Downing Street Says

Asked how did the Prime Minister feel about Germany not being willing to report Iran to the Security Council, the PMOS replied that first of all, people should wait for the official position of Germany and then we would respond.

Asked if the PMOS was saying that the words of the Deputy Foreign Minister were not official, the PMOS said he was not aware of them, and it was better that people got the official confirmation, and we would respond accordingly.

Asked if it was the position that we would like to refer to the Security Council, the PMOS said that we believed that there was a case for referral, and that had been our position all the way along. Tomorrow, the E3 Minister would meet, and after that, we believed that there should be an IAEA board meeting. Out of that, we would see what would happen. We had our position, others would have theirs, and there would be a proper debate.

Asked if we were acting exclusively through the EU on this, the PMOS replied that we were part of the E3, and that meant that the case would be made to the Board.

Asked if the Prime Minister saying he was "not ruling anything out" meant a shift in position, the PMOS said: no. People should deal with where we were, which was there was a process in play. We should therefore take that process and push it through. What there was not, however, in any way, and the Prime Minister’s words at PMQs underlined this, was any attempt to downplay the seriousness of this situation. This had been something which the Prime Minister had gone out of his way to talk about and to underline the seriousness with which he viewed the situation. That remained the case.

Put that the Prime Minister was "strikingly more cautious" in his language than he was at the Hampton Court press conference, for example, and was that ironically because the situation was now more serious, the PMOS said he thought that was a fair interpretation.

Asked if that was a right interpretation as well as fair, the PMOS said that at Hampton Court, the Prime Minister was issuing a wake-up call. Now, we were where we were, and we needed to persuade others to take a course of action. What did not help in persuading others to take a course of action was if there was a constant running commentary, but there should be no doubt that the Prime Minister believed even more firmly today that this was an issue that the whole international community had to, and was, facing up to.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Thursday, January 12, 2006

Iran

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries