The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair

The Chilcot inquiry is too early to really savage Tony Blair

Apparently Sir John Chilcot is likely to be ‘critical’ of Tony Blair in his long-awaited report into the Iraq war. We know this, or think we know it, because the Mail on Sunday has told us as much, in some detail. How does the Mail on Sunday know? It is odd of the committee to leak its findings, but I suppose that must be what has happened. Perhaps they are gripped by committee-envy, annoyed that other investigative committees have recently stolen their thunder and prominence, and wish to set up some advance publicity for the publication of the report.

For students of establishment inquiries, the Chilcot inquiry is an interesting beast. Official inquiries set up shortly after some appalling catastrophe has taken place — a few months later, say, or a year or so — tend to exonerate all concerned, not least because all concerned are usually still in positions of great power. This was true of the quite magnificent whitewash of the Franks Report into the Argentine invasion of the Falklands Islands, for example, which reported in 1983 (only one year after hostilities had ceased), and scarcely less true of Lord Hutton’s inquiry, which reported to guffaws and general hilarity only eight months after the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly.

On the other hand, if sufficient time has elapsed then the establishment inquiry can sometimes deliver a hefty, if largely pointless, blow to the people everyone else has for years known to have been guilty, especially if most of them are now dead. The more recent Bloody Sunday inquiry was able, from a distance of nearly four decades (and at the cost of an estimated £400 million, according to Tessa Jowell) to establish a series of facts that everyone had known colloquially for years. The generous view might be that their lordships are aided by the perspective which comes with time passing.

And so Chilcot, which was brought into being a full six years after the invasion of Iraq and ceased taking evidence from witnesses in the winter of this year; a sort of hybrid inquiry, then. Most of the important protagonists are no longer in positions of great power; the two most important, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, have been out of office for four years and eight years respectively and Labour, of course, no longer presides over us in government. Sir John Scarlett, our former top spook, has also departed.

However, Blair and Campbell are both still mooching around the place, somewhere beyond the edge of your eyesight, occasionally within it. So you might expect this inquiry to be moderately critical, without doing anything which might seriously frighten the horses, such as suggest that there is a prima facie case for prosecuting one or the other of them. Because that is the only outcome which would really matter: as with previous inquiries, the public understands full well by now exactly what happened. We know that, whatever the wisdom of invading Iraq, Blair and Campbell doctored the intelligence evidence in an attempt to mislead the public, the press and most importantly parliament into believing that there was a clear-cut necessity to invade Iraq and remove Saddam, predicated upon his programme of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed readiness to use them.

And we know that Blair had made his mind up to join the United States in military action against Iraq for almost a year, and had given his assurance on this matter to George W. Bush, at a time when he was telling everybody else — us, parliament, his own Cabinet — that war was certainly not inevitable. And I have to say, I cannot imagine a more serious charge to lay at the door of a prime minister than that he conned his government and his country into fighting a war in which thousands upon thousands of people died. As I say, even if you supported the war (possibly for other reasons, possibly even for the same reasons that Blair really wanted the war, which are too convoluted to go into right now), that much has been established over and over again, ad nauseum.

According to the Mail on Sunday, Chilcot is likely to be ‘critical’ of Blair on four main counts. The only important one, really, is that he failed to present the intelligence he was given in a ‘proper’ way and failed to tell anyone about his deal ‘signed in blood’ with the President of the United States. The others — that he failed to keep Cabinet ministers informed, failed to prepare properly for the aftermath of the war and so on — are all well and good, but will not trouble him too much. He has already admitted that more should have been done to prepare for what would happen in the event of victory, and he has been frank and damning in his disdain for Cabinet government and the necessity to inform them of anything. Only the deliberate misleading of the country might be enough to result in some sort of legal or civil action, and much of this will depend upon how strongly worded is Sir John Chilcot’s condemnation. If indeed it is a condemnation. I have the feeling that there is nothing he will say that would prevent Blair from continuing to pursue his current occupation — that of hoovering up vast amounts of money from around the world, and particularly the middle east.

Incidentally, a US review reported last week that Iraq was more deadly, dangerous and lawless now than it was 12 months ago, with a large increase in Shiite violence and the killing of 15 US servicemen last month.