Emily Thornberry MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary, responding to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee report on the intervention in Libya, said:

“In July, when the Chilcot report was published, David Cameron told Parliament that he had already taken all the actions necessary to ensure that the mistakes made in Iraq could not be repeated.

"But as I and others argued at the time, and as today’s report makes plain, far from learning the lessons from Iraq, David Cameron had in fact repeated all the major mistakes again in Libya, and with the same catastrophic consequences.

"Yet again, the warnings of experts in the region were ignored, and - behind the immediate justification for intervention - there was a hidden goal of regime change for which there was no legal basis and no parliamentary approval, and which abused the UN mandate for action.

"But worst of all, just as in Iraq, there was no credible plan for what would happen after the regime was toppled, and no anticipation of the dreadful risks that creating that power vacuum would hold, resulting in the all-too familiar pattern of factional conflicts, terrorist insurgence, and regional destabilisation that we have seen ever since.

"For a British government - of any party - to repeat those exact same mistakes less than a decade after the fall of Baghdad shows a staggering lack of awareness. But sadly, for David Cameron to do so was all too predictable.

"He will be remembered in history as a deeply reckless and complacent prime minister, who time and again acted impetuously, worried about the consequences later, and left others to clear up the mess he had created. It is true of the NHS. It is true of Brexit. And we can all now see it is true of Libya. It is a legacy of shame.”

Ends