I have a theory about Gordon Brown and the Chilcot inquiry. It’s a bit half-baked, but you shouldn’t mind that. You want a fully-baked political theory, you don’t come around here. You want the Parris page for that, or one of those Nelson or Forsyth bits up front. Back here you get the leftovers. The off-cuts. The sort of analysis you might get if you imprisoned a renegade unit of soldiers from the Los Angeles underground in a shed full of odds and ends, and told them they wouldn’t be let out until they produced a column. Held together with whimsy, and references you won’t really get if you’re not quite the right age to have watched The A-Team. You know the drill.
Anyway, my theory is this: Gordon Brown will ace the Chilcot inquiry. Slam-dunk it, hole-in-one, back of the net — as many sporting metaphors as you like. The Chilcot inquiry, my theory goes, will be his finest hour. He’ll disown Iraq, bury Blair, and become an anti-war hero. A sort of George Galloway you don’t want repeatedly to kick in the head.
Ideally, he’ll have a letter. It will have been written in late 2002 and it will say something along the lines of ‘Dear Tony Blair, I oppose the war in Iraq which I think is totally wrong and probably illegal, but I’m not resigning because it would bring down the government and we’ve got lots of stuff to do and the other lot — hahahaha, sorry, don’t mean to laugh, I know this is serious — are still being led by Iain Duncan Smith, who’d probably be even more up for a chaotic bomb-happy ruck than you are.’ And he’ll give it to Sir John Chilcot.
And then Sir John, of course, will have to read it.
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