He’s back. Almost exactly one year after his first appearance, Tony Blair returns to the QEII conference centre this morning to face renewed questioning by Sir John Chilcot and the Iraq Inquiry panel.
And what a difference a year makes. Labour, the party whose government took the UK to war in 2003, is no longer even in power. And swathes of document releases by the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks have encouraged us to question and analyse our political leaders’ actions and intents in an unprecedented way.
Perhaps it was in part the latter that encouraged the Inquiry to recently begin releasing (heavily redacted) transcripts of some of its secret hearings as well as a handful of newly-declassified documents.
Two key questions to listen for this morning. First: will Mr Blair support the declassification and release of private notes that he sent President Bush about Iraq in the run-up to hostilities? Perversely the Inquiry has seen the documents but it can’t read from or publish them, and Sir John’s anger with the Cabinet Office was clear earlier this week. Second: why did the former Prime Minister disregard his own Attorney General’s advice on the international legality of war in early 2003? That’s what Lord Goldsmith appeared to suggest in a statement released on Monday.
At the very end of his first evidence session, Sir John asked Mr Blair: “No regrets?” This, his memoirs revealed, made him feel “sick, a mixture of anger and anguish” at what he felt was a “headline question.” How Mr Blair will feel at the close of today’s questioning remains to be seen.
