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DERMOT MURNAGHAN:  Now it’s taken more than six years but the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War could be published within weeks.  The report is expected to be handed to government officials tomorrow, before then the security checking begins but one of the most influential Conservative MPs has warned there will be uproar if that takes more than a fortnight.  Well that man is of course David Davis, the former Foreign Office Minister and he’s with me now, a very good morning to you Mr Davis.  So you think what, a couple of weeks and we should finally see Chilcot, what about the referendum campaign, do you not think it would have an impact on that?   

DAVID DAVIS: It’s got nothing to do with the referendum campaign.  Both sides are implicated, the Tories supported it, the Labour government went for it as it were – the Iraq War that is, so there’s no political dimension and it’s got nothing to do with Europe, it’s one of the few things at the moment that has got nothing to do with Europe so it should take at most two weeks to security clear it.  Remember, everything in it has already been pored over by Whitehall any number of times and there’s worry that Number 10 a few weeks ago started saying oh well, this will be in June or July.  Why?  Are we still in the era of hot lead typesetting?  

DM: But even if it doesn’t and it has no particular bearing on decisions made in  the referendum, it drowns it out but would that be no bad thing for a while?  

DAVID DAVIS: Look, we’ve been talking about Europe now for two months and we’ve got at least another month to go, month and a half to go, so people will talk about other things and this is very important.  It is fundamental to decisions taken in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq, it’s also incredibly important to the families of the soldiers, the 179 soldiers who died who are going through agony being made to wait for closure.

DM: You mentioned Syria there and I know you’ve just come back from a trip there and seen President Assad, we’ll get onto that in a moment or two but on Chilcot, are you also worried given this process, the checking, the security vetting process being gone through, that it has already been Maxwellised, so to speak, those people who are mentioned and perhaps criticised within it have had a chance to respond, are you worried that it might pull its punches?

DAVID DAVIS: I would think it’s unlikely.  The Maxwellisation process was a negotiation process and it shouldn’t have been, I mean they employed at your expense and mine, at tax payers expense,  very expensive lawyers to defend the reputations of generals and politicians and so on, that’s not what it’s supposed to be about, it’s supposed to be about fact checking.  So there is a possibility that that’s blunted the edge but I think Chilcot must understand, this is probably the last thing he is going to do in public life, if this is a whitewash it will be seen as a whitewash, it will be described as a whitewash and his reputation will go the way of somebody who writes a whitewash so I don’t think so, I think every incentive is there for him to get it right.

DM: Okay, the EU referendum, the government view is that we remain and wheeling out the big economic guns in recent days and indeed coming up we are told that a Treasury report is going to warn about all kinds of things including recession, job losses and Stephen Crabb saying today it could have an economic effect as big as that from the banking crash in 2008, a big Project Fear is building up.

DAVID DAVIS: Yes and many, many decades ago a sort of namesake of mine, Mandy Rice-Davis, said ‘They would say that wouldn’t they?’ and I’m afraid that’s the way the public are beginning to see this.  We had the IMF last week, well the IMF is not an impartial organisation, Dominique Lagarde the head of it …

DM:  Hang on, Christine Lagarde.   

DAVID DAVIS: I beg your pardon, Christine Lagarde, I am rolling two into one, sorry, Christine Lagarde was involved in the setting of the terms for Greece and now admits by the way that they got it wrong so all of this, all the international establishments rolling out the stories to try and support the government line on this, I think the public are going to say actually it’s our decision, we believe what we want to believe and …

DM: Is this a misuse of resources?  I mean we’ve had the row about the overall leaflet, the £9.3 million that costs, here’s the government, the Treasury, being used to put this forward?   

DAVID DAVIS: There is a really serious problem for the government in this that the public will begin to think they’re cheating.  They spent as you say millions on that leaflet, they are diverting resources, they have got a large unit being set up especially at Number 10 for this, it’s beginning to look like propaganda rather than proper government.

DM: So what do you think then on that, if it’s a tight vote but Remain win and people have that view, people particularly in the Conservative party who lost, who wanted to leave like you, will that alter their attitude to the Prime Minister as leader?

DAVID DAVIS: Well I’m not sure about that but I think what it will do is it will make the referendum, as the Scottish one is, a neverendum.  It’s going to come back. This was supposed to resolve this thing for 30 or 40 years if not forever, in truth it will continue to haunt.

DM: And Mr Cameron’s future?  Ken Clarke of course saying if he loses thirty seconds.  

DAVID DAVIS: I don’t agree with that, I think the simple truth is if Brexit wins more accurately there will be an argument that people have been arguing against it can’t renegotiate it but there are plenty of people around that he can appoint, put in charge and say they’ve got basically sole power over this very, very important negotiation, that can be done.  

DM: But hold on, that will be the most fundamental thing facing the United Kingdom, it’s future relationship with the European Union, you’ve got a  Prime Minister there whose first name is Lame, second name Duck.

DAVID DAVIS: No, no, I don't think so, it’s fundamental, it’s not running the whole country but it is fundamental to the future of the country but then that’s where we are, that’s simply what’s going to happen I think.  

DM: Okay so who, any personalities in mind on this?  We’ve got Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Theresa Villiers who was just on?  

DAVID DAVIS: You’ve got a non-stop list of them, there’s about eight of them aren’t there who were signed up in the Cabinet so I don't think there’s a problem finding somebody to do it and in the middle ranks of government there are other people who are very much onside, one or two like Dominic Raab who have been negotiators for the country in the past so you could actually populate a whole department with people who really want it to work.

DM: But there are Chinese walls here, the Prime Minister has not allowed them to get involved and not allowed them to have a view ….  

DAVID DAVIS: No, I don’t think that but I think if you are going to have a negotiator you appoint somebody who really believes in it, really wants to do it, really wants to succeed and has spent the last three months at least, if not the last several years, thinking about how this will work which is pretty much what all the Brexit team have been doing.

DM: Okay, now I want to move on to Syria because you have some very important information and insight into the thinking of President Assad.  First of all, why did you want to go and see him because a lot of people are saying we shouldn’t even engage with these kind of monsters?

DAVID DAVIS: Yes, I know.  Look, at the moment the biggest issue in Europe as it turns out is mass migration and terrorism.  On our own estimates, not the Syrian estimates, on our own estimates there are about 1000 Jihadists a year arriving in Europe from Syria, the Syrian agencies think it is three times that so to give you an idea of the size.  That is overwhelming how we can deal with that, as you can see from Brussels and Paris and so on.  So we have to go back to the source and fix this at source which is why I went out. The current policy, the options, the outcomes are going to be what?  Either the Jihadists win which would actually be a disaster, an absolute disaster and wipe away the liberal society in Syria, it’s not a liberal state but it is a liberal society.  Secondly, there is a very, very long negotiation and for every year the negotiation goes on that’s another 1000 terrorists, another 10, 20, 100,000 migrants.  Or the Syrians win, sorry the Syrian government wins and if the Syrian government wins and it is only the Russians talking to them, they’re not going to sort out their torture, murder of prisoners and general attitude to the population. So my view is that we need to get a grip on this somehow, we need to get our hand on the table as well, our card in the deck and that’s why I went to find out what the attitude was.

DM: You say there the influence that the Russians have, now how did they do that?  By supporting Assad militarily.  Presumably you’re not saying Britain should go that far …

DAVID DAVIS: No, not at all.  

DM: But you’d have to get involved with the Assad regime.   

DAVID DAVIS: I asked Assad about the relationship with the Russians and I asked actually why they had downscaled their activities and he gave a very interesting answer.  He said that it’s because they were being accused of stymying negotiations by giving so much support.  Actually they are still giving a lot of support, there were Russian soldiers there, there were Russian pilots while I was there and so on but what was interesting is Putin said to Assad ‘We will not let you lose’.  Now that alters the complete complexion, the attitude to the Syrian government, the attitude of the other players in the game as it were, the Saudis, Qataris and so on.  It seems to me you have got a country there that is nearly destroyed, $100 billion of damage minimum to the infrastructure.  What we should be looking at is a global Marshall Plan to put this country back together again.  It used to be the Germany of the Middle East, the Germany of the Levant, the bread basket, the textile industry, pharmaceuticals, you name it.  If we said that, that gives us a card to play as well as something to do about it.

DM: But do we say for the time being, President Assad you’re the one to lead that government?   

DAVID DAVIS: No, you see one of the problems here, and it is difficult, what the war has done is polarised the population and there are a very large number of them who are so terrified of the Jihadists that they are now supporters of Assad.  One of the best NGO people I saw, I saw somebody there who was running one of the most important NGOs and he said if there was an election tomorrow Assad would win easily.  So that’s the problem, we’ve got to put democracy in place, we’ve got to change the behaviour of the Syrian government, that’s the most important thing, save the Syrian people from the torture and the killings that go on and actually use it to get Western influence back in this important country.

DM: Good to see you Mr Davis, thank you very much indeed for that insight into some of the thinking with the Syrian regime.  David Davis, thank you.