Bit by bit, Blair is forced to face the truth

It is curious sometimes how life comes full circle. Exactly a year ago I was sitting in an office at the BBC, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. As I write this, I am sitting in an office at the BBC, waiting to be interviewed, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. Their task is rather harder than it was before.

Lord Butler’s committee has pronounced on the great question — did the government mislead us all over the reasons for war? To the vast majority of the public, this is an issue about as opaque and mysterious as the religion of the Pope or the sanitary habits of bears in woods; but successive official inquiries, and a stubborn minority of the media, have been unable to bring themselves to say that Tony Blair committed deceit.

For the foreign affairs committee and the intelligence and security committee, the reason is simple. As they both complained, they were denied the evidence they needed to come to a fully informed verdict; the FAC was also directly lied to by Alastair Campbell. For Lord Hutton, who did see most of the paperwork, the reasons are more puzzling. My own feeling is that he was simply an innocent who was a little starstruck by the mandarins in his witness box (how could they possibly be dissembling to me? They’ve got knighthoods!).

Now, however, we finally have an official inquiry which has reached Key Stage 2 in the syllabus — finding that a government and its servants did something wrong. The members may not quite have got beyond this to advanced coursework — actually apportioning blame — but we cannot have everything.

It is fair to say that the intelligence services emerge even more damaged from this than the Prime Minister does. Their sources were often wrong, inappropriately assessed, second- and third-hand or even, in one critical case, completely untested.