David Cameron was entitled to overrule objections from his chief of defence staff and press ahead with the removal of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has said.
In a robust defence of the former prime minister after he was excoriated by a scathing foreign affairs select committee report, Heywood said any failures there had been in Libya had not been due to the structure of decision-making in Whitehall.
He also rejected a suggestion that intelligence chiefs and senior military officials should be entitled to seek a formal instruction from the prime minister if they believe decisions are being taken against the national interest.
The report, released on Wednesday, found that Cameron had overruled doubts voiced by his chief of defence staff, General Sir David Richards, when an operation to defend civilians in Benghazi in 2011 developed into regime change in Libya.
The oil-rich north African country has subsequently become a failed state, with riven politics, a bankrupt economy, mass movement of refugees and a nascent branch of Islamic State.
Richards, head of UK forces during the 2011 military intervention in Libya, confirmed to the BBC that he and the then-MI6 boss Sir John Sawers had had doubts over whether toppling Gaddafi was in Britain’s “vital national interest”.
When he raised his concerns, including over the legality of the British action, he was seen as “unhelpful”.
“Whether it was in our vital national interest to intervene is a matter for debate,” he told the BBC. He described the National Security Council, instituted in the wake of criticism of sofa government during the Iraq war, was “a little bit too neat” in the way it operated and described the intelligence on Libya as “very hazy”.
“I suspect, and quite naturally, the prime minister will come into the [NSC] having made his mind up broadly what should happen, and then we tweak at the edges,” he explained.
“Probably, we need a more rigorous analysis in committee to make sure that initial analysis is right. There should be a robust process of discussion.”
The Conservative chairman of the public administration select committee, Bernard Jenkin, claimed the Libyan episode “read horribly like a repeat, albeit on a much smaller scale, of all the mistakes that were made in Iraq”.
Heywood also disclosed that Sir Mark Lyall Grant, the prime minister’s national security adviser, had been asked to report on the lessons learned from the Libyan episode and the Iraq war following the Chilcot report.
Heywood denied that blame for the state of Libya could have been caused by poor decision-making structures in Whitehall.
“Whatever might have gone wrong in Libya in the aftermath of a successful military engagement was not down to a want of cabinet committees meeting with proper agenda and proper challenging,” he said. “Whatever happened was despite good process.”
He added that, in the case of Libya, Richards had had every opportunity to make his points. He claimed: “The prime minister in a democracy, provided he can take his cabinet with him, has to be the judge of the national interest.” Richards, he added, was “a very self-confident individual [who] had every opportunity to make those points”.
A right for intelligence or military chiefs to demand an instruction from the prime minister was completely unnecessary and, if ever sought, would destroy relationships, he said.
Other ministers rallied to Cameron’s defence, describing the Libya report as incredibly harsh.
Christopher Prentice, who was a UK special envoy for Libya in2011, passionately defended the intervention, saying: “I see regime change as the choice of the Libyan people.”
Libya should be viewed as a work in progress, he said, adding: “We should be looking forward not backwards.”
In Libya on Wednesday, attempts were under way to resolve disputes over the running of the Libyan oil terminals, after their capture by the Libyan National Army led by Gen Haftar, a controversial figure who is seeking to be made defence minister in a new government.
Western governments have condemned his role in capturing the oil, but he insists he will hand them back to the control of the Libyan National Oil Corporation.
The UN special envoy to Libya, Martin Kobler, said there was a role for Haftar in a future government, but said he was concerned by the capture of the oil ports. He said: “This development will further hinder oil exports, deprive Libya of its only source of income and increase the division of the country. This has to stop.”
• This article was amended on 19 September 2016. An earlier version quoted a former UK ambassador to Libya, Richard Northern, as defending the intervention in Libya. Those comments were made by a former UK special envoy for Libya, Christopher Prentice.
