Syria: Ed did his duty, and Cameron was the architect of his own defeat. David Cameron said last Thursday that the question before the House of Commons was one of judgement. He then lost the argument and the vote despite being the Prime Minister of a Coalition Government, when 39 of his Coalition MPs, and the Labour Opposition, voted against him. His handling of the issue was reckless and his defeat was predictable. Anyone who has followed the Syrian tragedy for the past two years, as I have done as Labour's Shadow Middle East Spokesman, knows that there has been a searing scepticism amongst Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs and Peers at the merest suggestion of UK military intervention there. I have attended a number of Parliamentary meetings where Tories in Parliament have made their opposition very clear indeed to Foreign Office Ministers. I am sure that they have done so to the Prime Minister himself. This was why the Foreign Secretary was forced to concede a vote on the issue. The Coalition Government conceded such a vote under pressure from its Backbenchers and the Opposition when a debate on the issue was set up before the summer recess. It did not do it voluntarily. The Prime Minister chose to recall Parliament and chose the timing of the vote. The implication of recalling Parliament was that the issue was time sensitive and that military action was imminent. This created an impression of haste which was not conducive to calm scrutiny and did not help the Government in a case where the precedent of the Iraq vote was so influential. When a decision on military action is imminent, the easiest course is to follow that suggested by the Prime Minister of the day. Just as it was in 2003, so it was in 2013. The difference this time is that we had a Leader of the Opposition who was doing his job. The tough decision is to oppose a rush to war. To suggest otherwise is to be ignorant of the pressure on all MPs, whatever Party they are in, when war threatens. The decision Ed Miliband made was the right one. Subsequent events have confirmed this to be so. On Saturday evening, two days following Parliament's vote, President Obama told us the question of military action was not time sensitive. There was no reason, therefore, for David Cameron to recall Parliament when he did and to hold the vote at the time he did. Had he waited, more information on the chemical weapons attack, perhaps even the interim judgement of the weapons inspectors, could have been made available to MPs before they made their decision. What David Cameron did immediately following the vote, made matters worse. He announced that "he got" that Parliament did not want military action. This is not, in fact, what Parliament said. It is what the Prime Minister decided, in the heat of that moment. Labour, whose decision to oppose the Government motion led to Cameron's defeat, said in its own amendment that we should wait for the evidence to be presented to the UN Security Council and then decide. Its motion did not rule out military action. The Prime Minister needs to take responsibility for the political situation he has created by choosing to rule out military action in Syria. It is difficult but is of his own making. I do not need to be told by the Prime Minister that I have to live with my vote. I know and I do. The crisis in Syria requires a political solution, difficult as that will be. At the G20, I want the Prime Minister to devote his whole energy to that course. Ian Lucas MP is Labour's Shadow Middle East Minister.