Today's Update From The Waugh Zone Is Titled `WHATEVER AND EVER, AMEN'

by Paul Waugh

What a day that was. Chilcot’s excoriating statement, Blair’s two-hour live TV defence, lame duck Cameron’s Commons reaction, Corbyn’s defiant speech. It was yet again a case of ‘stop the news, I want to get off’.

Those of us in the ‘lock-in’ to get an embargoed read of the Chilcot Report (believe me, it’s nowhere near as much fun as being in a pub downing illicit Guinness) quickly realised this was going to be no ‘whitewash’. Whitehall’s very own Godot had stopped the waiting and everyone was struck by just how forthright he was. Grounded in evidence, carefully written and utterly rigorous, the Iraq Inquiry report is everything that the Blair government’s WMD dossier was not.

Chilcot certainly didn’t bury his intro. In fact he got his rhetorical highlighter pen out to underline in his statement perhaps the one Blair-Bush memo that will forever now act as a shorthand for their relationship on Iraq: Blair would be with the US President ‘whatever’.

 

For all Blair’s emphasis on his ‘conditions’ included in that memo (and he obviously did get Bush to go down the UN route), Jonathan Powell and David Manning, and Chris Meyer, all thought it was a big mistake to offer what looked like a blank cheque for military action. Our list of the best Blair-Bush memos is HERE.

My analysis of the Chilcot Report is HERE. Owen Bennett’s piece on Blair’s extraordinary press conference is HERE.

Given the length of the report there will be more news nuggets to come out in coming days and weeks. Those who said we would see nothing new were wrong. We had details of the MI6 ‘source’ who watched Sean Connery’s Hollywood movie The Rock to wrongly claim nerve agents were being kept in glass vials. We had the letters showing that Blair himself effectively wrote his own legal advice by declaring - with no documentation - that Saddam was in ‘material breach’ of UN weapons curbs.

Today, the blame game has shifted to the United States and the Bush administration’s unshakeable determination to go to war. And like Chilcot, the suggestion is that UN weapons inspectors should have been given six more months. Sir Jeremy Greenstock says Blair did his best to get the Americans to go down the UN route but ultimately they just wanted to go ahead. “I felt that at the time, the British felt it at the time, I think the prime minister felt it at the time, that the Americans pushed us into going into military action too early," he told BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight.

More will emerge. From his tears and his anger at being called a liar, few can say that this was a ‘Whatevs’ former Prime Minister, when it comes to Iraq. But that one word, ‘Whatever’, will haunt him for the rest of his days.