Chilcot was as ineffective with Blair as expected. The central issue is not whether he can mesmerise with words (as when he sought to obfuscate what he clearly said and meant in an earlier TV interview that he would still have backed regime change even if there were no WMD in Iraq), nor is it whether he can distract from the real charge by diversionary musings about a future attack on Iran. The key issue is whether he had made up his mind on regime change irrevocably without any concerns for MI5, FCO or Cabinet contrary opinion (his Manichaean tendency of self-righteousness) for underlying motives he kept well hidden (above all sticking close to the Americans whose real motive was control of Iraqi oil, and WMD, the wickedness of Saddam, and democratisation of the Middle East were just pretexts), and then used every device to fix the facts to support the policy (as the Downing Street memo of July 2002 showed the Americans were already doing, and Blair then followed suit) even though he knew at the time that the evidence was trumped-up and false. That is the real charge, and Chilcot fluffed it.

The evidence that he knew that the claims used to justify the war were false is now certain beyond doubt. There are at least 5 grounds for this:
1 Blair present the inventory of chemical and biological weapons and weapon parts as weapons currently possessed by Saddam, not (as the intelligence services advised him) weapons unaccounted for since the first Gulf War 12 years before.
2 He drew special attention to the 45 minute deployment of WMD, which made such a frightening scenario at the time, even though he knew that this applied only to battlefield nuclear weapons, in order to give the impression that the threat went much wider, and failed to correct that misunderstanding though he knew it to be wrong.
3 He included the claim that Iraq tried to buy 500 tonnes of yellowcake from Niger as a component in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, even though MI5 had been told by the CIA that a former ambassador to Niger had visited the country 6 months before to investigate the allegation and found it to be completely bogus.
4 Blair told the House of Commons on 25 February 2003 that when Hussain Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, had defected to the West in 1995 he had revealed “the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme”, even though a Newsweek exclusive a few weeks later revealed that what Hussain Kamal actually said in his debriefing was exactly the opposite: “all weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear – were destroyed”.
5 Blair told the House on 24 September 2002 that the picture painted by the the intelligence services on Saddam’s weaponry was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, whereas he had actually been told beforehand that the JIC evidence was “sporadic and patchy”.
What we saw yesterday at the Chilcot Inquiry was theatre, larded as always by the media obsession with personality and atmosphere, not a serious and systematic investigation of the facts in detgermining Blair’s liability to the real charges against him. Indeed this was predictable since Chilcot’s terms of reference had been expressly drawn up to ‘identify lessons to be learned’, not for ‘apportionment of blame or consideration of issues of criminal or civil liability’. There will be many people now calling for this missing stage of the proceedings to be implemented.

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