense, when you take military action you’ve got clear political objectives.  Up till now Mr Blair didn’t have any clear political objectives.  I have just been in America for a week, President Obama is taking time, of course he always takes time because he finds it difficult to make his mind up, all options are on the table but you don’t know which option to choose unless you have a clear political objective – are you going to continue to support the Malaki government which lacked so much confidence it couldn’t get enough people to go to its parliament last week in order to help the government declare a state of emergency. 

DM: Let’s bring Jim on this and your next story sort of feeds in to this as well because I wanted to move it slightly towards the old argument for example about intervention in Afghanistan which came before Iraq and then about Iraq was that it would ultimately prevent terrorism on our own streets.  Now whether the mess in Iraq is of our own making partially or not, there is now an existential risk of terrorism on our streets because people are getting trained up there, British people are getting trained up in Iraq and in Syria in some pretty horrible techniques. 

JIM WATERSON: Yes and I think one of the most interesting things you can do, if you look at some of the Twitter accounts and some of the Instagram accounts of people, Britons out fighting in Iraq and they post pictures of themselves with cups of English tea and then talking about how they are going to pursue Jihad until the end of days, it’s a very strange mix of people from southern Britain going out there, being radicalised and yes, they have got British passports and presumably, while we are watching them, they could come back.   

DM: British passports, which moves us on to British values coming from the Prime Minister, he wants to see all schools promoting British values and this is your story, stay with us Jim, there is an article by the Prime Minister in the Mail in Sunday again.  These aren’t values that are exclusive to Britain, I certainly hope not – freedom, tolerance, social responsibility – we don’t have the sole hold on these values do we?

JIM WATERSON: Even Michael Gove, the Education Secretary who started this whole debate last week, wrote in 2007 that it is very un-British to define British values.  I think it is one of the key parts of our culture to try and avoid trying to pin down – and we all know John Major got in trouble when he tried to do maidens on the green and things like that, it all ends up being a bit twee really.  There are definitely some things which are worth defending but I think we are going to see a whole summer where we end up with this loosely defined curriculum which remember has to be taught from this September. 

DM: That’s a point, isn’t it, Penny Mordaunt, it’s all mother and apple pie and if we are not teaching these values in our schools then we shouldn’t be running schools surely. 

PENNY MORDAUNT: Yes, I think there we are going to have a lot of opinion pieces over the summer on this.  This is article the Prime Minister states what he thinks they are which is freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility and respecting and upholding the rule of law.  What he goes on to talk about, and hopefully we don’t have a monopoly on those things but what he does go on to talk about is what they’re embedded in and he is talking about in particular the Magna Carta and we’ve got all sorts …

DM: When asked on American television about the Magna Carta the Prime Minister didn’t know an awful lot about it did he?

PENNY MORDAUNT: Indeed, indeed so this is probably not a recent problem but I …

DM: Of course, did she die in vain?

PENNY MORDAUNT: Possibly a more controversial point but really talking about our constitution, the Magna Carta, those perhaps more dry issues but really trying to give pupils in our schools whatever their cultural background some ownership of that.  I think it’s a good thing.

DM: Which is what they achieve it seems in the United States. 

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: This is not a new debate because of course it is going on in Scotland, in the context of the debate about independence, is there a distinction between Scottish values and British values?  Well I’m someone who believes Scotland will do better to stay in the United Kingdom and I don't think there is any real difference but those who argue for yes say yes, there are distinctive Scottish values and these would be better preserved in an independent Scotland.

DM: Well that’s for another debate, thank you for throwing that in there.  Stay with me and read me this about the World Cup and perhaps the Scottish attitude to the result last night in Manaus. 

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: Well I’m British and as I frequently say I cheer for England at the Oval and I certainly cheer for England in the World Cup if they are the only British representatives.  I was struck by the fact that the Observer, which regards itself as a heavyweight paper and maybe my friends in the Observer won’t speak to me after this, has got a 15 page supplement on the World Cup which covers for example the prospects of Iran, Nigeria and Bosnia.  Now obviously England and particularly the result last night, I don't know if you watched any of …

DM: Actually I did stay up and I’m a little bit baggy under the eyes this morning. 

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: England played very well but in the end their opponents just had too much class and too much guile really but listen, my wife is already complaining about the fact that every other programme is being distorted or displaced by the World Cup and I think by the time it comes to an end, unless England progress and let’s hope for that, then people may get a bit fed up of it.

DM: I’m sure you’ve got your World Cup wall chart there, Sir Menzies.  Jim, we mentioned it in the headlines there, Labour’s dosh for dads is how the headline is written, extended and improved paternity leave. 

JIM WATERSON: This is Labour trying to show they can do something across the board for everyone and not just people at the bottom end so they are promising to double the amount of paternity leave that new fathers can get paid from two to four weeks, well not promising but putting forward the idea in the parlance and then there is the big debate internally as to whether they can fund it and that is what it will come down to.  The Tories are already saying that £150 million for a couple of weeks extra paternity leave is money the country can’t afford and Labour is debating all these nice ideas that they can sell to the nation at the election.

DM: It’s going to be popular though isn’t it, when you put it in with all consumer measures and things like that?

JIM WATERSON: It’s popular but it’s one other little thing.  On the doorstep if you are explaining that we can do a few things here, we can give you a couple of weeks more there, you have got to have a really clear message that you can sum up in a couple of sentences. 

DM: People like us will be counting up as well and adding it up and I’m sure the Conservatives will be adding it up and saying how much it is all going to cost.  Let’s stay with sport now, Penny you have got the Telegraph, state pupils missing out on the Olympics, what’s going on here?

PENNY MORDAUNT: Yes, this is Sir Michael Wilshaw who is going to be making a speech later this week criticising standards of PE in our schools, state educated schools and he has looked at the number of Olympic medallists and totted up whether they were privately educated or not and it’s not good news for state schools. I think there are a couple of issues going on here, the first is access to good facilities and this is not just about what goes on in schools but it is also people playing sports and getting involved in activities outside as well. 

DM: Isn’t that a British value?  Isn’t it something we should be pushing?

PENNY MORDAUNT: Absolutely, absolutely, I agree and I think one thing that we need to look at is previously we’ve had money for sport in schools and money for community sports and the two haven’t really joined up but actually the most sustainable models you can have is when you have the parents of pupils actually getting involved as well in whatever sport it is and training to be coaches and making the whole thing much more sustainable.

DM: It’s worrying though because the schools that educate the vast bulk of our children are doing less and less sport. 

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: I was a member of the Olympic board and the legacy was not just to be in the Olympic Park but was in ensuring that at every possible level that children and particularly girls had the opportunity to take part in sport because of its health and educational values but of course the responsibility for that no longer rests with Seb Coe and anyone else, it rests with the government and there is quite a lot of dissatisfaction not simply at what’s sometimes call the grassroots level but further up the tree in sport about the failure to show a sufficient commitment.

DM: Ultimately with sport you have got to want to do it and you can take a horse to water and all that but the Olympic legacy doesn’t seem to exist perhaps.

JIM WATERSON: The real problem with the schools is that the amount of money you need to put into facilities to have a world class athlete, we’ve got one ourselves here who is a champion runner but the facilities that I imagine you had to put up with then are nothing compared to what champion runners would have today and it is only the private schools that have the dosh to go out and do that so you either need a massive amount of central government funding or we need to find some solution where communities or local councils can do it themselves. 

DM: But my point is you have got to want to do it, you have got to see positive role models and get out and be taken away from your games console and all that.

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: But you can persuade people to do it, you can encourage them, give them incentives.  It makes you feel better, it makes you live better, there are all sorts of way of saying that.

PENNY MORDAUNT: And you also need, and Sir Michael’s point that I think he is going to make is we ought to have more competitive sport but I think you have to have a balance because there are people for who that is just a big turn off and if people are being active, whether it’s dance or something else, that’s a good thing that we need to be providing facilities for as well. 

DM: Okay Jim, I’ve just seen your next headline, ‘Boob pick MP, I took ecstasy”, what’s this? 

JIM WATERSON: This is the story where we’ve got Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, his wife has had a certain amount of attention for revealing a bit too much on Instagram but I think what this story shows is two things …

DM: She runs a delicatessen.

JIM WATERSON: She runs Danczuk’s Deli in Rochdale to give it a plug but the bit that I find interesting in this day and age we’ve got a Labour MP saying I took ecstasy, we’ve got his wife … they’re acting like normal people.  We’re no longer as scandalised by the fact that an MP has taken drugs, that an MP is willing to talk about it and act like a normal person about it.

DM: Do you think that’s a good thing, is it the reality of society?

JIM WATERSON: I think it’s a reality and rather than pretending that everyone is existing in a vacuum and that they should be appearing on the front page of the papers under ‘Labour MP: My drug shame’, instead just deal with it, I’ve moved on.

DM: Because a lot of MPs I talk to and ex-policemen, senior policemen say there is never going to be a real debate on drugs in this country, large proportions of the population take some form of illegal narcotics but MPs will never debate it properly.

SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: People stand off it.  If there’s a battle – and of course it is always language like that that’s used – we’re losing that battle if it exists because people still take drugs, there are still very damaging effects to health and social cohesion and one of the things, sort of a party political point but the Liberal Democrats have been arguing for ages that we need a Royal Commission to look not just at the way in which we punish people but the way in which we treat them and the extent to which these two things represent an integrated approach.  My view is more treatment, less punishment. 

DM: Wide ranging interesting stuff, thank you very much indeed for them mix, Jim, Sir Menzies, Penny, very good to see you all, thank you for taking us through some of the stories in the Sunday papers.