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2 March 1997

ONE of the more chilling sagas of modern politics reached another milestone last Wednesday with that extraordinary statement by Nicholas Soames that, although he now admits he repeatedly misled Parliament about the exposure of British troops to organo-phosphorous chemicals in the Gulf, this was not his fault because he was misled by his officials.

To understand just why a Government minister could be reduced to such a humiliating position we must go back to the 1960s, when organo-phosphorous (OP) pesticides were hailed as the miracle replacement for organo-chlorine pesticides such as DDT, which had caused an environmental disaster.

The dangers OPs posed to human health were no secret. When first developed in Germany in the 1930s they were adapted by the Nazis to make nerve gas. In 1951, following the deaths of various farm-workers, Solly Zuckerman warned of their extreme toxicity in a Ministry of Agriculture report; and in the 1950s both Porton Down and American scientists conducted extensive research into the way OPs work by eroding the nervous and immune systems. Even chronic exposure to quite low doses of OPs can thus induce a vast range of symptoms from unnatural tiredness, depression and mental disorder to malfunctioning of the muscular system, creating severe problems with the heart, eyes and lungs.

Nevertheless, a fatal mistake was made when, from the 1960s on, the much wider use of OP pesticides developed in a way that allowed their manufacturers to conceal the risk they posed to human health. Having allowed this to happen, the Government itself became increasingly compromised, particularly when it actively encouraged the use of OPs by forcing farmers to dip sheep, and thus it became drawn into supporting a general culture of deceit about the dangers of OPs.

When, by the early 1990s, evidence multiplied that a major disaster was unfolding, not least among thousands of sheep farmers, the Government response took on a consistent pattern. It denied there was any problem, as when the junior Agriculture Minister, Nicholas Soames, said the use of OPs "simply wouldn't be allowed if there was any question of danger to the public". It cited the evidence of "independent" experts, such as the Veterinary Products Committee, which derived almost all its information from the manufacturers (at one point 11 of 17 members of the VPC had connections with OP firms). And it did everything it could to prevent the carrying out of genuine independent research.

What the Government had not reckoned with was the influence of two remarkable people: the Countess of Mar, herself a sheep-dip victim, who began relentless questioning in the House of Lords; and Dr Goran Jamal, a Kurdish- born doctor researching the clinical effects of OP poisoning, whose people became the world's most celebrated OP victims when massacred with nerve gas by Saddam Hussein.

Faced with this campaign, from 1993 the Government fought a desperate rearguard action, trying slyly to phase out the use of OP sheep dips (without, of course, fully admitting their dangers); cynically blaming farmers themselves for not having used them responsibly; even trying to stifle Jamal by appointing him to an official advisory committee (from which he resigned last November, because he refused to be silenced).

But then, in a dramatic twist, the Gulf war disaster gradually came to light. And what first drew the Countess of Mar's attention to this was how many of the 3,000 victims suffering from appalling ill-health (20 have so far died) were reporting symptoms identical to those experienced by OP victims.

From 1994 the Countess began asking in the House of Lords just what chemicals our forces had been exposed to, and repeatedly, as shown in the report issued last week by Mr Soames, ministers denied that OPs were used. Only last August did it finally become clear to the MoD that the game was up, when Dr Jamal produced papers from a Staff-Sergeant Worthington, recording in detail just how recklessly troops were exposed to OPs.The Government was caught out in two ways. First, if the system had not become so clogged by that culture of deceit over OPs, orders to use them in the Gulf could never have been given. Second, only because the cover-up had now become so routine did the officials imagine they could get away with misleading ministers so persistently. As one insider put it to me last week: "I genuinely believe the ministers were not lying deliberately. They were landed in the s*** by the officials."

But the fact remains that, if the Countess of Mar could recognise that many of those symptoms reported by Gulf victims were those of OP poisoning, why couldn't Mr Soames, having been through it all before at the Ministry of Agriculture? If he was an intelligent, effective, honourable minister, he should have banged the table until his officials gave him truthful answers.