The early stages of the Chilcot inquiry put all its inherent weaknesses on view. It was deferred continually until (when British troops were ending their combat role) it could be resisted no more, and even then it was announced by Brown (at the strong instigation of Blair) that it would be a private inquiry, to keep it out of the public domain. The members were all carefully hand-picked by Gordon Brown himself as ‘sound’, i.e. would not give too much trouble. It has no legal counsel to harry evasive officials or politicians with forensic cross-examination. Witnesses are not required to take the oath to tell the truth. Nevertheless, despite all these defects, some important new revelations have come to light, most notably about the character and motivations of Blair himself. The new picture that emerges displays Blair as so eager to be part of the action, which the Americans neither needed nor cared about, that contrary to the impression that Blair sought to create that his closeness to Bush gave him influence over the US Administration, British leverage actually simply evaporated. Witnesses at the inquiry represent Bush regarding Blair as a patsy (inadvertently confirmed by Bush’s greeting “Yo Blair” caught off-mike at one of their international meetings). But the analysis goes deeper.

What the inquiry reveals more clearly than before is the mendacity by which the determination to go to war was concealed for far longer than previously realised. It isn’t only that Blair’s commitment to Bush in April 2002 at his Crawford ranch, 11 months before the war, was ‘signed in blood’, it is now clear that Blair was pushing regime change as early as 1998 (and consistently with that, I can recall that in 1991, when as Shadow Cabinet representative I had visited Croatia and Kosovo, Blair privately told me he urged action against the Serbs and Milosevic). He was not thrust into the Iraq War by American pressure; quite the opposite, Bush even phoned Blair to tell him he could “sit out the war”, whilst Rumsfeld made it clear the US was contant to go it alone. Britain didn’t need to go to war in Iraq (indeed the damage to British interests in the Middle East from participation in the war will be long-lasting), it was not pushed to do so by the US (they didn’t care either way), and it only did so because of Blair’s overweening ambition to be seen as a ‘serious player’ on the world stage. That picture emerges indelibly from the opening rounds of Chilcot.
The implications of this are stark. That Blair was able to manipulate and suppress all the institutions and individuals who stood in the way of his realising his own ambition – the Cabinet, Parliament, the Attorney General, the Foreign Office, MI6, the media, huge public demonstrations, among others – overtly reveals how little Britain is really a democracy. A determined autocrat (Thatcher or Blair) can ignore, face down, eliminate all opposition to his/her own chosen project. It exposes the growing centralisation of power within Downing Street which has been steadily fomenting for decades, together with the virtual collapse of all checks and balances. It is a fundamental problem for the British State into which, in typical British fashion, it has drifted over the years. It requires either an acknowledgement that this is irreversible, in which case we should have a formal presidency and a full-scale separation of powers, or a fundamental reassertion by Parliament of of its existential role in holding the Executive robustly and effectively to account. The risk is that, typically, British pragmatism will allow the drift to continue.

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