Tony Blair at the Chilcot inquiry
Andrew Sparrow with minute-by-minute coverage of Tony Blair's appearance at the Chilcot inquiry today
9.50am: Q: The Cabinet Office document from July 2002 says that at that point you were willing to support the US. Was that a turning point?
(The document has not been published by the inquiry, I don't think, but it is available on the internet.)
Blair says his views developed that year.
Q: Did the cabinet see the Cabinet Office options paper presented in March 2002?
Blair says he does not know who saw this.
Q: So how could the cabinet have a proper discussion, if people had not seen the document?
Blair says the cabinet was discussing this the whole time.
This was a perpetual conversation going on, in depth.
Q: But the options paper was very important.
Blair says the paper said two things. You could either go for containment or regime change.
There is nothing in those papers that did not surface as part of the discussion.
Blair says it might have been better for everyone to have seen those papers. He did not say that people should not see the papers.
9.43am: Blair says he read Sir Stephen Wall's evidence to the inquiry last night. (Wall, Blair's former EU adviser, gave evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday.) He likes Wall, but he disagrees with him, he says. Some people think the threat from terrorism should be managed. Blair says he disagrees. He thinks it should be confronted. That is where the 1930s analogy comes in.
9.41am: Sir Martin Gilbert asks the first round of questions.
He refers to the speech Blair gave in the Commons in March 2003. Blair compared Iraq with Nazi Germany. That had "emotive force" with the British public, Gilbert says. In his book, Blair said he almost took out this reference. Why did he regret using the Na! zi analo gy?
Blair says that in his speech he said he had to beware of "glib comparisons". But there was a valid point here. After 9/11 his view of the terrorist threat changed. The terrorists killed 3,000 people. But they would have killed 300,000 people if they could.
Where I think the analogy is valid is in saying we may look at the world today and say [is Iran really a threat?] My anxiety is we cannot take that risk.
He did not really mean to say that Saddam's Iraq was the same as Nazi Germany, he says. That is what he meant when he wrote about regretting that analogy.
9.36am: Sir John Chilcot starts by welcoming Tony Blair. Chilcot says he heard six hours of evidence from Blair last year. But there are some areas where he needs to "clarify" what happened.
Blair's statement covers many documents. But the inquiry will not be going through it line by line, Chilcot says.
At the end of the hearing Blair will make a statement about lessons for future prime ministers, Chilcot says.
9.33am: Tony Blair's session has begun.
9.31am: To coincide with the start of Tony Blair's evidence, the inquiry has just released 19 documents relating to the session. I've had the chance to look at them already because they were released to the media under embargo. The key ones are the witness statement from Tony Blair and the list of questions for him prepared by the inquiry. The inquiry's questions are extraordinarily detailed. They cover 17 issues and run to 11 pages. Blair's response covers another 26 pages. Here are the main points.
Blair denies offering George Bush a "blank cheque" in the private notes he sent to the US president. The inquiry team have read the notes, but are not allowed to quote from them. But one question relates to a note that Blair sent at the end of July 2002. The inquiry docume! nt says the note began .... The quote is then redacted. We know from Andrew Rawnsley's book The End of the Party that Blair sent a note to Bush at the end of July that began: "You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I'm with you."
This is how Blair responds to the charge that he was giving Bush a blank cheque:
I made it clear also to President Bush that I would be with him in tackling [Saddam's non-compliance with the UN. My statements of support on dealing with Saddam to President Bush and to Secretary Rumsfeld at our meeting in June 2002 were meant and were taken in this way. I could not and did not offer some kind of "blank cheque" in how we accomplished our shared objective ... What I was signalling was that there would be no withdrawal of support for something we thought right and do-able, simply for reasons of political pressure, ie I was going to be steadfast as an ally as I had promised, even though I knew it would also be tough politically. I sent this signal because I believed in the substance and because that meant we would be right alongside US thinking from the outset.
My public pronouncements - especially at Crawford and in Texas in the speech the next day, could have left no one in any doubt as to my position.
Blair apparently defends the decision to keep his notes to Bush private. Here's what he says about them.
The notes to President Bush were very private. They were written when I wanted to get a change or adjustment to policy .... [They covered going down the UN route, the Israel-Palestine routemap, getting the UN involved after the war, Iraqiisation.] In all these areas - and this is only in respect of Iraq - the ability to communicate privately and frankly was very important.
But Blair also says that the content of the notes was "essentially in line with my expressed views". Arguably, there is a contradiction between these two positi! ons.
Blair says he was entitled to ignore Lord Goldsmith's warning about war being illegal without a second UN resolution when he met Bush on 31 January 2003. We know that Blair said at this meeting that he would be "solidly" behind military action. But the day before Goldsmith told him war would be illegal without a second UN resolution. (Goldsmith subsequently changed his mind.) Blair said that he thought once Goldsmith knew the full negotiating history of UN security council resolution 1441 he would realise war without a second resolution would be legal.
When I received the advice on 30 January - which again was provisional - I did not understand how [Goldsmith] could reach the conclusion that a further decision was required, when expressly we had refused such language in 1441.
In speaking to President Bush on 31 January 2003 I was not going to go into this continuing legal debate, internal to the UK government. I repeated my strong commitment, given publicly and privately to do what it took to disarm Saddam.
Blair reveals that at one point he suggested putting an Iraqi general in charge of Iraq after Saddam was deposed. "I did ask as I said to President Bush in July 2002 whether it might be feasible to install a military leader then move to democracy in Iraq," he writes.
He strongly blames Iran and al-Qaida for what went wrong after the war. "This was the game-changer, the dimension not foreseen, that almost tipped Iraq into the abyss," he writes.
Blair says the absence of an effective Iraqi civil service was partly to blame for the chaos after the war. "We thought there was a functioning and effective Iraq civil service; in fact Saddam had largely degraded it."
He says that Gordon Brown made it clear that "resource was not a constraint" over Iraq.
9.22am: The Daily Telegraph has footage of Blair's arrival at the inquiry, and his reception by photographers and protesters. He and his minders walk straight past the police and through metal detectors without pausing, but the scenes are quite reminiscent of someone arriving at court.
9.04am: One protester who seems sympathetic to Galloway's view of where Blair should end up, outside the inquiry this morning (left).
8.57am: My colleague Paul Owen has been watching last night's Question Time debate on Tony Blair and Iraq, which was dominated by George Galloway, the former Labour and Respect MP, and Alastair Campbell, Blair's former director of communications:
Asked about Blair's return to the Chilcot panel, Galloway explained it this way: "I think that the recall is because even the establishment stooges on the inquiry could not ignore what in establishment-speak they call 'inconsistencies' in the former prime minister's initial evidence, which in real-people's-speak is now in tatters ... It's clear that they kept the attorney general [then Lord Goldsmith], the country's most senior legal official, absolutely out of the loop, to use his words, and as far away from the prime minister as it was possible to keep him, just so that they attorney would not be able to tell the then-prime minister that what he was proposing to do was illegal."
Alastair Campbell shook his head at this. Galloway went on: "Another way of putting that is that what he was proposing to do was a crime. And usually when people commit a crime, though not always, they end up in front of the courts and in front of a justice system. And I look forward to the day when Mr Blair is not in front of establishment stooges, but in the Hague, facing war crimes charges at the international court [applause], and by the way, his Goebbels, his Lord Haw-Haw, Alastair Campbell, who's got the same blood on his hands, ought to be sitting in the dock alongside him."
Read a quote by! present er David Dimbleby in which he appeared to be suggesting Blair's assassination would be "morally justified", Galloway said: "That's not of course the whole quote. The whole quote is: if I were an Iraqi, whose country had been invaded, whose family had been destroyed, whose house house had been destroyed, whose entire life had been destroyed by Tony Blair and George W Bush, would I regard an assassination of Tony Blair as being morally justified? Of course I would. However, I'm not calling for it, I hope it doesn't happen, if I hear anyone's going to do it I'll report it to Scotland Yard."
Campbell responded by quoting Galloway's own words to Saddam Hussein back at him "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability" winning some applause of his own.
"Not quite as bad as killing people, is it?" asked Galloway. "Tell us about Dr David Kelly."
Referring to the fresh evidence released by the inquiry this week that Goldsmith felt "uncomfortable" about Blair's statement to MPs that there were circumstances in which a second UN resolution authorising war would be "not necessary", Campbell characterised this document as explaining "why ultimately the attorney general said to the government, said to the cabinet, you have legal authority to remove Saddam".
He said Blair had gone to war in Iraq "because he believed Saddam had to be confronted, Saddam had to face up to his obligations ... he had finally to be forced, to be removed from power."
8.27am: Sir Christopher Meyer has criticised Sir Gus O'Donnell's decision not to publish the memos of conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush over the Iraq war, PoliticsHome reports.
Britain's ambassador in Washington at the time of the Iraq invasion told the Today programme:
Here we have a committee of privy councillors looking into the genesis and conduct of a war and a once in a century event, in a s! ituation where the prime minister is accused by some of lying, is accused of taking us to war illegally.
And here we have correspondence which actually gives I believe the clearest indication of the prime minister's motives and the nature of his commitments to George Bush."
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former British ambassador to the UN, disagreed:
I think there's a limit of what you can publish of private correspondence between leaders. What matters is the process itself... I think that that correspondence has been rightfully withheld.
Asked who owns state secrets, Greenstock said: "The government does, no individual does."
8.21am: In contrast to last time he was questioned, Tony Blair entered the building by the front door, pausing briefly to let photographers take his picture. Last time, the former prime minister entered the venue by a cordoned-off rear entrance.
Blair arrived more than two hours before questioning was due to begin. Only a handful of protesters were outside the QE2 conference centre in central London when he got there.
Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop The War Coalition, said:
Yet again he has sneaked in under cover of darkness, mirroring the way in which he launched his illegal war in 2003. Hopefully later today he will be asked to tell the truth about the legal advice he was given by Lord Goldsmith and also be challenged publicly about the contents of his letters to George Bush which he is still keeping secret.
Demonstrators held up banners calling Blair a liar and shouting that he should face a war crimes tribunal, according to the Press Association. Scores of police officers are on duty outside the conference centre.
8.11am: Tony Blair has arrived at the Iraq inquiry.
8.07am: In his memoirs Tony Blair said that he felt "sick" when he was asked a question at the end of his appearance before the Iraq inquiry in January last year. Sir! John Ch ilcot wanted to know if he had any regrets about the war. Blair felt this was unfair because this was "a headline question" that had to have a headline answer. "This wasn't a question being asked or answered in the quiet reflection of the soul; not something that could be weighed, considered and explained with profundity and penetrating clarity or even an easy honesty," Blair wrote.
If Blair felt last year's hearing was tricky, he may be feeling a lot more uncomfortable about what's going to happen today. Most observers felt that Chilcot and the four other members of his inquiry team gave Blair a rather easy ride last year. Today it is likely to be different. At the weekend Brian Brady in the Independent on Sunday quoted a source close to the inquiry as saying that the team felt what Blair had to say about the findings of the Iraq Survey Group was misleading. The source was quoted as saying:
There is a feeling that on this and on elements like the legal advice, he wilfully misrepresented the facts. The [panel members] are bruised by the suggestions that they gave him an easy ride last year, but they will be more prepared this time round.
The inquiry has dismissed this story. "There was a lot of head-scratching when that appeared," an official told me yesterday. "No one was looking around the room saying, 'Who gave away our secrets?'" But the inquiry has made it clear that some witnesses are being recalled to clear up apparent inconsistencies between what they said first time around and what the other evidence suggests. Blair is going to to be asked about a series of specific issues. And the questioning is likely to be more forensic than it was 12 months ago.
What will he be asked? The inquiry has not said. But it's not hard to guess what some of the questions will, or should, be. In the Guardian Philippe Sands has produced five key questions for the former prime minister. In the Independent Michael Savage has got 15 charges to be answered. My colleague Richard Norton-Taylor has also written up the latest evidence to emerge from the inquiry. It shows that Blair was offered a way out of attacking Iraq at a secret meeting with his foreign secretary Jack Straw eight days before the invasion.
The hearing starts at 9.30am and it will go on until about 2pm, with no break for lunch. I'll be blogging throughout, and then covering all the reaction afterwards.
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