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.