ABSTRACT
The ‘Arms to Iraq’ affair—which British ministers depicted as a series of minor errors ‘largely of an administrative nature’ (House of Commons Debates, 15 February 1996:1152)—threatened to bring down the government of John Major in late February 1996. That crisis occurred after one of the longest running and most highly politicized public inquiries in British history (Tomkins 1996:109; Barker 1997a). The affair centred around allegations that a government minister had encouraged companies to break the government’s rules forbidding arms exports to Iraq and that the rules on exports had been secretly relaxed. Ministers had also lied to parliament, and risked sending innocent men to jail in an attempt to cover this up. These allegations not only served to sap the government’s legitimacy over an extended period, but also may have represented a shift in the ‘British’ way of handling such crises, towards a more openly competitive ‘politics of scandal’ (Levi and Nelken 1996:1–17) more common elsewhere (Markovits and Silverstein 1988). Although the affair produced few immediate reforms, it certainly contributed to the subsequent landslide election defeat of the Conservative government in May 1997, after eighteen years in power.
