Flip-flopping Miliband accused of playing into hands of Assad The comments prompted anger from Mr Miliband's spokesman, who said the suggestion was "frankly insulting." "There will be families up and down this country listening to this debate thinking if there is military action it could be my son involved, it could be my father involved," the spokesman said. Downing Street should not lower itself to the level of personal abuse. He added: "The idea that somehow Ed Miliband gave [the Conservatives] a signal of support [on Wednesday] ... that is categorically untrue. We listened to what they had to say, we said we would reflect on it ... and we made our position clear. Labour later named the spokesman responsible for the "succour" comments as Craig Oliver, the Prime Minister's director of communications. In a letter to Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, last night, Michael Dugher, a shadow minister without portfolio, called the attack "infantile and irresponsible" and demanded an apology. The row followed a Commons debate conducted in an impassioned but sombre tone and which was not overtly party political. Senior figures from all three main parties raised the spectre of the Iraq war and warned against making the "same mistakes" that the last Labour government did in entering that conflict. In a sign of the strength of feeling, nearly 100 MPs requested to speak. Mr Cameron opened the debate and said he understood why Iraq had "poisoned" the well of public opinion against military interventions. His voice cracked as he talked about online videos showing children killed in last week's chemical attack in Damascus. The Prime Minister had been "emotional" after viewing the footage, his spokesman said later. Mr Miliband then told the Commons: "We have to learn the lessons of Iraq." He insisted that he was not "ruling out" military intervention in Syria but warned about the consequences of British involvement. "We need to be clear-eyed about the impact that this would have," he said. A succession of former Cabinet ministers spoke of parallels with the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Many had spoken in the Commons as Tony Blair prepared to lead Britain into a controversial conflict that would last more than eight years. Jack Straw, who was the foreign secretary at the time, said: "I was the final speaker in this House on March 18 2003 on a resolution which I recommended to the House that we should take action against Saddam Hussein's regime." He added: "But whatever the justification of March 18 2003 the fact was there was an egregious intelligence failure and that has had profound consequences." He added: "The Government has yet to prove its case." Senior Conservatives spoke forcefully of the need to respond to the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Dr Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, said: "How do we respond to a regime that has used chemical weapons against its own civilian population, something that is against international law and is in fact a war crime?" He added: "If we do nothing, I believe that would be an abdication of our international, legal and moral obligations which we should take extremely seriously. To do nothing would be interpreted in Damascus as appeasement of a dreadful regime and of the dreadful actions it has carried out. But there were also opponents on the Tory back benches. David Davis, the MP for Haltemprice and Howden who fought Mr Cameron for the leadership in 2005, said that the Government should consider that the intelligence could again be wrong on Syria. "We have got to be very, very hard in testing it," he said. He warned that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, would simply give the Syrian regime more weapons if there was an intervention. A series of Tories told the Prime Minister they would support him on the "principle" of military action. But it is thought that many could rebel in the event of a second vote next week following a report by UN inspectors. In the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, warned that Christians in Syria would face reprisals if Britain were to intervene. "Talking to a very senior Christian leader in the region yesterday, he said 'intervention from abroad would declare open season on the Christian community,"" the archbishop said. Lord Dannatt, a former head of the Army, said: "The drums of war were banging very loudly two or three days ago.