Diary – 16 July 2004

I have the feeling that nobody cares very much about Lord Butler’s report into the use of Iraq war intelligence. The public has made up its mind that the government misled us all deliberately — and issues of sloppy working practices at No. 10 seem, by comparison, small beer indeed. It was the former minister John Denham who summed up the whole business most succinctly last autumn: the government decided to go to war with Iraq and then commissioned reports and dossiers to support that decision. It should have been the other way around. From that point, all else follows. The government needed those dossiers to support its case and quite clearly went about ensuring that they did so.

It is less the ineptitude of No. 10 Downing Street that bothers me than the reflexive dishonesty of the office and, by extension, the Prime Minister. Are we really expected to believe that Tony Blair did not know the full details behind the claim that Saddam could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, as he appeared to assure us last December? Is it conceivable that he didn’t know that this claim related only to very short-range battlefield weapons (which, in any case, did not exist)? If he didn’t, he is staggeringly incompetent and should go.