Tony Blair’s six hours at the witness table of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry yesterday gave us a bravura performance, allowing him to display all the old familiar dramatic and forensic skills that got him out of so many scrapes during his years at No. 10. The media this morning all comment on how nervous he [...]
The academic and historian Professor Geoffrey Warner has kindly authorised me to publish on this website a short but meticulously researched paper comparing the evidence given to three official inquiries — Butler, Hutton and now Chilcot — about the famous (or infamous) warning in one of the two Iraq dossiers that Saddam Hussein could have [...]
This week the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry starts to hear evidence on, among other things, the legality or illegality of the Iraq war. Among the key witnesses will be Sir Michael Wood, at the time the Foreign Secretary’s principal legal adviser: Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then Wood’s deputy, who resigned because she could not accept the Attorney-General’s formal [...]
In your heart you know he’s wrong….
….but at least he’s better-looking than Gordon
[Hat-tip: http://mydavidcameron.com/]
In its report of the secret letter of 25 March 2002 (a year before the US-UK attack on Iraq) from Jack Straw, then Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, to Tony Blair, warning the prime minister of the likely pitfalls involved in any future military action against Iraq, the Sunday Times of 17 January 2010 includes a [...]
When I commented in question-time after a recent London club discussion dinner about Tony Blair’s pre-Iraq prevarications[1] over the conditions in which he would commit Britain to war, the distinguished speaker (I later learned) murmured to his neighbour that “this chap is obsessed with Iraq”. Well, maybe I am. It may be a lot of [...]
It’s disappointing that the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t focus relentlessly on the gaping hole in Alastair Campbell’s defence of his and Blair’s record in Iraq, summed up here:
“When it came to it, when the diplomatic process clearly was not going to resolve the issue, post [UN Security Council resolution] 1441 and when the French pulled the [...]
