How can we punish Blair?

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency.

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.)

This week, as Tony Blair finally appears at the Iraq inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, is in the same position as that interviewer. Sir John has spoken in impeccably Church of England terms about the purpose of his hearings being to ‘learn lessons’, ‘establish what happened’, and not put anyone ‘on trial’. Sadly, however, all the British public wants is to cut off Mr Blair’s goolies.

According to a recent poll, only a third think that the former prime minister honestly believed the case he made for military action — and a quarter want to skip the inquiry and move straight to the war crimes trial. Our problem is not that we haven’t ‘established what happened’. We know what happened. The reason Iraq remains unfinished business for Britain is that none of those responsible has been punished for their actions.

So in the likely event that Mr Blair survives his Gas Mark Two roasting from Team Chilcot, how else could the great warrior-statesman be brought to justice? Tuesday’s testimony from the former Foreign Office legal adviser Sir Michael Wood and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, that the war was ‘unlawful,’ raised new excitement that Mr Blair could yet find himself in an orange jumpsuit, with Cherie sneaking cigarettes through the visitors’ room grille.