Forget Chilcot

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3″ title=”Peter Hitchens and Fraser Nelson debate whether the Chilcot report needs to be published” startat=1916]

Listen

[/audioplayer]It might actually be better if Sir John Chilcot’s report is never published. I for one can no longer be bothered to be annoyed (though I used to be) by the increasingly comical excuses for its non-appearance. We all know the real reason is that the Iraq war was the product of lies, vainglory and creeping to the Americans, but they don’t want to admit it.

I suspect Sir John and his colleagues would be more hurt by a patronising acceptance that they are a hopeless embarrassment than by any more anger. Instead of publishing the report, we could send Sir John home, abandon the whole thing and have another inquiry into why it wasn’t published, also lasting many years. I doubt very much if, when Sir John’s epic actually falls heavily from the press, it will give much comfort to the relatives of the dead, here or abroad. Those of us who can remember Lord Hutton know that those responsible will deceive themselves about the Iraq war, and everything about it, till they die.

I will not believe they have understood what they did until two things happen: when Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office lawyer who resigned in a lonely protest against the illegality of the war, heads the honours list with a damehood and a GCMG; and when Anthony Blair gives every penny he owns to charity, including all those blasted houses, and goes off to spend his remaining years in a Trappist monastery, along with Alastair Campbell, who will be good at helping him keep his vow of silence.

I know perfectly well that justice of this kind happens only in daydreams.