Today's Update From The Waugh Zone Is Titled `MISSION ACCOMPLISHED'

* Paul Waugh

by Paul Waugh

That is that, the end. Seven years after it was commissioned, the Chilcot report will finally be published today. Political reporters are currently locked away studying its 2.6 million words (furiously tapping Ctrl-F and ‘Tony Blair’). The Inquiry's conclusions will be released around 11.30am.

Sir John will not be taking questions when he unveils the 12-volume report. But in an interview ahead of its release, he said the Inquiry “wouldn’t shy away” from criticising the leading players in the war.

Whatever today’s outcome, it is likely the report will confirm what people already think. Prepare for Twitter spats. But what happens next? The legacy of Iraq is the thread that runs through British politics and the UK’s foreign policy approach to this day. Closure seems unlikely. More than 200 people were killed by an Isis suicide bombing in Baghdad on Sunday.

Andrew Murrison, a former Tory defense minister, tells me he is worried the report will be used against British soldiers while those “higher up the food chain to get off criticism which is their due”. Murrison, who voted against the war only to then serve in it as a Royal Navy reserve officer, says “it seems to me that Tony Blair is in the dock” and it would be “simply not right, instinctively, if after all this pain and grief the country has gone through, the man who made key decisions at that time was not to come in for some extremely severe criticism”.

Some want more than severe criticism. They are prepared to use the report to call for Blair to be tried for war crimes. All eyes will be on Jeremy Corbyn this afternoon when he stands up in the Commons to deliver his verdict on the report, Blair and Labour MPs who voted for the war in 2003.

Here are some seismic things that have happened since Gordon Brown set up the Inquiry in 2009: a coalition government, the Leveson Inquiry, a Scottish independence referendum, a Tory majority, Brexit, two Labour leadership contests, a Tory leadership contest, the Juno probe travelled 1.8 billion miles from Earth to Jupiter. Snapchat.

 

* Paul Waugh Is The Executive Editor, HuffPost, UK.