A UK cabinet minister has dismissed the idea that parliament should have a vote on whether to take any military action and suggested that giving MPs such authority was a mistake.

Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, told the BBC: “Outsourcing that decision to people who do not have the full picture is quite wrong and the convention that was established I think is very wrong.”

The prime minister will make a statement in the Commons on Monday afternoon about Saturday morning’s strike, but it is not yet clear whether she will then take part in a full-scale debate on a government motion. Opposition parties will push for a debate on a motion of their own.

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The convention that parliament should have a vote was at the heart of Tony Blair’s campaign in 2003 to persuade parliament to authorise his decision to back the US in Iraq. He said he would resign if he could not win MPs’ backing.



In 2011, William Hague, then foreign secretary, confirmed that the convention did exist, and it was accepted that the Commons must have the opportunity to debate the deployment of military force – except in an emergency.

After David Cameron, then prime minister, accepted defeat in 2013 at the hands of MPs in his appeal for a targeted strike in response to a chemical weapons attack in Syria, confirmation appeared to have been made that the convention was embedded.



When May speaks in the Commons on Monday afternoon, she is expected to be fiercely criticised for breaching the convention. Some MPs argue that she could have recalled parliament at any time.

On Radio 4’s Today programme, Mordaunt indicated that the government would try to face down the attack not by appealing to the emergency nature of the decision but by dismissing the convention itself. She said it was not possible to share enough intelligence for MPs to make an informed decision.



“To take a decision on whether something is legally justified and whether what we are intending to do in terms of targets you would need to know information that could not be shared with every MP,” Mordaunt said.

Jeremy Corbyn is calling for a formal ‘war powers act’ that would give parliament similar powers to the US Congress, which has the right to be consulted.



Mordaunt argued that David Cameron’s failure in 2013 proved that the convention was a mistake. “I would disagree with anyone who thought we got 2013 right. The irony of that event was we had two pretty well identical motions neither of which was calling for military action and parliament still managed to mess that up,” she said.

The opposition parties and some Conservative MPs argued before the strike that the government should make its case to parliament. One suggested that if the prime minister could not defend it in parliament, there should not be any action.



Labour’s shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, said there was no reason for parliament not to get a vote. “No one is suggesting that Britain was under imminent threat,” she told Today. “This was a planned intervention and probably planned for some days.”

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She added: “Some people will suspect that it didn’t happen because there was governmental concern that they couldn’t get the vote in parliament.”



It is also feared by some Tories that the legality of any military strike is questionable. The government has published a summary of its legal advice that appears to rest on the contentious UN right to protect.



In terms likely to be used byCorbyn in the Commons on Monday, Chakrabarti said other options were still open and that on the government’s own terms the case did not stack up: “I don’t think the government can demonstrate convincing evidence and a general acceptance by the international community that they had to act in the way they did a few days ago.

“The second test … is that it must be objectively clear that there is no practicable alternative to the use of force. Now how can they argue that when the chemical weapons inspectors were on their way in?”

