Tony Blair gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq
Tony Blair denies offering George Bush a "blank cheque"
Former PM defends decision to keep notes to Bush private
'Entitled to ignore warning war illegal without 2nd resolution'
He suggested military leader should rule Iraq post-Saddam
Read more: Blair says cabinet was fully informed about invasion
10.48am: Lyne says the Foreign Office legal advisers took the same view as Goldsmith: that 1441 would not authorise war without a second resolution. Blair said 1441 achieved his objectives. How could it, when the attorney general said it would not authorise war?
Blair says 1441 would authorise war without a second resolution. That was the whole point. That was what he asked for, he says. "I'm sure I would have said you better make sure it does meet our objective," Blair says.
They're taking a short break for 10 minutes.
10.46am: Sir Roderic Lyne asks about Lord Goldsmith's involvement in the negotiations over UN resolution 1441.
Blair says it would have been "sensible" to have had Goldsmith more involved. If he been been more involved, and had known the negotiating history from the beginning, he would have realised that 1441 could authorise war without a second resolution.
10.42am: Blair says many people in the US administration did not want Bush to go to the UN. Blair was trying to persuade him to take a radically different view. But he wanted Bush to know that Blair would be "with America in handling this".
For Bush, UN resolution 1441 represented a "huge compromise" for Bush and a "huge opportunity" for the international community. It would have been "profoundly wrong" to have gone back to the US afterwards and to have withdrawn support, Blair says.
Sir John Chilcot says he wants to repeat his point about being disappointed about not being allowed to quote from Blair's notes to Bush.
10.38am: Chilcot asks about the opening statement in t! he note Blair sent to Bush at the end of July (see 9.31am). Sir David Manning, Blair's foreign affairs adviser, said he was unhappy about this phrase ("You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I'm with you," according to Andrew Rawnsley.) He thought it was too sweeping.
Blair says he did change the wording of the opening phrase after speaking to Manning.
But he says that he wanted to make the point to Bush that he supported him. The rest of the memo contained reservations.
Chilcot puts the Rawnsley quote to Blair. Blair says that that was not the correct wording. Chilcot suggests that Rawnsley got his information from Blair. "I don't know about that," says Blair.
10.35am: Sir John Chilcot asks about the Cabinet Office's decision not to allow Blair's notes to Bush to be disclosed.
Blair says he is happy to discuss the notes. But he thinks it is "extremely important" that the US president and the British prime minister can communicate in confidence.
10.33am: Sir Lawrence Freedman asks about a document released today, a note from Blair to his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, written on 17 March 2002.
In the note Blair said: "The immediate WMD problems don't seem obviously worse than three years ago."
Blair says that was true. But, since 9/11, the willingness to tolerate risk had changed.
Freedman then reads out another quote from the document. Blair said in the document:
So we have to re-order our story and message. Increasingly, I think it should be about the nature of the regime.
Blair says the nature of the regime might not have been the justification for the war. But it was a reason for being pleased about Saddam going.
10.30am: Blai! r says i t was "absolutely clear from the very outset" that Bush was going to change the Iraqi regime if Saddam did not let the inspectors back in.
10.26am: Blair says there were two ways of dealing with the issue: "change of heart or change of regime".
Regime change was US policy.
Q: Why did you sent Bush a paper?
Blair says he found that, when he wanted to change US policy, it helped to put something in writing.
10.25am: Lyne asks if Blair accepted at the end of 2001 that Iraq should be dealt with as part of "phase two" of the war against terror.
Blair says he viewed it as all part of the same issue.
Q: So how did you react to the Foreign Office advice saying containment should be tightened?
Blair says the Foreign Office was not quite saying that. The Foreign Office said containment was having some success.
Blair asks if he can quote from the paper. Lyne says it has not been officially declassified, but that it has been leaked it's here and that his means Blair can quote from it.
10.21am: Lyne goes back to late November 2001. At this point George Bush said in a press conference that, if Saddam did not allow weapons inspectors in, the Iraqi leader would "find out" what would happen. That showed Bush was starting to focus on Iraq. Soon after this, Blair started to get lots of advice about Iraq. The then-prime minister received advice from the Foreign Office that said there was no "anti-terrorism" grounds for military action against Iraq. Blair also received advice from MI6. (Chris Ames has written about this at the Iraq Inquiry Digest.) Around this time Blair had a conversation with Bush. What was the gist of this?
Blair says the Foreign Office paper said there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaida. But that does not mean that Iraq's WMD programmes were not a matter of concern. Blair reads from what! the pap er said about Saddam's WMD programme. "That was not exactly a reassuring paper about Saddam," he says.
Q: But what did you say to Bush?
Blair says he told Bush they had to deal with this issue. After 9/11, the "calculus of risk" had changed. He told Bush he would be "up for" dealing with this issue.
He was in no doubt that it would be good for the world to get rid of Saddam. He said so publicly, Blair says.
10.11am: Lyne asks whether the policy should have been "stress-tested" in a cabinet committee attended by a wider range of ministers. Would that have identified the problems that emerged?
Blair says he would like to say yes. But he does not really think this would have made much difference.
Margaret Thatcher's war cabinet did not have the chancellor in it, he says.
Blair says Lyne is suggesting the policy was not being tested. But "people were testing it the whole time". For example, Robin Cook challenged Blair's approach.
There was a lot of detailed planning going on. But nothing put ministers on notice for the problem they ended up dealing with.
(Blair is referring to Iran. In his evidence last year he blamed Iran for much of went wrong in the aftermath. And he made the same point in the witness statement released this morning. See 9.31am.)
10.06am: Lyne says military preparations were being made in secret.
That was necessary, says Blair.
Q: Was it understood in cabinet that military preparations were under way?
Yes.
Q: Did they take collective responsibility for the policy?
Yes, says Blair.
Lyne suggests cabinet ministers did not know about the planning.
Blair does not accept this. It defies "common sense and logic" to suggest that there were people in the cabinet who did not know what the consequences of the policy would be.
10.02am! : Lyne s ays he is not clear when the cabinet actually endorsed Blair's strategy.
Were cabinet ministers in a position to make a decision without having read the papers?
Can you identify a moment when you told the cabinet you needed a decision?
Blair says he was not keeping his options open. His policy was "totally clear". He was going to deal with the issue. He wanted to deal with it through the UN. But not addressing it was "not an option".
The facts were not in dispute, Blair says.
10.00am: Q: Tom McKane, another Cabinet Office official, said the government was still pursuing containment as a policy in early 2002. Are you saying that it was clear that going to the UN could lead to war?
Blair says this was the issue "the entire time". He had to remind people that he had not taken a final military decision.
Lyne says the cabinet did not discuss Iraq between April and September 2002. But the policy was changing. Did you have cabinet support for what you were doing?
Yes, says Blair. The cabinet wanted to go down the UN route.
Q: But did they understand this could lead to war?
Yes, says Blair. He was saying this publicly. He does not think any cabinet minister would have misunderstood that there could be military action. Blair was saying this in public.
The cabinet were of two minds. One group supported him all the way. Another group was keen to avoid military action.
I cannot believe that anyone would come here and say: "I really didn't realise that was the policy of the government."
9.56am: Sir Roderic Lyne is asking the questions now. He asks if the cabinet was discussing regime change in early 2002.
Blair says the cabinet was discussing the options at that point. They were:
1. Saddam having a change of heart.
2. Regime change.
Q: Sir Stephen Wall was asked when it became clear to the cabinet that they had endorsed a policy that was "very likely" to lead to war. Wa! ll said probably not before January 2003. Do you think that was a fair assessment?
Blair replies: "I don't, frankly."
Blair says the cabinet should have known before January 2003 that war was "very likely".
Blair quotes from an interview he gave to Jeremy Paxman in 2002. He adds:
The one thing nobody could have been in any doubt about was where I stood on the issue or what the policy of the government was.
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: S ir 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 Nazi analogy?
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 ar e 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 document 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 th e 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 positions.
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 functio! ning 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 (below).
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 d ay 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 presenter 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 ov er 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 situation 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 Chilcot 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 aske d 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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