Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Sir John Chilcot says Blair damaged trust in politics

Sir John Chilcot isn’t a man who deals in pithy quotes. His Iraq War inquiry report came in at two-and-a-half million words, and even the executive summary was 150 pages long. Yet Chilcot’s assessment of Tony Blair during his select committee appearance this afternoon was about as damning as he could manage. Asked whether the former PM had damaged trust in politics, Chilcot had this to say:

‘I think when a government or the leader of a government presents a case with all the powers of advocacy that he or she can command, and in doing so goes beyond what the facts of the case and the basic analysis of that can support, then it does damage politics, yes.’

Chilcot went on to say that he ‘can only imagine’ it would take some time for this trust to be restored. The idea that Blair has dented faith in politics might seem like a moot point: ‘Of course, he has’, many will say. It’s also true that, in his report which was finally released in July, Chilcot has already said that Blair overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and that the option to invade Iraq wasn’t the ‘last resort’ it was made out to be at the time. 

Yet the suggestion of damage to the public’s trust in politics which Chilcot made today was a new observation. It’s hardly revelatory, but in the absence of anything more damning, it’s about as good a soundbite as Chilcot is going to offer on the subject. 

Chilcot also offered up an interesting observation on Blair’s influence and power and how this affected the ability of those around him to stand up to the Prime Minister. Chilcot said that, at the time of the Iraq war, Blair ’had achieved a personal and political dominance which was, in a sense, overriding collective cabinet responsibility’.

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