How can we punish Blair?

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency.

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.)

This week, as Tony Blair finally appears at the Iraq inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, is in the same position as that interviewer. Sir John has spoken in impeccably Church of England terms about the purpose of his hearings being to ‘learn lessons’, ‘establish what happened’, and not put anyone ‘on trial’.