Bring back Gilligan

On Tuesday, 24 September 2002 Tony Blair stood up in the House of Commons and waved a dossier. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ he said. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ These words were vital, at the time, since many MPs believed this country had no business waging war in Mesopotamia. It was in Mr Blair’s interests to point up the threat from Iraq. ‘The document discloses that Saddam’s military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them,’ he wrote in the foreword. As Mr Blair’s officials had foreseen, these words had a big impact. A banner headline in the Evening Standard read ‘45 minutes from attack’. In so far as these claims made sense, they were quite untrue.

Saddam turned out not to have such stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and certainly no capacity to launch them ‘within 45 minutes’.