Iraq inquiry is stitch up - Cameron - News in brief

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The Prime Minister was criticised after insisting hearings could not be held in public due to national security considerations.

Tory leader David Cameron said: "The inquiry needs to be, and needs to be seen to be, truly independent and not an establishment stitch-up," he said.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said he had held talks with bereaved relatives of service personnel who had urged him to press for a full public inquiry.

"A secret inquiry conducted by a clutch of grandees handpicked by the Prime Minister is not what Britain needs," he said. "The Government must not be allowed to close the book on this war as it opened it - in secrecy."

In a Commons statement, Mr Brown said the inquiry, by a committee of privy counsellors headed by a former Whitehall mandarin, would not seek to apportion blame and would not report until after the next General Election. He argued closed hearings would ensure evidence given to the inquiry by politicians, military officers, and officials would be as "full and candid as possible".

However, his arguments were dismissed by the opposition parties who warned it would not satisfy public demands to establish the truth of what had happened. More worryingly for Mr Brown after last week's threatened revolt against his leadership, a series of Labour MPs also rose to criticise the decision to hold the inquiry in secret.

They included Gordon Prentice, who said: "I had hoped for a new politics of openness after last week. I'm not prepared to accept a secret inquiry into Iraq and I want the Prime Minister to think again."

Rose Gentle - who campaigned against the UK's presence in Iraq after her son Gordon, 19, was killed in 2004 - said that she would continue to lobby for a full public inquiry.

"We have fought and fought for this but it will be no use and it could all be for nothing behind closed doors," she said. "My family and most of the families who lost loved ones just want a simple answer to a simple question - why did we go in to Iraq in the first place?"